Career Readiness Starts With Knowing Who You Are, Not Which Job Is Open

In Inside Higher Ed, student success reporter Joshua Bay sits down with Félix Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of the City University of New York, for a conversation titled Is College Preparing Students for Work? As families question the value of a degree, CUNY is trying to weave career preparation through the entire college experience instead of leaving it for senior year.

The effort, called CUNY Beyond, launched in 2025 at four campuses and is now expanding to five more with a $6.8 million investment. The chancellor makes a few points I found refreshing. Roughly half of CUNY's students were born outside the United States, and many are the first in their families to attend college. Most don't have professional connections, so the university intends to supply them. As he put it, "We need to be the place where they build that connection." He also told students to expect to reinvent themselves professionally several times, and said salary alone can't capture whether a graduate succeeded.

I admire the ambition and the scale, and I especially appreciate that he refuses to steer students toward particular industries. I want to add the piece that determines whether career readiness actually holds up over a lifetime.

Readiness for What, and for Whom?

Most career readiness efforts begin with the job market. Which fields are hiring? Which skills are in demand? Which internships lead to offers? Those are fair questions, and a university system serving students without family networks has every reason to ask them.

But a student who prepares only for today's openings is preparing for a target that will move. The chancellor said as much when he described careers that don't exist yet. The one thing a student carries from job to job, and from reinvention to reinvention, is themselves: how they think, what they notice, and the kinds of problems they are drawn to solve.

That self-knowledge is the foundation everything else stands on. Skills can be learned and replaced. Credentials can be earned and outgrown. Knowing what you naturally solve for is what lets you choose which skills to learn next. And it isn't fixed. It deepens with every class, job and setback, which is exactly why students need help seeing it early and revisiting it often. I made the case for putting identity beneath skills in A Skills-First Economy Needs an Identity-First Foundation.

Connection Is Where Students Get Seen

The part of the conversation that moved me most was the chancellor's focus on paid internships. He says he likes being called their patron saint, because his students can't afford to work for free.

That matters for economic reasons, but there is an identity reason too. Many first-generation students arrive having spent years editing themselves to fit environments that weren't built with them in mind. They learn to keep their heads down and show only the parts of themselves that seem to belong. An internship is often the first professional room where someone outside their family watches them work and tells them what they're good at.

Those moments of recognition build something no career center workshop can. A student whose supervisor tells them they see things others miss starts to trust their own judgment. That trust is the beginning of conviction, and it is what carries a person through the reinventions the chancellor predicts.

The chancellor also said he wants CUNY Beyond to eventually disappear into the normal way the university works. I like that goal. A consistent, systemwide approach means every student gets the same access, and that kind of reliability matters in a university as large and diverse as CUNY. The opportunity is to make sure that standard includes a regular moment where students reflect on who they are becoming, not just what they are qualifying for.

Questions Worth Asking This Semester

For colleges: when your career services team meets a student, does the first conversation start with the job market or with the student? What would change if the order were reversed?

For faculty: which assignments in your course give students a chance to discover how they think, rather than only demonstrating what they know?

For students and parents: after your next internship or part-time job, ask one question beyond whether you liked it. What did people come to you for? The answer is a clue to what you solve for, and it will keep evolving. I explored why that thread matters across a long career in The Only Constant in a Multichapter Career Is You.

CUNY is right that students will reinvent themselves many times. The best preparation a college can offer is helping them know who they are, so each reinvention builds on that knowledge instead of starting over.

Jobs will change many times over a career, so the readiness that lasts is knowing who you are each time you begin again.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.