Gained in Translation

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Before I jump into this week’s post, three things to be aware of.

Tomorrow I will be participating in a webinar sponsored by Mentor Collective that, as it happens touches on some of the themes I am writing about today. Check it out and maybe join us.

Next week I will be attending most of the Open edX conference happening in my backyard of Salt Lake City. Last year it was in Paris; this year it’s in the Paris of the Wasatch Valley. If you will be there, let me know. I also have a highly opinionated and non-comprehensive food guide to Salt Lake City, which I have linked to at the bottom of this post for anyone who is interested.

I will also be heading to Norway the following week and, again, the offer to meet and chat stands. I will alas be missing a catch-up with my regular and favorite Norwegian co-conspirator. But Roger won’t be able to escape me forever. On to the post.

Preparing students to thrive in the job market is an increasingly critical part of student success. Not only because it is the right thing to do, or because students increasingly judge the value of higher education in terms of its ability to prepare them for what comes later, but also because universities are increasingly being held accountable for students’ post-graduation earnings.

And the task facing students in the labor market is increasingly daunting.

Navigating entry into and flourishing within the job market is often framed as an information challenge. But in many ways students are awash in career information: labor market data, career centers and counselors, advice networks, and increasingly AI tools that help them identify opportunities and prepare for them.

Yet students still struggle to navigate careers and make decisions about their futures. One report after another this week circled the same underlying issue from different directions. Together, they convinced me that students increasingly suffer not from an information deficit, but from a translation deficit.

Career navigation as translation

A new report from Harvard’s Kennedy School Project on Workforce provides some fascinating insights into how students and workers think about and navigate careers. Its central argument is that careers are no longer linear. Instead, most people’s working lives are characterized by a constant need to adapt, pivot, and potentially exit and re-enter the workforce. The report treats career navigation as a problem of interpreting fragmented labor-market signals in an unstable economy.

What I found particularly interesting were the findings about how students and workers navigate this increasingly complex environment. The results reveal a growing divide between institutional authority and practical utility.

Traditional institutional sources remain trusted, but students increasingly turn elsewhere for guidance that feels more immediate, actionable, and personalized.

The contrast between traditional sources of career information — teachers, counselors, and career service centers — and newer, less formal sources was particularly striking. Traditional sources ranked higher on reliability than helpfulness, while networks, online tools, and social media ranked surprisingly high on helpfulness despite being viewed as less reliable.

What this chart suggests to me is that students and workers are finding value in:

• low-friction,

• ambient,

• conversational,

• always-on systems.

Students and workers increasingly appear willing to trade some degree of reliability for information that feels more immediate, personalized, conversational, and actionable.

The challenge is that the kinds of translation students increasingly prefer — low-friction, always-on, AI-mediated — may not be the kinds of translation best equipped to help students navigate uncertainty, identity, and long-term career development.

Many low-friction guidance systems are optimized for immediate decisions. Relational translation, by contrast, is often about helping students navigate uncertainty over time.

Which partly explains why students are still holding onto people and institutions that provide guidance. Students appear to be constructing hybrid guidance ecosystems made up of both traditional and non-traditional sources. But what is still missing is what the authors refer to as “interpretive infrastructure” to help people make sense of the labor market and navigate pivots, exits, and re-entries.

The role of interpretation, or translation is critical. As they explain:

Career readiness as curricular translation

While the Harvard report focuses on labor-market navigation, a report from Every Learner Everywhere (ELE), The Career Readiness Imperative in Gateway Courses, treats career readiness primarily as a curricular translation problem.

The ELE report is based on the premise that too few students engage with traditional career supports such as career centers or co-curricular activities (for example, career-oriented clubs). Institutions already teach students many skills and competencies that are enormously valuable in the workforce, including in the liberal arts. But what they have traditionally failed to do is help students recognize, narrate, articulate, and connect their learning to what employers need.

To address this, the report proposes embedding career readiness throughout the curriculum. Drawing on frameworks such as those from NACE and AAC&U, it emphasizes integrating career discussions and career-oriented content across courses, especially gateway courses such as required quantitative, writing, or introductory disciplinary courses.

Including career content in these kinds of courses means that students are exposed to career translation early and often, particularly when they may need it most. Faculty help provide students with ways of translating between the curriculum and the workplace.

I like this approach, especially in how it moves away from the narrow vocationalism that characterizes many efforts to incorporate career support into the curriculum. But it is only a partial solution.

Even apart from its deeply institutional focus, the model relies heavily on faculty to do the translation work. We have seen this become a problem in many other “across the curriculum” initiatives, where responsibility often gets pushed downward and informally assigned to the most junior faculty member, or to the one person in the department willing or interested enough to take it on.

But the Harvard report suggests the challenge is messier and far more ongoing. Translation is not simply a one-shot matter of helping students connect coursework to careers inside a class. Labor markets themselves are fragmented, unstable, and difficult to interpret. Students pivot, stop out, re-enter, relocate, and continually reassess opportunities and risks.

Translation in that context is not an episodic curricular intervention but an ongoing process of interpretation, navigation, and adaptation. In unstable labor markets, translation increasingly becomes lifelong rather than episodic work.

Mentorship as relational translation

What both reports never fully solve for me is who actually performs this translation over time, especially as students pivot, reassess, stop out, re-enter, and encounter changing labor markets. A third report, this time from Mentor Collective, partially answers that question by reframing translation as relational rather than merely informational. (In the interests of full disclosure, I am participating in a Mentor Collective webinar tomorrow — you should come — but my opinions, as always, are my own.)

Unlike many institutional supports, mentoring relationships are adaptive. Mentors can contextualize advice, personalize guidance, revise interpretations over time, and help students navigate ambiguity rather than simply deliver information. That matters in labor markets characterized by uncertainty, pivots, and unstable pathways.

The report describes this relational translation in several ways.

What is striking about these examples is that mentors are not simply providing career information. They are helping students interpret unfamiliar systems, decode professional expectations, imagine possible futures, and convert aspiration into action. Much of this work involves navigating tacit knowledge and hidden norms that are difficult to fully codify into websites, career modules, or competency frameworks.

Mentors are not only interpreters. They are also cultural brokers, navigators, and translators of institutional and professional norms. And they do this on an ongoing basis. In institutions where support systems are often fragmented and siloed, mentors can also function as continuity figures, helping students connect experiences and navigate across institutional boundaries.

Taken together, these reports suggest that translation is doing much more than simply conveying information about jobs. It is about explaining worlds, navigating systems, and helping students construct identities and possible futures.

Translation does more than convey information

Across these reports, it becomes clear that translation in career success — and the translation being done by mentors, faculty, advisors, and institutions — is performing at least six different kinds of work:

Cognitive work: Helping students make sense of complexity.

Interpretive work: Helping students connect signals to decisions.

Narrative work: Helping students tell coherent stories about themselves.

Emotional work: Reducing intimidation, uncertainty, and paralysis.

Social capital work: Helping students access norms, networks, and hidden rules.

Institutional work: Bridging the gap between formal institutional systems and lived student experience.

Higher education institutions have traditionally been organized around content delivery and information provision. But increasingly, student success depends not just on helping students acquire information, but on helping them construct coherent professional identities and navigate uncertain systems.

Increasingly, student success — especially in career terms — depends on interpretation, navigation, identity construction, contextualization, sense-making, and relationship-building.

What these reports collectively suggest is that translation itself is increasingly becoming institutional infrastructure. Not a supplemental service or optional co-curricular support, but a core institutional function.

Universities historically organized themselves around content delivery, credentialing, and information provision. But in labor markets characterized by uncertainty, pivots, and fragmented pathways, students increasingly need systems that help them interpret, contextualize, and navigate complexity over time. That is a very different institutional challenge.

It is also a huge shift, and AI complicates this further because it dramatically lowers the cost of information access while potentially increasing the need for interpretation and judgment. Higher education increasingly suffers not from an information deficit, but from a translation deficit.

But once translation becomes infrastructure, questions about power, norms, and inequality become unavoidable.

The challenges of translation

Translation may be increasingly critical, but it is important to recognize that it is not always an unalloyed good. Translation in any context is complex, contested, unequal, partial, and political. In student success and career navigation, translators inevitably carry assumptions about what success looks like, what kinds of careers matter, and how professionalism should be performed.

Translators carry their own biases and blind spots

Mentors, faculty, advisors, networks, and AI systems all interpret the world through partial experience. And social capital has a tendency to reproduce itself. The Harvard report hints at this when discussing networks that are narrow and self-reinforcing.

Mentors as translators may steer students toward familiar paths. Faculty may overvalue academic trajectories. Employers may privilege dominant norms. Networks often reproduce class and cultural assumptions.

Translation is never neutral.

Translation risks becoming assimilation

A great deal of translation work in career readiness implicitly involves:

• teaching students how to speak professional-managerial language,

• teaching them institutional norms,

• teaching them how to perform employability.

But this raises difficult questions: whose norms, whose professionalism, and whose communication styles?

This especially matters for:

• first-generation students,

• neurodivergent students,

• working-class students,

• students of color,

• international students.

Sometimes “translation” quietly becomes less about helping students navigate systems and more about helping them adapt to unequal systems rather than changing them.

When organizations outsource translation

Organizations increasingly rely on mentors to provide interpretive and developmental labor that formal systems either cannot or will not provide directly.

When I worked at Gartner, we were assigned mentors — usually from outside our immediate unit — to help us find our feet as analysts. My mentor Kristin was the best mentor imaginable, and she remains so to this day. In her words, “there is no endpoint to mentoring.”

At first, I thought the system was amazing — and to be fair, I got enormous value from it. But over time I also realized it partly allowed the company to absolve itself of the responsibility to provide more formal professional development and institutional support.

Gartner-style mentoring systems can be enormously valuable. But they should not become replacements for broader investments in training, development, and institutional support.

Translation as infrastructure

Higher education has spent years building information systems. But increasingly, student success may depend on building interpretive systems instead.

Those systems need to be intentionally developed and supported. They include:

• mentoring networks of all kinds,

• embedded advising,

• peer interpretation,

• labor market contextualization,

• alumni guidance,

• career translation infrastructure,

• adaptive coaching.

But building interpretive systems also requires understanding how translation actually functions within student success work. If translation is increasingly becoming infrastructure for student success, then institutions need to think much more carefully about who does that translation, whose norms shape it, and who gets left out.

A Highly Opinionated Guide to Eating in Salt Lake City

Morgan’s completely quirky, personal and incomplete food guide to Salt Lake City, for those attending Open edX or just visiting.

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