Career Launchpad: what changes when a university can measure readiness across a whole cohort
There are two conversations about employability on every campus, and they never meet.
A student sits with a placement officer in her final year and is asked what she wants to do. She says something reasonable. She cannot say which skills she is short of for that role, because nobody has ever told her, and the job descriptions she has read are written to sound impressive rather than to be measured against.
In another room, a placement head is asked how the cohort is looking. He says something reasonable too. He cannot say how many of those students are actually ready, or which ones are quietly drifting, because the only data he has arrives at the end, in the form of a placement percentage, by which time nothing can be done about it.
Both people are working hard. Neither has a number they can act on while there is still time.
That gap is what SkillDrift Career Launchpad is built to close, and today it has its own home at www.skilldrift.org.
One number, and you can check the working
The centre of the product is the Career Readiness Score. One number out of 100 for each student, computed in the backend from nine measured components.
Three properties matter more than the number itself, and they are the reason a placement team can build a process on it.
It is arithmetic, not an opinion. The same inputs give the same score. Run it again next week and nothing moves unless something about the student moved.
It can go down. A score that only rises is a progress bar. If a student stops doing the work, or retargets at a harder role, the number should fall, and it does.
It explains its own movement. Every change traces to the component that caused it, so a student is never told she improved without being told why, and a placement officer is never asked to trust a figure she cannot open.
The weighting behind those components is tunable per institution. A conservatoire and an engineering school should not weight the same things identically, and they do not have to.
What the institution sees that the student does not
The student sees her own picture: which skills she is missing for the role she is aiming at, a roadmap to close them, interview practice with a scored report, and a resume that updates as she learns.
The institution sees the shape of the whole cohort. Which programmes are ready and which are not. Which students have not started. Where the same gap keeps appearing across a department, which is usually a curriculum signal rather than a student signal.
That second view is the one that changes how a placement team spends its week, because it turns placement from something you report on afterwards into something you can intervene in while the term is still running.
Two products, and the line between them is real
SkillDrift Career Launchpad is not the individual SkillDrift product with a university login on the front. They are two different products, with separate databases and separate user bases.
The line between them is signup. Anyone can sign themselves up for SkillDrift as an individual. Nobody can sign themselves up for Career Launchpad. An institution deploys it and provisions its own people inside its own tenant, on its own subdomain, with its own database. There is no other route in.
That sounds like a restriction and it is actually the point. It is what makes the data ownership split enforceable rather than merely described.
Institutional data belongs to the institution. A student's own learning data belongs to her.
The dividing line is aggregation. Anything that only has meaning across students, the cohort heatmaps, the department scorecards, the placement pipeline, belongs to the institution. Anything about one student, her scores, her roadmap, her interview records, her documents, belongs to her. She can take it with her when she leaves.
Most vendors cannot say that clearly, because most vendors have not decided.
Why we built the institutional side at all
The individual product answers one person's question: what is between me and the job I want.
Institutions kept asking a different question, and asking it in the same words each time. Not "can our students use your tool", but "can we see whether this is working, across everyone, before the year ends".
That is a different product. It needs cohort onboarding rather than signup, tenancy rather than accounts, a written data protection position rather than a privacy notice, and one measured number rather than a dashboard of activity. So we built it as a different product.
Where to look
The site covers the parts an institution asks about before a demo:
- How the Career Readiness Score works, including every input that feeds it
- How a cohort gets onboarded
- What a placement team sees, and what leadership sees
- Integrations: sign on, student information systems, learning management systems
- Security and compliance
Where to start
If you run a placement office or a career centre, three things in order:
- Read how the Career Readiness Score is built, every input that feeds it.
- Look at what your placement team would see day to day, and what leadership would see.
- Book a demo and bring one programme to talk about rather than the whole institution. It is a shorter conversation and a better one.
Everything is at www.skilldrift.org.