Colleges & Universities Welcome Kit

Want to learn how to use Career Key Central to view and manage your students’ activity? For the CDP, see Support> Manage CDP Clients, for CKD, see Support> Manage CKD Discoverers.

Time to Complete

4 minutes

Overview

This Welcome Kit helps you implement Career Key with prospective or current college students.  It covers,

  • PathAdvisor career well-being app, which contains both the CDP and CKD assessments,
  • Career Decision Profile (CDP) career decision inventory, and
  • Career Key Discovery (CKD) Holland personality and career interest inventory.

2 ways to Boost Career Readiness with Career Key

Curriculum Integration (LMS) – digital course material

Through the LMS – a Learning Management System such as Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle. Faculty adopt the LTI 1.3 tool technology as a digital course material and student activity data is shared with student support departments.

Career Exploration and Planning (non-LMS)

Through Career Key’s hosted platform.

Although these use cases differ, the underlying products are similar.

Takeaways

  • Learn what’s in your Career Key product
  • Learn how students, instructors, and advisors benefit

A. How Career Key Works

Get to know your students better, faster

With Career Key, your students can gain life- and career-changing insights about their career decision status, personality, interests, skills and values. They can use this information to move forward on their decision journey, identifying best fit career options and postsecondary programs where they will thrive.

Research shows that a close fit between a student’s strongest Holland personality types and postsecondary education programs predicts higher grades, persistence in a program and higher on-time college graduation rates.

Career Key’s career decision platform includes a career well-being app and two scientifically valid assessments,

  • PathAdvisor, the career well-being app that includes the CDP and CKD assessments,
  • the 5-minute Career Decision Profile (CDP) measure of career decision status, and
  • the 10-minute Career Key Discovery (CKD) interest inventory based on Holland’s Theory,
    whose results are all displayed in the group administration portal, Career Key Central.

How PathAdvisor works

Students complete “Set Up” of PathAdvisor in about 15 minutes. Set up includes:

  • Complete the CDP
  • Complete CKD and explore careers and majors at that institution that match their personality and interests.

Optional: Retake the CDP (called “Comfort Reflection” in the app) at the end of the semester or after an intervention to measure impact on career readiness.

How the Career Decision Profile works

  • Takes students about 5 minutes to complete the inventory
  • Mobile and tablet friendly
  • Self-interpreting, individualized explanation of assessment results, recommended next steps to keep making progress on their decision-making journey
  • Students receive a shareable PDF report with results and their recommended next steps
  • Advisors see estimated levels of service for each student in Career Key Central, in addition to detailed results
  • Pre and post intervention administration provides scientifically valid data on multiple dimensions of career decision status including:
    > Decidedness
    > Comfort
    > Self-Clarity
    > Knowledge of Careers and Education Options
    > Decisiveness
    > Career Choice Importance
    > Existence of barrier(s) (Capacity for Persisting)
    > Other Factors (optional fill-in)

How Career Key Discovery works

  • Takes students about 10 minutes to complete
  • Scientifically valid Holland personality and interest inventory
  • Self-interpreting, individualized explanation of assessment results, including environments that the student will find thriving, promising, and challenging
  • Students can filter and explore best-fit careers and education programs by education required, duration, type of award
  • Students receive a shareable PDF report (sample) with results and their selected options

Shared Learning Goals

  1. Help students explore how they feel about where they are, and understand they are supported
  2. Understand how ready each student is to make a decision about a career or education program
  3. Learn more about students’ unique decision needs, including other factors not otherwise known to the advisor
  4. Increase students’ awareness of themselves – their interests, personality, and values,
  5. Help students relate their personal characteristics to occupations and education programs,
  6. Expand the career and postsecondary education options students are considering,
  7. Stimulate students’ career exploration, such as, discussing possible careers and training programs with others and doing online research,
  8. Increase students’ confidence in their ability to make good career and education choices

Career Key meets professional standards in career readiness competencies and accreditation standards, such as those for colleges of business (AACSB).  See the List of Higher Education Downloads below.

B. Curriculum Integration (LMS)

When used to embed career readiness in the curriculum, Career Key facilitates easier and greater collaboration between faculty and their colleagues in student success, career services, and academic advising.

Everyone uses shared Career Key data to help students stay in school (retention), identify and stick with their best-fit field of study (persistence), and graduate on time ready for a good job or graduate program (employability).

Career Key assigns a service level to each student based on their Career Decision Profile (CDP) score. Based on that level, Career Key notifies instructors and advisors by email who needs more help, why, and suggestions for how to follow up. For more details, read Explore Client Decision-Making.

Career Key notifies instructors by email about students in their class who need a little extra attention (Proactive Staff Service Level), why, and how to help them.

LMS Instructor Center

For implementation resources and support, go to our LMS Career Key Instructor Center on our Support Portal, which includes

C. Career Exploration and Planning (non-LMS)

Implementation Guide – Colleges contains tips for more traditional career development implementation of Career Key.

D. List of Higher Education Resources

Product Overview Videos

Faculty and Advisors: watch the series in the Instructor Manual.

Students: Career Decision Profile (https://vimeo.com/480498917)
Students: Career Key Discovery (https://vimeo.com/392542053)
Students: CKD Profile Decision Tools (https://vimeo.com/409021237)

White Papers

Critical Gen Z Career Readiness Needs (2025), published in AACSB Insights

Competencies and Standards Career Key Covers

Career Key Map to National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Career Readiness Competencies

Career Key Map to AACSB Accreditation Standards

 

Related in this knowledgebase