If you have not already read the general guidelines for using the topical guides, please begin here. As a reminder, these guides are intended to stir your initial thinking, not offer comprehensive guidance. We encourage you to explore the questions and resources in this guide with at least one other person on your campus.
Introduction
Career services works at a natural intersection with vocational exploration and discernment. However, people sometimes understand “vocation” to refer narrowly to the trades or career. This is why career services professionals play a pivotal role in clarifying that vocation refers to a whole-life calling, of which a job or career is only a part (albeit a central one for students and educators alike).
In addition to the natural intersections, career centers are well situated institutionally for both wide reach and sustainability. When vocation is thoughtfully integrated into the wide variety of services that career centers provide to students (at all stages of their college journey), students are exposed at multiple points to the wider vocational frame. Likewise, career offices can develop vocation-oriented systems and programs—alongside training for its personnel—that ensure a measure of program sustainability. In this way, they become an important anchor for a culture of vocation on campus.
Skills in self-awareness and personal narrative, interpersonal engagement, and civic contribution are all vocational competencies that fall within the purview of career services. In addition, career centers often employ a wide variety of valuable tools, such as strengths assessments, life design principles, values inventories, and the NACE competencies. These can serve as meaningful and sometimes transformative catalysts for student awareness and growth. While they should not serve as stand-ins for vocation work, they can be tools embedded within a broader vocation framework.
Questions to Consider
- What programs or services does the career center currently offer to support students’ exploration and discernment? Does your institution have existing assessments or tools to help students assess strengths, skills, or values or discern their career interests?
- What is the campus culture around career exploration and support? Does career coaching reside mostly with faculty members or with career services professionals? Are there opportunities for faculty members and staff to collaborate on this work?
- What is the demographic profile of the institution’s student body and how does that impact the structure and offerings of career coaching and services?
Resources
Blog Posts
Finding Your One Thing and The Myth of the Linear Career
by David Youland
These complementary blog posts challenge students to move beyond reactive career decision-making driven by accident, apathy, or social pressure, advocating instead for proactive vocational discernment that recognizes career as worthy of deep reflection. While acknowledging that a narrative of linear career progression can provide useful developmental scaffolding for students beginning their professional journeys, Youland ultimately argues that such frameworks are misleading, as real careers frequently involve non-linear pivots that require ongoing reflection and flexibility. Together, the posts position career discernment as a continuous practice of “coddiwompling”—purposeful meandering toward evolving destinations—that honors both the practical realities of professional life and the deeper vocational questions of meaning, fulfillment, and authentic self-expression across one’s life.
Blog Post
Hope through Connection II: Called beyond Career
by Deirdre Egan-Ryan
Egan-Ryan describes how vocation-inflected alumni panels and interview assignments in an introductory English course help students reimagine career as one dimension of a multifaceted calling rather than a singular defining identity. By asking panelists and interviewees to discuss not only their professional trajectories but also their community commitments, family choices, and evolving sense of purpose, the course creates transformative moments where students witness how former English majors integrate paid work with other vocations to craft meaningful, flourishing lives. This approach cultivates conversational skills and a hopeful recognition that career paths can be flexible, values-driven journeys shaped by passion and community rather than a fear of making the “wrong” choice.
Blog Post
Building Career Readiness
by Stephanie Johnson
“Building Career Readiness” synthesizes two Inside Higher Ed pieces that challenge institutions to rethink career preparation by moving beyond exclusive off-campus internship programs toward more accessible, faculty-led work-integrated learning embedded directly in classroom curricula. Matthew T. Hora argues that faculty are uniquely positioned to contextualize transferable skills within disciplinary content while creating equitable learning environments, and Matt Reed emphasizes the transformative potential of faculty actively engaging with Career Services and explicitly naming the professional competencies students develop through coursework. Together, these perspectives advocate for a collaborative model where career readiness becomes a shared responsibility between academic affairs and student support services rather than an add-on experience available only to privileged students with access to competitive internships.
Podcast Episode
Career Services at a Crossroads
by Andy Chan
Andy Chan, Vice President for Innovation and Career Development at Wake Forest University, discusses the ways vocation and career overlap, as well as how we might help students rethink success. The provocative title of his TED talk, “Why Career Services Must Die,” is a rallying cry for how the academy can better integrate questions of career and purpose throughout all aspects of the college experience. For Chan, innovation is not just about novelty for its own sake, but about “creating value in new ways that meets the needs of those you serve and also aligns with who you are and what you value.” He emphasizes the importance of “situational mentors” along the way and demonstrates that the categories of mission, core values, and our students’ passions can help us reimagine more instrumentalist models of “career services” as forms of vocational exploration and discernment.
Example Activities
Here are some activities that help students deepen their vocational reflection. These example activities are meant to be examples to spark thinking about what might be possible in your classroom.
The following tools can help students reflect on personal commitments and interests alongside more traditional career exploration activities. Keep in mind that self-reflection is also a skill to be developed, and students will benefit from structured guidance on how to put together the various discoveries these tools yield. A wide variety of values sorting exercises are available on the internet. Students can use them, or you can use them to create your own physical cards. Examples:
- https://www.valuescardsort.com/
- https://www.truupsychology.com/values
- https://www.thegoodproject.org/value-sort
- https://brenebrown.com/podcast/living-into-our-values/#listen
Conversation Dinner
Each semester one faculty member and one staff member are invited to share their vocational stories over a meal with students, faculty and staff in attendance. These can be recorded and archived in the library. Selection of participants is intentional to ensure different perspectives are reflected.
Values Card Sort
The values card sort is a hands-on activity that can be used to help students consider their own values and to provide a starting place for reflection. This activity has been adapted from the Personal Values Card Sort created by Miller, W. R, C’de Baca, J., Matthews, D. B., & Wilbourne, P. L. (2001) at the University of New Mexico. The full card sort includes 83 values and can be found by searching for it online. A 30-values card sort or a 34-values card sort are available for use.
Student Instructions
- Find 5 cards labeled: least important, less important, neutral, more important, and most important.
- Sort values cards into piles according to how important each value is to you from most important to least important. While many of them may be important to you, do your best to follow the suggestions of how many cards to include in each pile.
- Once you have completed sorting the values, record for yourself which values are in each pile
- Looking at the values in your “most important” pile, respond to the following questions:
- How are you already living towards this value? Or how could you start to live more towards this value? Think about how this fits in with your life as a college student right now?
- How do these values guide you towards living the life you want to live (or a life that matters to you)?
- How do these values relate to the impact you want to have on the world?
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