Every year, career services offices review thousands of student resumes. They fix formatting. They correct verb tense. They suggest bullets that are more action-oriented. They ensure the margins are consistent.
This work is useful. A clean, well-formatted resume is easier to read and signals professionalism. But it is not the intervention that most changes whether a student gets hired.
The higher-value intervention is different: teaching students to identify the competencies they've developed and describe them in the language that employers actually use to evaluate candidates. That's a skills coaching problem, not a resume formatting problem, and it's one that most career services offices haven't yet built the capacity to address at scale.
Amy Everson, Senior Director of University Recognition and Institutional Events at the American Public University System, named the gap during the State of Higher Ed webinar, explaining how students have developed real competencies through their coursework, leadership experiences, and daily academic life, but they don't have the vocabulary to describe those competencies in professional language. Career services is the natural platform for teaching that vocabulary. Most aren't using it that way.
Why Students Can't Describe What They Know
The competency gap that matters most is not what students have learned. It's what they can communicate.
A student who has spent four years managing competing priorities (a full course load, a part-time job, and a leadership role in a student organization) has developed real professional capability in time management, resource allocation, and operating under pressure. They just don't call it that. They call it "having a lot on my plate."
A student who has completed a research project requiring independent hypothesis formation, methodology design, literature synthesis, and results presentation has developed analytical thinking, project management, and professional communication skills. They often describe it as "did research for a class."
The language gap is not about deception. Students are accurately describing their experiences. What they're missing is the translation layer: the ability to describe what they did in terms of the professional competencies it demonstrates, using the vocabulary that recruiters are trained to evaluate.
According to the 2026 State of Higher Ed Report, only 22.2% of recruiters believe the degree alone justifies its cost. That's not because degrees aren't producing competencies; it's because the competencies aren't being communicated in terms employers can evaluate. The missing link is the translation layer that career services is uniquely positioned to build.
What Skills Language Coaching Actually Involves
Skills language coaching is a different kind of career services intervention than resume review. It's also more sustainable, because it produces a capability students carry into every professional context rather than a document that requires updating every time a new job is applied for.
The core process looks like this:
- Competency inventory: Students systematically review their experiences (coursework, work history, leadership activities, volunteer roles, research projects) and identify what skills each experience developed. Not what they did (the task) but what capability it demonstrated (the competency). This step often requires significant prompting because students don't naturally audit their experiences through a competency lens.
- Vocabulary mapping: For each competency, students learn the professional vocabulary that employers use to describe and evaluate it. "I managed a lot of different tasks" becomes "I prioritized competing demands under resource constraints." "I worked with my group on a project" becomes "I collaborated across different perspectives to deliver outcomes under ambiguity." The mapping is not embellishment; it's accurate professional translation.
- Narrative building: Students develop a professional narrative that integrates their competencies into a coherent story about who they are professionally and what they can contribute. This narrative informs their resume, their interview responses, and their professional communication more broadly.
- Application practice: Students apply their competency narrative in simulated professional contexts (mock interviews, professional pitch exercises, networking conversations) and receive feedback on where the narrative is compelling and where it needs work.
This is four to six hours of coaching to do well. Most career services offices don't currently offer it at anything close to scale. But it's the highest-ROI investment they can make in student career outcomes.
Where Career Services Can Build This Now
The infrastructure for skills language coaching doesn't require starting from scratch. Most career services offices have the staff expertise. What they often lack is the positioning and the curriculum.
- Build skills language frameworks: A library of translation templates, turning common student experiences into employer-recognized competencies, can be developed once and deployed at scale through advising conversations, digital resources, and workshop formats. The templates become a shared resource rather than a bespoke service.
- Integrate into required touchpoints: When skills language coaching is embedded in orientation, required advising appointments, or capstone coursework rather than offered as an elective service, it reaches students who wouldn't self-select into it. The 38.8% who have used career services self-selected; the 61.2% who haven't are often the ones who would benefit most.
- Train faculty advisors: Faculty who advise students on academic and professional decisions are often the most trusted professional development voices students encounter. Faculty who understand the skills translation problem (and who can help students see their academic work through a competency lens) extend the reach of career services without requiring students to visit a separate office.
- Create peer coaching programs: Upperclassmen who have gone through the skills translation process successfully can coach younger students through it. Peer programs scale the intervention in ways that staff capacity alone can't.
The Institutional Case
Investing in skills language coaching is not just a student welfare investment. It's an institutional positioning investment.
According to the 2026 State of Higher Ed Report, 31% of students want more career-focused resources. More practically: the institutions whose graduates consistently land strong first positions build a reputation that affects enrollment, retention, and alumni engagement. The investment in career services that actually works (skills coaching, employer pipeline building, sustained engagement) produces measurable returns across the institution.
The current model (resume formatting, job listings, senior-year workshops) is not producing that return. The evidence is in the utilization data: 38.8% engagement for a resource that 84.3% of students know exists. When nearly half the students who know a resource exists choose not to use it, the resource is not providing the value it could.
The switch from logistics to coaching doesn't require replacing the existing infrastructure. It requires layering a higher-value intervention on top of it, and positioning that intervention as the primary value rather than the add-on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between resume coaching and skills language coaching?
Resume coaching focuses on document quality: formatting, action verbs, bullet structure, presentation. Skills language coaching focuses on narrative substance: what competencies has this student developed, and how do they describe them in professional language? The former improves how the resume looks; the latter improves what it says about the student's actual capability.
How do you teach students to identify their own competencies without embellishing?
The key is the question framing. "What skills did you develop?" often produces inflated answers. "When in this experience did you have to make a judgment call?" or "What problem did you solve that the people around you couldn't?" produces more specific and accurate competency identification. Good skills coaching uses questioning techniques that help students surface what's genuinely there rather than inventing what should be.
Is this more relevant for students from disadvantaged backgrounds?
The skills translation problem affects all students, but it disproportionately affects first-generation students and those without professional mentors in their networks. Students who have family members in professional fields often receive informal skills language coaching through those relationships. Students who don't come from those backgrounds often enter the job market without the translation layer that those relationships would have provided. Institutional investment in skills coaching is also an equity investment.
How does the NSLS address the skills language gap?
The NSLS's structured leadership development program builds career competencies (goal-setting, professional communication, peer accountability) and provides a framework for describing those competencies in professional language. Members who complete the program leave with specific, documented professional development they can describe to employers, in addition to the broader competency development the program provides.
Resume formatting is a service. Skills language coaching is an investment — in students, in institutional outcomes, and in the employer relationships that depend on a consistent supply of genuinely prepared candidates. The transition from one to the other is the most valuable thing career services can do right now. For the full data on career services, employer expectations, and what drives student career readiness, read the 2026 State of Higher Ed Report.
