Harvesting a Decade of Employability Insights

We’ve Got the Grapes: What a Decade in the Employability Trenches Taught Us

The national conversation about post-completion success has officially hit full bloom. Everywhere we turn, the energy around employability, return on investment, and workforce readiness is palpable. Higher ed sessions focus on postsecondary value, career integration, and ensuring students leave college ready for life and work. That urgency now echoes across federal policy, philanthropy, and the higher education ecosystem. For us at QA Commons, it is exciting — and a little surreal.

Because we’ve been here for a while.

Since 2016, QA Commons has been working to embed employability into the core of educational design and delivery. We launched our first pilot nearly a decade ago and have been refining, iterating, and scaling our approach ever since. Our home base? St. Helena, California—a small town with a big reputation for wine innovation—demonstrates that thoughtful innovation can thrive far from traditional power centers. As a national nonprofit, we work with programs across the country—from Kentucky to Connecticut to Utah and West Virginia. But St. Helena is where we planted our roots. And, much like a good vineyard, we’ve spent the last nine years nurturing something with patience, creativity, and perseverance.

We’ve made mistakes—lots of them. We’ve piloted things that didn’t stick, used language that didn’t land, and underestimated just how stretched educators already are—and how difficult it is to take on additional work, even when they believe in it. But we’ve stayed in the field, kept listening, and done the hard, sometimes humbling, work of learning through practice.

So when we say “we’ve got the grapes,” we mean this: we’ve put in the work. We’ve been cultivating employability long enough to bring in a real harvest. And if you’ll indulge the metaphor just a little further, we’re ready to pour.

Five Commitments That Make Employability Stick

In our work across dozens of institutions, we’ve found five commitments that consistently matter:

• Cultivating Essential Employability Qualities (EEQs)
• Integrating Career Support Services
• Employer Engagement
• Student and Alumni Engagement
• Transparency of Outcomes

We’ve tested our framework in four-year university liberal arts programs, community college STEM pathways, workforce development initiatives, K-12 continuation schools, and reentry programs for justice-impacted individuals. We’ve worked with more than 131 programs certified or supported across 60 institutions in 31 states, and through it all, it has held up—guiding programs in building a culture of employability that’s flexible enough to fit, strong enough to matter.

What We’ve Learned

Nearly a decade of fieldwork, feedback loops, and partnerships has taught us a lot. Here’s what we’ve come to understand:

• Employability isn’t an outcome. It’s a mindset. Cultivating qualities like adaptability, collaboration, and problem-solving begins with intentional design, not last-minute career workshops. Too often, institutions still treat employability as a checklist — a one-off workshop, certificate, or résumé review. But real workplace readiness requires continuous, embedded development across a student’s academic journey.
• Start with strengths, not deficits. Faculty already cultivate these qualities in their teaching—even if they don’t call them employability skills. Recognizing and building on that existing strength is far more effective than imposing prescriptive, external models that overlook disciplinary expertise. While many faculty resist framing their fields as “workforce training,” they are eager to show the value of their disciplines and help students succeed after graduation. The real gap is that students often lack the language to recognize and articulate the professional value of what they’ve learned. When faculty and students make those connections explicit, it validates disciplines, affirms learning, and sparks innovations that stay true to academic integrity while strengthening students’ real-world readiness.
• Career services alone can’t carry this work. With high staff-to-student ratios, limited context, and often only a loose connection to what students actually experience in their programs, they are often set up to fall short. Students spend hundreds of credit hours with faculty who know their strengths and struggles intimately; that’s where employability needs to live, not as an external add-on.
• Cultural capital gaps are real. Equity won’t happen by accident. Institutions must explicitly teach the norms, networks, unspoken expectations, and awareness of opportunity; knowing what options exist, how to access them, and how to move forward. Completing an academic program alone doesn’t guarantee these outcomes, and not all students acquire them without intentional cultivation.
• Employability is contextual and developmental. Communication looks very different in a biology lab, a courtroom, or a community organizing project—and what counts as “readiness” varies just as much. Preparing students means helping them navigate those nuances while also affirming progress along the way. Validation isn’t about labeling someone as employable at a single moment; it’s about giving students the language to recognize growth, build confidence, and carry a mindset of lifelong development. That’s why we resist one-size-fits-all models and instead adapt our approaches to discipline, identity, and context—because that’s what makes the learning real.
• No two programs are alike. The diversity of department culture, faculty buy-in, and community context makes a one-size-fits-all model both impossible and undesirable. Yet some institutions demonstrate what’s possible when employability becomes part of a shared campus ethos. At Murray State University, for example, several departments went through a structured certification process that asked them to reflect on how their teaching built employability qualities. What we saw was remarkable: the underlying principles—student reflection, intentional skill-building, translational communication—started to take hold beyond the original participants. New programs came in already well-aligned, often earning top marks. It’s a reminder that when employability becomes a shared language, its impact can scale organically.

For Campus Leaders

If you’re a provost, department chair, or faculty lead, our message is this: employability is not a threat to academic integrity—it’s an invitation to make learning more intentional, inclusive, and durable. Ask yourself: Are we helping students recognize the value of what they’re already learning? Are we making space for reflection, articulation, and translation? Are we engaging employers as partners—not dictators? Are we treating employability as a shared, developmental responsibility across the curriculum and as a cornerstone of lifelong learning—not a last-mile add-on?

Employability is also about more than discrete skills. It’s about the whole person—their confidence, motivation, resilience, and sense of purpose. Students’ ability to thrive in workplaces and communities depends as much on mindset, self-belief, and relationships as it does on technical expertise.

Looking Ahead

Our work continues to evolve—shaped by feedback, grounded in practice, and informed by the shifting realities of higher education. We’ve cultivated a body of insight—and we’re ready to share what it has yielded.

What has become clear to us is that employability isn’t a simple matter. It’s a rich, interdisciplinary challenge—one that draws from educational design, sociology, psychology, labor economics, business, public policy, and more. We’ve developed tools, frameworks, and approaches that are helping institutions move forward. But we also have questions—many of them.

We’re wary of simple answers, and skeptical of anyone who claims to have it all figured out. What we do believe in is ongoing conversation, collective learning, and a deep respect for the complexity of the work. As the national dialogue around employability deepens, we hope our experience can make a meaningful contribution to the journey ahead.

We’ve put in the seasons of care. What we’ve harvested so far is just the beginning — and now the real work is in sharing the harvest, learning from one another, and planting the next rows with intention.