Stop Matching Keywords: Career Navigation Is Infrastructure

Summary

Career navigation is easy to confuse with information access, but they aren’t the same thing. Katherine DeRosear draws on 25-plus years in workforce and education technology to argue that career navigation only works when it’s built as ongoing infrastructure rather than a one-time tool, and explains what that requires for the students, workers, and agencies who depend on it.

[Estimated read time: 5 minutes]

What drives workforce innovation

For more than 25 years, I’ve watched workforce and education organizations adapt to wave after wave of technological change.

I remember moving from physical job banks and index cards to online job portals. I also remember when the first generation of keyword-matching search engines promised to solve unemployment almost overnight (spoiler alert: they didn’t).

After decades of advances, setbacks, and new approaches, I’ve come to one conclusion that has only grown stronger over time:

Meaningful workforce innovation depends on whether technology helps people see opportunities they couldn’t see before and helps the institutions serving them act with greater clarity, speed, and purpose. Not simply whether it provides access to more information.

Career navigation is one of the clearest examples of that distinction.

More information doesn’t automatically bring clarity

Early in my career, one of our biggest challenges was helping people find career information at all. Today, that problem has largely been solved. Students, job seekers, career changers, and workforce professionals have access to thousands of occupations, education programs, credentials, assessments, labor market reports, and digital tools.

Yet, more information hasn’t produced greater clarity. Simply providing access to information doesn’t automatically help people understand how their interests, experiences, and skills connect to meaningful opportunities and give them confidence to take the next step.

I’ve worked with career navigation platforms serving students, educators, workforce professionals, and job seekers. I’ve helped support statewide career exploration systems that connected individuals to high-demand occupations, education and training programs, industry-recognized credentials, and regional labor market information.

I’ve also worked with comprehensive college, career, and life readiness platforms that helped students connect academic planning with career interests, work-based learning, postsecondary options, and future goals.

Over time, I’ve also come to believe that career navigation isn’t a service someone receives once. It isn’t a website people visit during a job search. And it isn’t a conversation reserved for moments of major transition.

Weak career navigation creates systemwide problems

In higher education, students often struggle to connect academic choices with career outcomes. Adult learners who leave school before completing a credential may not understand the value of the coursework they’ve already completed or which other pathways it may apply to. Career advisors work tirelessly to support students, but growing demand and limited staffing make effective, personalized guidance increasingly difficult.

State workforce agencies face similar challenges. Individuals with valuable transferable skills may be directed back toward familiar occupations instead of emerging opportunities where those skills remain highly relevant. Military veterans, military spouses, gig workers, and internationally trained professionals frequently possess capabilities that traditional matching systems struggle to recognize.

Even significant public investments in labor market information, longitudinal data systems, and training programs cannot achieve their full value if citizens can’t easily understand how those resources apply to their own situations.

Over time, these individual challenges become broader workforce issues. Employers can’t find qualified workers, while many workers already possess relevant skills that aren’t being recognized or connected to those jobs. Students invest time and money in pathways that don’t align with their goals. Public investments generate valuable data but don’t always translate into better outcomes for the people they were designed to serve.

These are symptoms of the same underlying challenge: career navigation that treats decisions as isolated events instead of an ongoing process.

What better career navigation requires

Effective career navigation cannot be reduced to a one-time assessment, a static website, or a list of job openings.

It begins early, evolves continuously, and combines technology with trusted human guidance. It connects education and training opportunities with current labor market conditions while recognizing that every individual brings a unique combination of experiences, interests, strengths, and aspirations.

Most importantly, it helps people understand possibilities they may not have considered.

Someone leaving hospitality shouldn’t be limited to hospitality simply because that’s what’s listed on a résumé. A parent returning to the workforce shouldn’t have to start from scratch because years of informal leadership and project management aren’t captured by traditional systems. A student shouldn’t have to guess whether a particular credential will create opportunities in the region where they hope to build a career.

Technology can help answer those questions, but only when it’s designed around people rather than around databases.

Designing solutions to incorporate those principles

Those lessons shaped the way we approached Wayfinder, our AI-enabled career navigation engine developed in partnership with Google.

Rather than functioning as another standalone destination, Wayfinder can integrate into the systems people already use, whether that’s a workforce portal, an unemployment insurance system, or a student success platform.

Instead of relying primarily on keyword matching, it helps identify transferable skills, connect individuals to relevant education and career opportunities, and present guidance informed by labor market data, state priorities, and each person’s unique experiences and goals.

Just as importantly, Wayfinder isn’t intended to replace career advisors or workforce professionals. It exists to strengthen their work by giving them richer information and helping individuals arrive at those conversations with greater clarity and confidence.

Technology should make human expertise more effective, not less necessary.

Looking ahead

Workforce systems have always evolved alongside changes in the economy. Artificial intelligence represents another significant shift, but it doesn’t change the fundamental purpose of career navigation.

Our responsibility remains the same: help people to understand where they are, recognize where they can go next, and make informed decisions that improve both their individual opportunity and community prosperity.

The organizations that will lead in the years ahead will build career navigation as lasting infrastructure that serves people across every stage of learning and work.

That’s the standard I believe we should hold ourselves to. It’s also the standard we set for Wayfinder.