The Articulation Gap
This resources includes summaries of Developing Employability Skill Articulation in College Students by Bradley C. Kovalcik
In the world of career services in higher education, there’s an ongoing debate about how well students prepared for post-college opportunities. Consider these data points:

While students might overrate themselves in their abilities, why are employers stating that students have such low proficiencies in communication? It isn’t because they aren’t learning communication but rather that students struggle to explain their experiences to employers in meaningful ways. This is known as the articulation gap – the gap between what a student learns in a classroom, in study abroad experience, or in an internship – and how that applies to a career or job. We as faculty and staff don’t just need to help students develop skills – we need to help students know how to articulate them.
Developing a Framework
There are countless ways to consider skills and ways to evaluate them. To keep things consistent and easy, we use the NACE career readiness competencies and the associated NACE competency assessment to name, define, and assess skills.
In order to help with learning these skills, it’s also important to rely on scaffolding (based on Burner’s work). To address the articulation gap, there are four main scaffolds, outlined below.
Step 1: Skill Naming and Defining
Before a student can state their skills, they need to have the vocabulary to do so. The first scaffold focuses on providing these baseline knowledge of what the skills are. The art of naming can make knowledge more accessible and allow it to feel more relevant and real in students’ lives.
Having terminology is also valuable as employers tend to use skill language fluidly without universally agreed-upon language, which can increase the articulation gap. Providing students with the ability to name and define skills better prepares them to discuss their skills, even when employers might use vague descriptors.
To make terms accessible to students, skills and definitions should be:
- incorporated into student training and skills assessments
- organically referred to during discussions/conversations with students
- used in programming, syllabi, and learning objectives
- utilized in marketing for departments and programs
Step 2: Skill Awareness and Identification
Once students can name and define skills, they can then begin to build skill awareness and identify how those skills show up for them. This process requires them to have a concrete experience, then observe and reflect on that experience. Skills will no longer be detached concepts but personal experiences students can connect to.
Ways to incorporate awareness and identification include:
- written or verbal prompts
- identifying situations they’ve had recently and perform prompted reflection on it
- partner work and skill identification
Step 3: Connecting to Skills While Building Evidence
This step builds on skill awareness and goes beyond to assist students in being able to easily and automatically name skills. This shifts into further developing skills and how they can grow. As students build personal connections to their skills through their experiences, they can begin to identify stories and anecdotes about their experiences that they can share with others, allowing them to examine personal skill growth by comparing past experiences with recent ones.
Reflection is extremely important at this stage and the 4Cs of Critical Reflection (continuous, connected, challenging, and contextualized) should be utilized. This will help students have stories to pull from, growing their self-authorship and communication.
Ways to include deep reflection include:
- think/pair/share
- resume bullet point activities
- group discussions
- rubrics assessing skills (provided or created by students themselves)
- open-ended questions
Step 4: Skill Articulation and Transference
After building and growing in each previous section, students are now ready to understand how to transfer their skills to new situations. It’s essential that we prepare students to see that skills required in situations can be the same, even when those situations are very different.
Students should have many opportunities to practice skill articulation and recognize how their skills transfer. Response methods, such as STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) – which is often used in interview preparation – can help skill articulation not just to employers but in many other settings.
Practicing the STAR response method can be used in:
- written reflections
- group discuxssions
- oral presentations
- creating ePortfolios
- mock interviews
- including students in hiring process for peer positions
- resume crafting sessions
Takeaways
This scaffolding structure will help students clearly address their own skills and transfer them from course to course and across various areas in their lives. For this method to be affective, it should be used across campus by all possible departments.
For more information on how to utilize this scaffolding, please email the Strommen Center.
Sources
Developing Employability Skill Articulation in College Students