Class of 2026 graduates are looking for employers that will invest in their future by providing opportunities to grow and advance in their career.

The American Heart Association’s approach to its internship program is to create intentionally designed experiences rather than a collection of activities.

For decades, one of the pervasive arguments in college recruiting has been the effectiveness of high-tech versus high-touch practices. According to research conducted by Mary Scott, that argument persists with the integration of AI into college recruiting.

UConn’s Center for Career Readiness and Life Skills created an AI Committee to develop a sustainable, intentional strategy for integrating AI into career services in ways that support student learning, staff confidence, and employer/alumni engagement.

Internship programs are about more than just getting quality hires in the door: Retention metrics reported in NACE’s 2026 Internship & Co-op Report demonstrate the long-term ROI of having a program.

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s on-campus internship program is designed to help departments reimagine student employment as a more intentional and developmental experience by embedding career readiness skills directly into student work.

Employers are going into the classroom to share expertise and establish relationships with students and faculty, according to results of NACE’s 2026 Internship & Co-op survey.

Employers are increasingly reporting attempts by fake candidates to obtain jobs—and gain access to the organization’s systems and properties—for unlawful purposes.

Results from NACE’s 2026 Career Services Benchmarking Poll on AI show a big shift in just a few years in how AI is integrating into the work of career centers. Eighty-six percent of career centers are using AI as an assistive tool when working with individual students—up sharply from just 20% in 2023 and 76% in 2025.

Overall, employers say new college graduates are reasonably well prepared for the jobs they will enter after graduation—and more than 20% say they are very well prepared, according to NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update.

AI is increasingly becoming an expectation for early career talent, shaping both the job market and entry-level work, according to NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update.

Employers expect to increase new college graduate hiring from the Class of 2026 by 5.6%, a projection driven upward by the more than one-third of respondents reporting plans to bring in additional hires, according to results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update.

When reviewing the resumes of Class of 2026 candidates for entry-level positions, employers are seeking graduates who provide evidence of polished teamwork, problem-solving, and communication skills, according to results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update survey.

Project Rebound at Sonoma State is a high-touch, relationship-centered program designed to support students who are formerly incarcerated and system-impacted from admission through graduation.

Approximately one-half of employers responding to NACE’s 2026 Internship & Co-op Survey report that they provide financial relocation assistance to interns, a benefit that they say also boosts their experiential education programs.

Key metrics for internship programs—offer, acceptance, and conversion rates—all increased among 2024-25 interns compared to 2023-24 interns.

Employers expect to bring in 3.9% more interns in 2025-26 compared with 2024-25, according to NACE’s 2026 Internship & Co-op Report.

Last summer, Queens College incorporated the NACE Career Readiness Competencies into its summer internship program and used the NACE Competency Assessment Tool to quantify gains interns made.

Jeff Crume, an adjunct professor of cybersecurity who has spent more than four decades in the IT industry, provides insight into the ways companies and college students are adapting to AI’s impact on the entry-level workforce.

Although the average hourly wage for interns has continued to rise over the past 10 years, due to inflation, it has declined in real terms. Meanwhile, the average hourly wage for co-ops dipped slightly but is up in terms of inflation rates.

Affirmation from career center staff shifted a conceptual spark into a departmental priority allowing the Sophomore Career Accelerator to launch as a signature initiative at Muhlenberg College.

Because Insperity has long-used behavioral-based interviewing to identify candidates’ qualities and experience, the transition to more skills-based hiring has been a relatively smooth one.

Nearly 56% of employers expect to offer signing bonuses to their new college hires from the Class of 2026, according to results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey.

The University of Oklahoma Career Center has been using the NACE Competency Assessment Tool since this past summer. Staff saw it as a viable device to help support their focus on developing their students’ competencies.

Students hoping to demonstrate their skills during a skills-based hiring process should share examples and situations when they used their skills to solve problems, according to employers responding to NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey.

An important consideration for employers offering paid internships—an undertaking that should be performed annually—is setting intern salaries.

Hospitality—a strong component in building fruitful relationships with those organizations that recruit ECSU students—is a foundational element of ECSU’s efforts to overcome any potential limitations associated with its rural location.

With a projected overall average salary of $94,212, computer sciences graduates are expected to be the top earners among Class of 2026 master’s degree grads.

Employers regard having an internship with their organization or within their industry to be the most influential factors when choosing between two otherwise equally qualified candidates.

In an effort to strengthen retention and quality of hire, Kiewit Corporation refined its college hiring strategy to place greater emphasis on career readiness skills.

Despite the prevalence of AI in the national dialogue, its use among graduating seniors as a job-search tool is not as widespread as many believe as students have strong concerns about using AI.

Moravian University’s Elevate program aligns the school’s academic strengths with clear, tangible career and life outcomes, integrating leadership and teamwork development, experiential learning, global perspectives, and career preparation across the undergraduate experience.

Starting salary projections show promise for the upcoming Class of 2026. Nearly all categories of reported majors are showing healthy increases that range from 3.1% for engineering majors to 6.9% for computer sciences majors.

Williams, a Fortune 500 energy company, bases its college recruiting and early career hiring on NACE’s Career Readiness Competencies, particularly communication, professionalism and critical thinking.

Several schools that have attained high First-Destinations Survey knowledge rates shared their strategies for doing so.

Employers looking to ensure they have a robust pool of college candidates consider several factors when selecting the schools at which they recruit.

When it comes to offering experiences that interns find beneficial, what are employers doing well and what can they do better? According to respondents to NACE’s 2025 Student Survey, interns valued their colleagues who were friendly and helpful and made the internship a good experience.

Among employers participating in NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey, 70% report using skill-based hiring, up from 65% last year. Furthermore, among this year’s employers, 71% use this approach at least half of the time.

Uncertainty surrounds the use of artificial intelligence among university relations and recruiting professionals and, to a lesser extent, among career services practitioners.

Approximately 86% of bachelor’s degree graduates and 89% of master’s degree grads from the Class of 2024 were employed or enrolled in further education within six months of graduation, according to NACE’s First Destinations for the College Class of 2024 report.

Employers looking to maximize their campus recruiting efforts should establish and grow relationships with career services. There are several key steps they can take to do so.

More than 90% of employers responding to NACE’s Recruiting Benchmarks Survey said career services is important to their success on campus. There are four overarching ways career services can contribute to that success.

Students embrace hands-on skills development through experiential learning and report that employers are helping them develop key skills they need as they prepare for the workplace.

In 2024, Protiviti created a PowerBI dashboard to holistically evaluate the performance of more than 300 of its interns and share the data with leadership teams to use when considering full-time offers.

In 2015, as part of a college-wide strategic plan, the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at the University of Minnesota embarked on an ambitious journey to integrate career readiness into the undergraduate experience.

Reflecting an uncertain job market for college graduates, employers are projecting just a 1.6% increase in hiring for the Class of 2026 when compared to the Class of 2025.

The use of AI in career centers to help students in their employment journey has grown substantially in recent years, according to results of NACE’s recent Quick Poll on Career Services Benchmarks.

In spring 2023, the California State University Channel Islands Martin V. Smith School of Business & Economics launched a career readiness course that all business and economics majors are required to take.

Since the creation of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Buckeye Pathways Summer Internship program five years ago, career readiness has been a central priority.

Launched in 2024, “V Teamer for a Day” is an in-person experience at several key Verizon hub locations designed to immerse potential interns in the company’s culture and develop a sense of belonging.

Students appear to be unfamiliar with the concept of skills-based hiring, despite being asked to demonstrate their skills and working to develop them, according to results of NACE’s 2025 Student Survey.

Carnegie Mellon’s Career and Professional Development Center created a custom Google sheet dashboard to track career fair registrations and provide information that helps staff drive toward goals.

In response to a national and extensive industry workforce shortage, Garver’s recruitment team has crafted a dedicated university recruiting program that ultimately serves as a pipeline for eventual full-time employees.

AI is creating new job opportunities for college graduates, and higher education and employers can adjust the ways they operate and interact to ensure students are prepared for these roles.

Although the Class of 2025 faced a tough job market, they responded in ways that suggest they were aware of the challenges they were facing. A number of results from NACE’s 2025 Student Survey support this.

Recently, a NACE member raised recruiter safety on campus. There are many ways recruiters and career services professionals can work together to prepare for and manage tenuous situations to ease the stress level of those involved and ensure the safety of all.

The winner of NACE’s 2025 Chevron Innovation Award, Arizona State University (ASU) Career Services partnered with ASU Family to develop a multi-model strategic communication and event plan designed to engage family members in support of their student's career journey.

Although there remains a salary advantage for college graduates earning master's degrees, the differential in starting salaries between bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees among top majors is diminishing.

Employers made more offers to candidates this year, but they took longer to make decisions about these offers, according to NACE’s 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks Report.

NACE’s Career Services Benchmarks Quick Poll reveals the progress colleges and universities are making in implementing career readiness competencies on their campuses.

A guide developed by the 2024-25 Principles for Ethical Professional Practice Committee applies the NACE principles to AI use in career services and recruitment, providing actionable recommendations to ensure responsible implementation.

Salas O’Brien clears common hurdles when trying to keep interns engaged during the academic year, such as being passive and assuming students will remember their internship experience without ongoing connection.

Employers continue to recruit in the fall but have made significant adjustments to the timing of their offers, according to NACE’s 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks Report.

The large-college winner of the 2025 NACE Career Services Excellence Award, the UConn Work+ Pilot integrated career readiness into on-campus student employment, enhancing the experience for more than 200 student employees and 40 supervisors.

There are many strategies employers can use to maintain—and even strengthen—ties with their interns when they return to campus and throughout the academic year.

The Maximus Summer Internship Program is a mission-driven talent pipeline that advances workforce leadership and strategically engages with students to achieve excellent outcomes.

The overall average salary for new college graduates has experienced a slight uptick as the final overall average salary is up 2.2% over the Class of 2023’s average.

The goal of the LER Accelerator coalition and for the release of its recent white paper is to be a catalyst for faster growth of the adoption of learning and employment records.

The college winner of the 2025 NACE Technology Excellence Award, the Kenyon College Career Development Office’s career rewards program incentivizes student use of career services in a way that makes it fun for the students and efficient for office staff.

The employer winner of the 2025 NACE Technology Excellence Award, GM Financial's intern social media strategy tells the authentic story of the firm’s intern experience and grows its pipeline of students for internships and early career opportunities.

Offers to interns for full-time positions fell along with overall conversion rates even as acceptance rates rose, according to NACE’s latest internship benchmarks.

The small employer winner of the 2025 NACE Recruiting Excellence Award, heritage Moss Adams’ (now Baker Tilly) Summer Internship Experience is designed to build a strong pipeline of skilled career professionals who will elevate the profession and the firm.

The small college winner of the 2025 NACE Career Services Excellence Award, Furman University developed its “Four-Year Pathway,” a program that spans students’ undergraduate career and prepares them to enter the workforce.

Future Business Leaders of America has integrated the NACE Competencies into its collegiate programming to bridge a critical gap between classroom learning and the demands of the modern workforce.

In positive news for the Class of 2026, nearly 87% of employers responding to NACE’s Job Outlook 2025 Spring Update survey said their organization will be actively recruiting for both full-time and internship positions in fall of 2025.

In spring 2025, NACE conducted a follow-up poll to a 2023 survey to better understand the current mental health concerns of NACE members. In the latest poll, more than half of participants self-reported that their mental health was worse at the time of the poll than it was last year at the same time.

There has been much discussion about whether a degree is necessary for every job. The answer is “no.” About half of employers responding to NACE’s Job Outlook 2025 Spring Update survey said their organization has positions that are flexible in terms of degree.

Research conducted by Mary Scott shows candidates’ increasing “lack of enthusiasm” about employer use of AI as a screening tool.

The Olinde Career Center at LSU launched Talking Tiger Talent as a way to modernize and scale the center’s employer outreach efforts.

When the University of Texas University Leadership Network launched in 2013, it had two main goals that remain in place today: to help students graduate in four years and to provide students who are under-resourced with an opportunity to participate in various forms of experiential learning without having to work.

What do Class of 2025 college graduates want most in a job? According to NACE’s annual student survey, they are looking for stability. They also would like a healthy workplace culture and friendly coworkers.

Almost two-thirds of employers responding to NACE’s Job Outlook 2025 Spring Update survey reported using skills-based hiring to help them identify candidates with potential.

The traditional office visit has evolved into an opportunity for an organization to give job candidates a glimpse into its culture and a vision for the candidates’ career there.

NACE surveyed early career professionals about their experiences and attitudes; in this article, we examine the effects of gender on the experiences of early career talent.

The North Dakota State University Career and Advising Center team has found that its Employer Town Halls held via Zoom are a great way to disseminate information in a different format than just an email.

Hybrid and in-person remain the preferred work modalities of employers for both their overall and entry-level positions, which matches the ways students prefer to work, NACE research has found.

Although overall hiring projections are up just 0.6% from last year, nearly 90% of employers anticipate increasing or maintaining hiring for the college Class of 2025, according to NACE’s Job Outlook 2025 Spring Update.

In-person activities are the most widely used and effective means for recruiting interns, according to results of NACE’s 2025 Internship & Co-op survey.

NACE surveyed early career talent—those who graduated in 2021, 2022, and 2023—to determine if (and how) experiential learning impacted their careers once they had graduated and landed in their first job. The results showed that those who took part in experiential learning while in college had higher rates of career satisfaction and a higher average salary than those who did not engage in experiential learning.

The Career and Life Design process that Hassan Akmal created is evolving. Today, AI makes this pursuit more tangible than ever, acting as an unprecedented sounding board for self-exploration.

Moving to skills-based hiring opens opportunity for a broader demographic of students to access positions where they otherwise would not meet the qualifications. Many employers include skills development in their internship programs to enhance their interns’ career readiness and bolster conversion.

More than 70% of organizations expect to increase or maintain intern hiring, according to NACE’s 2025 Internship & Co-op Report. However, overall intern hiring is expected to fall 3.1%.

The average hourly wage for bachelor’s degree level interns has increased each year over the past 10 years and now stands at $23.04, according to NACE’s 2025 Guide to Compensation for Interns & Co-ops.

Career center budgets for the 2024-25 academic year have increased across the board since 2022-23, according to results of NACE’s 2024-25 Career Services Benchmarks survey.

To persist toward successful conversion of interns, organizations must not view engagement as a 10-week summer pursuit. Instead, engagement must gain momentum through recruiting and pre-internship, accelerate during the internship itself, and be maintained after interns return to campus.

The University of North Florida (UNF) has historically offered innovative programs, services, resources, and events to ensure students are successful and career ready by the time they graduate. This approach led leadership to embark on a new path at the intersection of UNF’s core functions and NACE’s career readiness competencies.

Understanding the experiences, preferences, and goals of the early career Gen Z professional will help employers craft meaningful experiences that will ultimately enhance productivity and retention, while career centers will be able to better guide their students.

Attendance numbers reflect the preferences employers and students have for the format of career fairs, results of NACE’s 2024-25 Career Services Benchmarks survey reveal.

The College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington recently launched its Pillars Undergraduate Experience, a framework designed to prepare students for academic achievement and lifelong career success.

More than 200 senior career services leaders took part in a March 5 virtual meet up hosted by NACE to discuss effects of the Trump administration’s recent executive orders and “Dear Colleague” letter on the profession.

Among the main reasons why career center staff are not using AI with students are concerns about the technology collecting students’ personal data.

The goal for employers should be to keep autistic employees from “hire to retire,” which is the ability to sustain these employees by providing them with the support they need to build their career in an organization.

Class of 2025 engineering and business graduates at the master’s degree level are expected to see salaries climb 12.5% and 3.1%, respectively, according to results of NACE’s Winter 2025 Salary Survey.

Relocation assistance may be the secret sauce to attracting top-notch interns.

By measuring employment brand strength, companies can identify areas to improve their employer brand, pinpoint strengths to leverage, and assess the effectiveness of their recruitment strategies, ultimately aiming to attract the best candidates and reduce hiring costs.

Networking is a valuable tool for students that offers both career exploration and access to opportunities, particularly in a competitive job market. To get the most out of its networking events, USC Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections has taken them through several iterations to reach their current format.

There are two primary reasons that career centers might lack confidence in using AI in their work: speed and ethics.

Overall, starting salary projections for the Class of 2025 are something of a mixed bag as projected movement in salaries ranges from a gain of 2.8% for agriculture and natural resources to a decrease of 3.6% for the social sciences.

Review the latest executive orders, shifts in regulations, and other actions that impact the work of career services and early talent recruiting professionals.

When recruiting and hiring students with autism, it’s important for employers to train hiring managers so they understand how the hiring process might look different and adjust their criteria on how they evaluate candidates.

Over the past five years—and maybe because they weathered the pandemic and got a giant taste of how quickly things can change—new grads’ wish list has largely reflected one thing: their desire for security.

When students responding to NACE’s 2024 Student Survey were asked to identify the obstacles preventing them from participating in internships, their responses revealed they attributed their decision to a lack of time, concerns over pay, and scant opportunities.

The most prominent elements of a successful partnership between an HBCU and an employer are gaining understanding of challenges, demands, and goals and changing behaviors.

There are several factors linked to the decision to convert for Class of 2024 graduating seniors, according to results of NACE’s 2024 Student Survey.

There is a clear and persistent disconnect between how students and employers perceive students’ development of the competencies they need to be career ready as they enter the workforce.

Aurora University’s career services office uses ChatGPT as a tool to help its students prepare for job interviews and teach them ethical ways to use generative AI.

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling is developing a pre-onboarding program to engage and build excitement among its interns prior to their start date next summer.

College students from the Class of 2025 looking to enter the job market should highlight on their resumes the attributes and skills they developed in their classwork and through their various experiential assignments. But which attributes and skills are most important to employers?

To produce career-ready graduates, the Lehman College School of Business intentionally equips its students with competencies through the promotion of applied learning in its three programs.

Close to two-thirds of employers responding to the Job Outlook 2025 survey reported that they use skills-based hiring practices for new entry-level hires, and more than half use these practices always or most of the time in their hiring process.

Hiring for the college Class of 2025 is expected to increase 7.3% over hiring for the Class of 2024, according to NACE’s Job Outlook 2025 survey.

Disney provides resources to the College Fund to administer the latter’s scholarship program, called the Future Native Storytellers Program. Recently, a smaller group of program scholars was selected to receive additional enhancements to increase the awareness of opportunities at Disney for Native students.

This past summer, Arup expanded its career readiness programming for summer interns by working with its internal learning and development team to implement a series of competency-focused workshops.

Nearly 85% of Class of 2023 bachelor’s degree graduates and nearly 90% of master’s degree graduates were employed or engaged in further education within six months of graduation.

While some of the experiences of nontraditional-aged students mirror those of their traditional-aged peers, there are important areas where they diverge. This information can help career service professionals and recruiters better serve this growing group of college students.

Matt Purdy of Murray State advises career services professionals to think about the resources they are trying to obtain and find data that not only align with what they are asking for, but to connect them to the priorities of their administration or institution.

Graduating students weighing job offers heavily consider the cost of living in each job’s location when making their decision, according to NACE’s 2024 Student Survey report.

Forté, winner of the 2024 NACE Business Affiliate Award for Excellence in Leadership, focuses its work on systematically addressing the barriers that prevent women from pursuing MBA degrees and business leadership positions.

Career fairs are relatively effective means for students to convert connections into jobs, according to NACE’s 2024 Student Survey report.

Liberty Mutual has found that one of the most effective ways to maintain or strengthen connections with prior interns when they are on campus is to meet them where they are, such by hosting meetups, dinners, or coffee chats on or near campus.

The percent of graduating seniors who participated in an internship is the highest that NACE has recorded in the past six years, according to results of NACE’s 2024 Student Survey.

When done right, execution—meeting or exceeding students’ expectations throughout their candidate experience—helps drive success in early talent recruiting.

The Georgia Tech Career Center, large-college winner of the 2024 NACE Career Services Excellence Award, hired eight new staff members across various functional areas within the office in a process that aligned with the institute’s DEI Blueprint to, in part, closely reflect the demographics of Atlanta.

Because faculty are frequently asked by their current and former students for career advice, there is an opportunity to increase awareness among faculty of the resources available to them.

Salaries for college graduates overall continue to climb as, for the second straight year, the increase in average salary for a graduating class has surpassed 7%.

There are interesting data points from NACE’s 2024 Recruiting Compensation Report in terms of budgets, internship offers, and retention that provide insight into the operations and approaches of URR functions.

Fear of AI has turned into curiosity, says Jeremy Schifeling, who reports seeing more and more career leaders getting excited about leveraging these tools for both their students’ and their own success.

Recruiters are taking more time to extend an offer to a candidate following an interview, but the deadline for acceptance remains close to two weeks.

The University of Illinois Chicago, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Career Development Office, winner of the 2024 NACE Career Readiness Excellence Award, designed an innovative eight-week, one-credit career strengths-based course for its students.

Global Atlantic Financial Group, the small employer winner of the 2024 NACE Recruiting Excellence Award, addressed a pressing need for increased diversity and innovation and a robust talent pipeline.

Lifted by average increases that ranged between 3.5% and 4.4%, salaries for all recruiting professionals increased in 2023, while the majority of respondents at all levels received bonuses.

The college winner of the 2024 NACE Technology Excellence Award, University of California, Berkeley Career Engagement used Google Workspace products to create a data-visualization dashboard to tell its story in a low-cost, efficient manner.

The employer winner of the 2024 NACE Technology Excellence Award, Freese and Nichols implemented talent acquisition platform Yello and modified its roles and processes related to its on-campus career fair strategy to significantly increase its university hiring.

The conversion rate for interns fell, fueled by a lower offer rate. The lower rate could reflect lower-than-expected hiring needs or could signal an issue with the intern selection process.

Nearly 90% of the college Class of 2024 indicated that their institution prepared them for the next step in their career, according to results of NACE’s 2024 Student Survey.

The small college winner of the 2024 NACE Award for Career Services Excellence, Providence College’s Chirico Career Center has created and honed an engaging program designed to help students as they consider their majors and explore potential careers.

Although allyship with the LGBTQ+ community different for everyone, one thing is clear: It requires action.

The college Class of 2024 is looking for economic security in a job, according to results of NACE’s annual student survey.

Northwestern Mutual shifting the focus of its internship program to development of career readiness competencies seemed like a natural progression since the company was already focusing on themes similar to those identified by NACE’s competencies.

The NACE Career Readiness Competencies can be a valuable tool to help faculty members demonstrate to administrators, students, and parents that what they do creates long-term value for students.

While nearly 20% of employers that responded to NACE’s Job Outlook 2024 Spring Update survey have had discussions about removing the college degree as a key requirement for entry-level positions, nearly 80% of respondents expect that there will be no change in the next two years.

Winner of NACE’s 2024 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Excellence Award for colleges, the Georgia Tech Career Center’s Georgia Tech’s AuthenTECH Partnership initiative leverages staff to provide population-specific resources, expand programming, and cultivate partnerships to advance equitable career outcomes.

Landmark College, an institution exclusively for students who learn differently including those on the autism spectrum, champions a strengths-based model and gives students the skills and strategies they need to achieve their goals.

Winner of the 2024 Chevron Innovation Award, the Gregory S. Fehribach Center at Eskenazi Health empowers Indiana college students with physical disabilities to achieve equitable employment following graduation.

Faculty are a key source of career advice for students—with more than nine of out 10 saying students asked them for guidance in the past year, according to a new study conducted by NACE in collaboration with the American Association of Colleges & Universities and the Society for Experiential Education.

Hiring for internships is expected to remain stable this year, according to NACE’s 2024 Internship and Co-op Report. Overall, eight out of 10 employers taking part in NACE’s annual benchmark report expect to maintain (47.2%) or increase (32.2%) the number of interns they bring in for 2023-24 compared to the 2022-23 academic year.

Nearly 83% of employers responding to NACE’s Job Outlook 2024 Spring Update survey anticipate increasing or maintaining hiring for the Class of 2024. This leaves just 17.4% of respondents planning to decrease hires, but their planned cuts mean overall hiring projections are down 5.8% from last year.

Because Liberty Mutual Insurance hires hundreds of interns a year, it equips interns with a wide range of skills and has the skill profile of an intern closely align with its early career roles to prepare interns for potential future full-time roles.

Belonging at work—feeling that one is valued, accepted, and supported—helps to ensure a healthy, productive, and positive work environment. NACE surveyed its membership to better understand their experiences with belonging in the profession.

For Spring Hill College, the work to attain a high knowledge rate on its first-destination survey begins in the fall.

Cayuga Community College’s career services office launched its microcredentialing program in 2018. Since then, it has been building microcredentials in the non-credit and credit side of the institution, including developing its microcredential program and updating it to an online learning platform.

Visa’s internship program is designed to build full-time conversion and provide an exceptional experience for incoming talent. Phill Haig, Visa’s director of early career programs, says Visa’s target conversion rate has been 70%.

Despite achieving a knowledge rate of 90.6% on its most recent first-destination survey, the Roanoke College career center is tweaking the survey’s process to improve it.

Recruiters who foster a sense of belonging among potential hires have a positive impact on the candidate’s view of the organization.

Centre College’s three-year average knowledge rate for its first-destination survey (FDS) stands at an impressive 98%. This is especially notable given that the survey wasn’t required for students until 2023.

Consultant Katie Donovan offers tips for employers to eliminate the main causes of pay inequity for women, including that women are underpaid doing the same jobs as men and are underrepresented in leadership roles.

Hourly wages for interns have kept pace with inflation, signaling the value of these programs to employers.

Interns who feel committed to the organization because they were well treated are 7.14 times more likely to accept an offer of full-time employment.

When it comes to the attributes of a job and an organization and the benefits the organization offers, there are some differences in student preferences by race and gender.

The University of Dallas career development office listened to student feedback to pivot from texting students career-related information to sending messages via email. The results have been impressive.

The University of Western Florida CDCE recently launched its AI Career Toolkit to address AI use, challenges, and possibilities by students exploring careers and the career coaches supporting them.

Employers were slower in making offers to their candidates for their full-time positions than they were prior to the pandemic, although students who accepted the offers were quicker to do so.

Despite calls to “return to the office” from employers and the prevailing media narrative, the hybrid work modality appears here to stay.

Visa has found that hiring diverse talent is easier to accomplish the earlier it can engage students and it helps create a network of brand evangelists who are able to advocate for Visa on campus.

There is good news for the Class of 2024: Salary projections for all reported groups of majors are higher than the projections reported for the Class of 2023

The latest federal updates will keep NACE members informed on how career services and recruiting are impacted by federal action, what developments can be expected, and opportunities available for them to weigh in.

Although new college graduates looking to enter the workforce and employers hiring these graduates agree on which competencies are most important for job candidates to hone, their perception of student proficiency in them differs.

The Yale Office of Career Strategy enlisted the help of key partners to create an assessment tool that incorporates design-thinking principles and is available to everyone, not just Yale students and alums.

The career services office at Colorado Boulder launched an Artificial Intelligence Working Group to collect information on developments, discuss campus applications of AI, and more.

After two relatively down years connected with the COVID-19 pandemic, the outcomes rate for Class of 2022 bachelor’s degree graduates returned to pre-pandemic levels.

UCSD’s Rady School Career Management Center is addressing and creating resources around AI to guide students in its effective, safest, and ethical use during the college recruiting process.

A joint research project by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) and Break Through Tech uncovered the positive impact career services has on outcomes for women in general and for women pursuing tech careers in particular. The research is detailed in “The Impact of Career Services on Women Pursuing Tech Careers,” which is free to the public.

To foster a truly diverse and inclusive workplace, employers should expand their DEI efforts to encompass what is increasingly being referred to as DEIA—or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Slightly more than 43% of employers plan to increase starting salaries to Class of 2024 bachelor’s degree graduates, and nearly all remaining employers anticipate keeping salaries at last year’s levels.

New college graduates embrace the value of higher education, with 91% reporting that, if they had a chance to do it again, they would opt to pursue a college education.

The small dip in college hiring revealed by NACE’s Job Outlook 2024 survey is down from the last two years, when the college job market experienced brisk growth that, in 2022, reached record levels.

Employers confirmed their belief in the value of higher education and higher education institutions in NACE’s latest benchmark survey.

To make McPherson College students aware of the skills they are developing during their campus jobs, Amy Beckman incorporated career readiness competencies into student job descriptions and supervision.

Mary Scott compared data from 2016 to that from 2022 to gauge students’ assessment that an employer “made it seem as though they were interested in me.” What she found was astonishing.

Getting faculty buy in, having liaisons in different departments, and having the faculty be program champions was the key to the success of Georgia State’s “College to Career” career readiness initiative.

The Williams Companies evaluates talent for internships based on the NACE Career Readiness Competencies, focusing on the competencies where it has seen gaps in its intern class.

Career centers looking to increase FDS response rates might want to focus on communicating regularly with students, providing participation incentives, and ensuring the process is convenient for students.

Last year, Progressive Insurance achieved an intern conversion rate of 91%, far exceeding the overall conversion rate of 57.6% for 2021-22.

Not only does PathwayU offer student assessments, but it also provides guidance based on predictive knowledge that accounts for the user’s sense of purpose and meaning.

While moving to a virtual world and with little experience using virtual tools, William & Mary career center staff connected students and alumni by creating the Professional Development Academy.

Early data from a forthcoming NACE study indicate that the gender pay gap has widened over the past year, with female graduates now earning just 72 cents to every dollar earned by male graduates, down from around 81 cents.

Data provided by more than 2,300 bachelor’s degree-level graduating seniors who took part in NACE’s 2023 Student Survey demonstrate that systemic inequities continue to exist in internships—not only in terms of who takes part, but also in terms of who gets paid.

Dominican University, a Hispanic-serving institution with 64% of students identifying as Latinx and located just outside of Chicago, launched its successful career development program in its Brennan School of Business in fall 2017.

To prepare students for their transition to the workforce, career centers have to account for the standards of professionalism shifting over the past several years.

The large-employer winner of the 2023 NACE Award for Recruiting Excellence, DISH’s “Recruit Once, Hire Twice” college recruiting process brings in top interns and works to convert them into full-time hires.

Signed into law in 1963, the Equal Pay Act prohibits pay discrimination based on sex. However, 60 years since the passage of the law, women continue to experience a pay gap, relative to men.

Among the key information recruiters need to know to successfully navigate their careers is to stay informed and value relationships.

Research conducted by NACE and The Center for the Study of HBCUs underscores how important it is for companies to conduct audits to assess gaps and inequities in their recruiting efforts.

A new $1 million gift supporting career development at William & Mary will triple the number of students annually who can receive university funding for unpaid and underpaid internships.

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is a public Research 1 university with 52,000 students and 18 colleges and schools, including medical and law schools. Like many large universities, UT Austin has a highly distributed model of 15 career centers within schools, and each area operates independently.

During the pandemic in 2020, LaGuardia Community College—a public community college that is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system—inaugurated a new president, who is an advocate for workforce development as well as for internships. In addition, the chancellor for CUNY established career services as one of his priorities.

A grant from the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) helped to move career services to a position of more prominence at Tougaloo College and embed career readiness in the school’s curriculum.

Through its Experiential Learning Platform™, Saxbys builds individualized academic partnerships to open cafes that provide exceptional paid experiential learning opportunities for students.

Career services at Michigan State University (MSU) is a centralized/hybrid organization of offices and is well-known for its Career Services Network, which is composed of career services professionals strategically located in central and college-based offices.

The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Engineering Job & Internship Fair Tours were created to engage more first- and second-year students in job fairs and to reduce barriers to attendance.

William & Mary (W&M) has recently undergone a shift that has elevated career services, alumni engagement, internships, and applied learning at the highly selective, Research 2, public, residential research university.

College graduates in their early professional careers report significant mental health issues and view their jobs as a contributing factor. How can employers and colleges provide support?

In terms of their career interests and goals, members of Generation Z have an increased appetite for and awareness of entrepreneurship.

After witnessing the impact that the pandemic had on early undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in the tech industry, IBM scaled up its early talent ID program.

The average hourly wage for 2020-21 bachelor’s level interns and co-ops was identical at $20.82, according to results of NACE’s 2022 Internship & Co-op Survey Report.

Regardless of how employers ran their programs in summer 2021, the hybrid model is their favored modality for their 2021-22 internships, according to NACE’s 2022 Internship & Co-op Survey Report.

An employer looking to set up a “campus champion” program as an element in its campus recruiting efforts turned to colleagues in the NACE Community for ideas on staffing, the responsibilities and expectations of the program, and the guidelines for campus engagement.

Interviews-per-hire average (IPHA) is the average number of interviews conducted with each college hire. IPHA is a deeper analysis to determine the variation of recruiting processes across positions or sourcing channels.

Two critical factors for limiting bias in AI systems are building diverse AI teams and implementing an enterprise-wide trustworthy AI framework.

Over the past 10 years, there has been a clear shift away from housing the career center in student affairs.

Schools that conduct an annual FDS to capture information on how their new college graduates fare following graduation can benefit their own institutions and demonstrate the value of higher education.

NACE offers suggestions for getting the most out of your organization’s intern surveys.

Students who took paid internships or co-ops were more likely to receive an offer of full-time employment and a higher salary offer from their employers than were students who took unpaid internships or co-ops, according to results of NACE’s Class of 2015 Student Survey.

When asked to rate the career readiness competencies of college graduates in terms of “essential need,” employers view four as vital, according to results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2016 Spring Update.

Immigration attorney Mark B. Rhoads answers several critical questions about international students navigating the visa sponsorship process.

Average starting salary projections for the Class of 2022 range from an increase of 5.4% to a decrease of 14.8%.

When choosing between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, employers deem having internship experience—with the organization or within its industry—to be the most influential factors.

New graduates and their potential employers can agree on which skills are most important for job candidates, but differ on how proficient new graduates are in those abilities.