Improving Coach: Tools, Standards, and Skill Insights
Coach Product Update: April 2025
At CareerVillage, we’re continuing to evolve Coach to provide more relevant, timely, and effective career guidance—especially for learners who don’t have consistent access to advising. Below are three updates that reflect how we're improving the experience and laying the groundwork for what's next.
Real-time tools and resources—now in the chat
Coach can now pull in verified resources directly into the chat interface. Learners can ask questions about financial aid, job requirements, or academic programs and receive real-time responses from sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CareerOneStop and O*NET.
For institutional partners, we’ve started integrating live course catalogs and career pages—making it easier to direct learners to up-to-date, locally relevant options.
This replaces the need for static PDFs or outdated reference material—and ensures that the information Coach shares is both accurate and actionable.
Coach is connected to trusted sources like CareerOneStop for local labor market data and up-to-date info on every career path.
Defining quality, not guessing at it
We're also in the process of implementing a new quality evaluation framework for Coach's responses. Over the past month, our Coaching and Learning Expert, in partnership with our data team, has been developing 150+ quality benchmarks aligned to the NCDA’s National Career Development Guidelines and NACE’s Career Readiness Competencies, two of the most widely recognized frameworks in the field.
Once this framework is fully integrated into our internal evaluation tooling (expected to begin rolling out this quarter), it will allow us to systematically assess where Coach is performing well and where it needs improvement.
The result will be more consistent, more targeted guidance—better aligned with the standards that educators and career professionals use every day.
Soon, Coach will be able to assess career readiness from a user’s resume or LinkedIn profile.
Building the foundation for smarter recommendations
At the same time, our data team just kicked off the first phase of a new career skills model that will form the backbone of Coach’s future recommendation engine.
The project—led by our research team and supported by expert advisors—is focused on determining what career readiness skills can be inferred from a resume or LinkedIn profile. As part of the first phase of the project, we’re working to manually code resumes, analyze skill indicators, and build a more nuanced, human-centered model of skill recognition.
The ultimate goal: Coach will be able to assess what skills a learner already has, identify gaps, and recommend targeted activities that help them grow.
Committed to delivering high-quality career guidance at scale
These updates are part of our broader effort to make Coach more accurate, more aligned with learner needs, and more useful to institutions that are scaling career guidance with limited resources.
If you’re interested in integrating your own resources, collaborating on quality benchmarks, or learning more about the skills model, we’d love to hear from you.
