Understanding Career Readiness in College Student-Athletes and Identifying Associated Personal Qualities

The transition of college student-athletes into postcollege life, and especially the process of obtaining postcollege employment, has become a topic of special interest in collegiate athletics. In recent years, universities, colleges, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have faced renewed pressure to ensure that college student-athletes successfully complete required coursework and have relevant workforce skills (Dent, Sanserino, & Werner, 2014; Ganim, 2014) readying them to enter the job market. Even so, college student-athletes invest a significant amount of time and energy in their sport, detracting from the time they might otherwise commit to exploring and preparing for possible careers (Sandstedt et al., 2004). During their collegiate years, student-athletes spend up to 20 hours per week, the equivalent of a part-time job, in official practice time on their sport (NCAA, 2014a). These hours are mandated by team requirements and often also include compulsory practice throughout much of the summer. Many athletes also spend countless additional hours on unofficial mental preparation, conditioning, and training on their own (Wieberg, 2011) to maintain or improve their performance.

Fewer than 2 percent of college student-athletes in the United States actually go on to play sports at the professional level (NCAA, 2014b). The extensive hours spent in their sport thus rarely translate into postcollege employment, unlike hours other students may spend in part-time employment or internships. Certainly, being prepared for postcollege employment is a concern of most graduating college students. However, given the unique challenge of focusing extensive time and energy on excellent sport performance as well as maintaining strong academic performance (Heird & Steinfeldt, 2013; Parham, 1993), college student-athletes may be at particular risk of not allowing time or energy to ready themselves for the transition into a nonsports career.

While significant attention has been given to professional athletes’ transition out of sports, comparatively little research has focused on the transition of U.S. college student-athletes into postcollege employment (Cummins & O’Boyle, 2015). Given the importance of postcollege employability, one aim of this study is to identify the range of experiences college student-athletes have in terms of their readiness to embark on postcollege employment. A related aim is to identify personal qualities that might be associated with college student-athletes’ career readiness.

Career Readiness Among Students in General

Career readiness is a growing topic of concern at all levels of the education system. The U.S. federal and state governments have been particularly interested in understanding the idea of career readiness among graduating high school students. One element of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, adopted in 2015, encourages states to design K–12 education systems to prepare all students for college and careers (Advance CTE, 2018). States have subsequently developed concrete plans describing the knowledge each high school student should have upon graduation as a potential workforce entrant—these often revolve around rigorous standards in English language arts and mathematics. In higher education, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has recently developed a definition of career readiness for college students. Career readiness is defined as “the attainment and demonstration of requisite competencies that broadly prepare college graduates for a successful transition into the workforce” (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2018). There is an associated list of eight competencies that were developed through consultation with employers that recruit and hire through universities.

The scholarship on career development also sheds some insight into the concept of career readiness, as described by Gysbers (2013). His perspective is that career readiness is best conceptualized holistically as active involvement in shaping and directing one’s life, visualizing and planning for the future, and “assertively mov[ing] toward self-defined, meaningful career futures” (Gysbers, 2013, p. 284). He emphasizes that career readiness is developed through participation in many life roles and multiple settings and that these roles and settings supply events (both planned and unplanned) that affect career readiness. Further, career ready students are thought to have a collection of personal characteristics in common, including proactiveness, resilience, and adaptivity (Gysbers, 2013).

Career Readiness Among College Student-Athletes

The concept of career readiness, per se, has not been studied directly with reference to college student-athletes. Studies of career-related issues for exiting college student-athletes have instead often adopted a somewhat negative view of athletes’ preparedness for careers beyond college. Many such studies focus on issues such as arrested career development and athletes’ sense of uncertainty about the future (Webb, Nasco, Riley, & Headrick, 1998), grief and loss regarding the transition to a nonathletic career postcollege (Lally, 2007), and identity foreclosure (Linnemeyer & Brown, 2010). Examining the extent of career readiness, a more positively oriented concept, in college student-athletes thus helps broaden our understanding of the potential range of experiences in college student-athlete lives in general.

Although career readiness has not been studied directly among athletes, their general transition out of sports has been examined. A systematic review (Park, Lavallee, & Tod, 2013) specifies four main strategies athletes use to facilitate a positive transition out of sports: (1) coping strategies such as staying busy, searching for new interests, and seeking support; (2) preretirement planning activities for nonsports careers; (3) support from close others; and (4) organized support programs that aid the exit from sports. However, the review concerns athletes in general (i.e., high school, college, club, professional, and elite sports) rather than college student-athletes specifically and focuses on their readiness to manage life in general rather than specifically career readiness.

Two recent studies have attempted to redress the lack of research in this area. A study of senior college student-athletes at a Division I university demonstrates alignment between college student-athletes’ major choice and their career aspirations, suggesting that many engaged in important career planning activities (Navarro, 2015). Another study that focused on resources facilitating the transition into postcollege employment identifies key psychosocial factors among exiting male college basketball players (Cummins & O’Boyle, 2015). Those factors were the athletes’ motivation to transition; their perception of the overall college experience; their identification with basketball; their career ambition, preparation, and control; and the perceived challenge of the transition. The fact that those factors are different from the ones identified in the review of athletes in general further underscores the idea that college student-athletes do have some unique concerns unlike other athletes in transition.

The national efforts around promoting career readiness have certainly advanced knowledge about the topic; however, readiness has been conceptualized based on the perspectives of employers and educators rather than students themselves. Gysbers’s (2013) description of career readiness offers a helpful outline of how career readiness might be experienced but was developed with K–12 students in mind and thus may not apply directly to college students. Finally, the concept of career readiness has not been studied with reference to college student-athletes, a population that may be uniquely at risk of lack of readiness. Given the dearth of empirically based research focusing specifically on career readiness as experienced by college student-athletes, this study uses a qualitative approach to explore its nature and applicability for that population. The qualitative approach seems especially suited to such an undertaking, as it allows exploration of concepts from the “ground up” based on the views of college student-athletes themselves. Specifically, this study identifies (1) the features of career readiness and the extent to which college student-athletes demonstrate those features and (2) the personal qualities associated with career readiness among college student-athletes.

Method

Participants

The sample consisted of 18 college-student athletes (9 male, 9 female) at a large, public state university with a Division I athletic program. The mean age of participants was 20.9. The sample had two people who identified as African American, one Asian American, four Hispanic or Latino/Latina, eight Caucasian, and three who identified as being of mixed descent. There were two sophomores, five juniors, eight seniors, and three “fifth-year seniors,” that is, students who were in their fifth year of college and had not exhausted their sports eligibility due to “redshirting.” Sixteen received either a full or a partial scholarship for sports participation; two did not. Three worked part-time during the academic year; 15 did not. Twelve NCAA sports were represented in the sample. Seven participants were members of the university student-athlete leadership council.

Materials

A semistructured interviewing questionnaire containing 21 open-ended questions was used during the interviews. With semistructured interviewing, the interviewer obtains answers to all questions devised for the interview, but the questions are not necessarily asked in the planned order. The goal is to follow the participant’s train of thought and ask questions in an order that seems natural according to the conversation. Additionally, a variety of probes and unplanned follow-up questions were included to allow for greater clarity and depth of responses. The interviews covered topics such as the daily activities of a college student-athlete, attitudes toward and feelings about their sport, memorable successes and periods of struggle in collegiate athletics, general thoughts on their sports performance, plans for the future, thoughts about searching for jobs, activities undergone to prepare for obtaining a job, and thoughts about their own identity. The specific questions asked were designed to elicit a broad range of responses, giving participants freedom to describe whatever they believed was relevant. Sample questions included “Let’s talk about graduating for a moment. What do you envision for your life after college in terms of employment?” and “Tell me about your thoughts about looking for a job. How do you feel about that?”

A high-quality, small digital voice recorder was used to record each interview. A consent form was administered that met American Psychological Association ethical treatment guidelines and indicated that identities would be held in strict confidence.

Procedure

Participants were recruited and subsequently interviewed over a 6-month period through a combination of maximum variation and snowball sampling. The overall goal of the recruitment strategy was to provide maximum variation in terms of gender, sport represented, and leadership experience. As an initial method of recruiting, the researcher attended a university meeting of the student-athlete leadership council and spoke briefly about the project. The leadership council contained 2 representatives from each competitive sport at the university and totaled 42 members. Those who thought they might be interested in participating signed a sheet handed out at the meeting and provided their contact information. The researcher then contacted those potential participants by e-mail, cell phone call, or text message to determine whether they were definitely interested in participating. Student-athletes who ultimately completed an interview were asked to provide referrals of other athletes who did not belong to the leadership council but might be interested in participating. Those referrals were then contacted as well, to help build a varied sample.

All but two interviews were conducted by the lead researcher. A graduate assistant conducted two interviews, as they involved student-athletes who were enrolled in a very large course taught by the lead researcher during the semester the interviews took place. Although the researcher did not personally know those two students, this precaution was taken to control bias. Each student-athlete participated in a one-on-one, face-to-face, in-depth interview. The interviewer met participants in either a small room in the library or a quiet outdoor location on campus. With signed consent by participants, all interviews were recorded and later transcribed professionally. Participants were also provided with a US$25 gift card to a healthy eating establishment on campus to thank them for their time. On average, the interviews lasted 55 min. All athletes in the sample chose pseudonyms; those pseudonyms are used here.

Analyses Strategies

Although the basic and broad description of career readiness was adopted from the work of Gysbers (2013), the specific nature of that construct was left open to allow for a unique representation of it, as it might be described by college student-athletes. Consequently, open coding was initially conducted on all transcripts. Each transcript was read line-by-line, and the text was demarcated into “incidences” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) or meaningful, unique chunks of data, which stand out as worthy of attention. These incidences covered a wide range of information pertaining to participants’ athletic history, current experiences and goals in athletics, how they managed struggles and successes, thoughts about their career plans after graduation, and sense of identity. Each incident was given a label or “code” identifying its essential meaning.

The coding technique of constant comparative analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) was utilized during open coding to compare codes to one another and develop broader categories containing subcategories and subcodes. This technique involves classifying segments of text according to whether they resemble text segments from interviews processed earlier. When a new segment of text resembles others processed earlier, it is placed into the same category as the others and labeled with the same code accordingly; if not, it is placed into a different category and labeled differently. All data categories were refined following numerous iterations and sorting of the various categories and subcategories. As per analysis strategies consistent with grounded theory, the concept of career readiness was identified as the central phenomenon of interest and so was thoroughly explored in terms of identifying its properties and dimensions.

As this was part of a larger study on college student-athletes lives in general, a final coding scheme for all topics addressed in the interview was ultimately developed which contained 26 major categories as well as multiple subcategories and associated codes. One of the 26 major categories was termed “career readiness.” That category contained 20 distinct codes representing various attitudes, cognitive planning strategies, and behaviors that could be considered to represent career readiness, as per Gysbers’s (2013) conceptualization. Those 20 separate codes were then reassembled into a typology, or classification scheme, distinguishing three “levels” of career readiness (see Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Levels of Career Readiness and Accompanying Features.

Level	Features
Career ready	Has clear expression of specific career interests.
	Has clear expression of specialty interest within that career area.
	Expresses clear confidence about ability to conduct career search.
	Has planned specific steps to achieve career goal.
	Has developed network of job contacts.
	Has developed a recent resume.
	Has developed references for recommendations.
	Has begun pursuing specific job opportunities or internships.
Semi-career ready	Has expressed some career interests but specifics may be vague.
	Has general plan about how to achieve career goal.
	Only somewhat confident about ability to conduct job search.
	May or may not have resume; could be outdated or underdeveloped.
	Has identified possible job contacts but not yet made contact.
	Has explored general possibilities for job opportunities or internships but not yet sought them out.
Minimally or not career ready	Specific career interests are unknown.
	Lack of confidence and/or anxious about ability to conduct career search.
	Has not planned steps to achieve career goal.
	No behavior directed toward developing job contacts.
	No behavior directed toward preparing for job search (e.g., no resume, no database search of possible jobs).
	No behavior directed toward attaining internship or relevant job experience.

The strategy of analytic induction (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998) was then implemented to explore features that might distinguish career ready athletes from those who were minimally or not career ready. Analytic induction is often used as a way to identify typical patterns or universal laws in the data (Katz, 1983; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Specifically, for purposes of this study, efforts were made to identify common personal qualities held by those who were identified as career ready as well as common personal qualities held by those who were not. The personal qualities that were examined came from the coding categories (other than the category of “career readiness”) in the overall list of 26 major categories. The process required formulating tentative hypotheses about the connections between various concepts in the data and, then, according to analytic induction, studying cases in sequential order to explore their fit with the hypothesis. If one case in the data fits a tentative hypothesis, the researcher moves to the next case to explore its fit. If a case is encountered that does not fit the tentative hypothesis, the hypothesis must be slightly reformulated and tested again. This process continues until the hypothesis has been “adequately tested” (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998, p. 139). The aim is to amass as many cases as possible that fit the pattern. A search for negative cases, or cases that essentially “disprove” the emerging hypothesis, was also conducted; this is an important verification strategy in analytic induction. Taylor and Bogdan (1998) point out that analytic induction and the search for negative cases have the advantage of requiring researchers to repeatedly refine and qualify propositions so they apply as broadly as possible, though perhaps not universally. Consequently, a few negative cases can be thought of as akin to “outliers,” whereas too many negative cases suggest the hypothesis should be discredited.

Several tentative hypotheses were thus developed, tested, and sometimes discarded with the same main question in mind, that is, which personal qualities were consistently associated with the group of career ready athletes and, conversely, which were consistently associated with those who were minimally or not career ready? The results discuss only those propositions for which there was clear support, that is, there were clear patterns of associations between career readiness and the associated concepts.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness has been described as the idea that audiences must be persuaded that “the findings of the inquiry are worth paying attention to, worth taking account of” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 290). A similar idea is integrity, which requires that a researcher has “concerns for the quality, for the value, for the honesty of their work” (p. 219). Several strategies typically employed to ensure trustworthiness were used here. An audit trail was maintained, consisting of all interview transcripts and recordings, postinterview field notes, coding schemes and the sequenced revisions of those coding schemes, analytic and procedural memos, and an informal reflexive journal. In addition, offers were made to all participants to review and edit their transcripts. Two participants requested copies of their transcripts, though none ultimately asked to remove information. Prolonged engagement was achieved by listening to each audio record of the transcripts to ensure it was accurately transcribed and to understand the tone of voice. In addition, each transcript was read in full at least twice prior to coding it; this activity helped ensure that the data were processed not only over an extended period of time but also at a deep and more holistic level. Finally, in terms of transparency, it should be noted that the author was not a college student-athlete herself, though has teenage family members who are involved in competitive athletics at the junior high and high school level.

Results

Career Readiness

There was considerable variation in the sample with regard to the extent of career readiness. Given the codes that emerged to represent varying features of career readiness (see Table 1), a criterion was set that to be identified as career ready, semi-career ready, or minimally or not career ready, a participant could be missing no more than two codes in a specific category or could have no more than two codes belonging to another category. A case-by-case examination was conducted for each participant, noting the specific career readiness codes each exhibited for each. Seven participants were consequently classified as career ready, three were semi-career ready, and eight were minimally or not career ready.

Ace, a soccer player in his junior year of college, is a typical example of college student-athlete who exhibits career readiness. Although he dreams of playing professional soccer, he has simultaneously developed solid and well-explicated career interests and has created a specific set of steps to help him achieve that goal. He explains:

Well, there’s a couple of dreams here. The number one is playing soccer at the next level. Number two is, I’m actually trying to achieve a biomedical degree right now. And that’s not any fun but, I actually love my really difficult courses. It’s like, if I’m going to be in college, why not push myself as hard as I can. So, if I see that soccer’s not working out, I’m going to start applying to as many med schools as I can. {Any particular kind of medicine?} I would love to actually be a knee surgeon. Obviously, though, you can’t just want to do that and then you’re going to do it. I can’t really volunteer my time at a hospital or doctor’s office, which looks great on a resume, because of soccer. That leaves me to summer. And during the summer I need to make money. So, I’m going to intern at local former military base with a big company that pays very well. And then on the side I’ll have time to intern at a hospital, which will be unpaid, but it needs to be done.

Carson, a fifth-year senior women’s softball player, also has clear career plans, which include becoming a ski instructor in the winter months, a camp counselor in the summer, and ultimately being a representative for a ski equipment company. As is typical of the career ready participants, she feels quite confident about her ability to pursue this path.

I feel pretty prepared. I feel like I won’t—I mean, God has what he has planned for me, but I feel like I won’t face much that I feel like I can’t get through. I feel like I’ve been pushed pretty hard, even with my personal stuff and then softball on top of it, and I just feel like I’ve grown and really developed my strength and am just really confident in who I am, and I just feel like I can endure whatever kind of comes my way in that search.

Kevin, a senior basketball player, exhibits similarly strong, though different aspects of career readiness. He would like to earn a master’s degree in speech pathology but knows that entry into such a graduate program is competitive, so he needs to first gain some work experience. He has taken several proactive steps, by connecting with university career support services, by revising his resume and preparing for interviews, and beginning a search for internships. He says:

I was probably going to try [for that] internship first, and I’ve been Googling different internships I can do too, so it can look good on my resume. I’ve also been talking—we have a coach who works in the Student Athlete Resource Center, and I’ve talked to him about building and working on my resume and trying to help me. I’ve also been talking to people about resumes and how to do mock interviews and things like that.

Thoughts about their possible work futures and associated preparations were markedly different among athletes who were classified as minimally or not career ready. One such athlete was Giselle, a women’s volleyball player in her junior year. When asked about her career plans following graduation, her response indicates that her plans are unclear:

[Big sigh]. I really don’t have any set plans. I’m kind of looking into grad school. Like I know I’m smart and I think I got the grades for the first time last year to be like oh, maybe I can go to grad school. And then I have family that works for the NSA so they’re very pro-government, like I should work for the government. So I don’t really—I think working for the government would be nice but I don’t know really what I want to do in there. It’s just they push it like I’ve got to go for it and—but I just really want to travel.

Athletes with a similar lack of clear plans also tended to struggle with feeling confident about their ability to conduct a career search. Willow, a women’s golfer in the spring season of her senior year, was one such participant. She also describes the realization that she has enacted very few behaviors to prepare for such a search.

It’s a little scary to think of because I mean there’s a lot of options and a lot of ways you can go and so for me, it’s like I don’t really know exactly what I want to do besides golf. If the golf world doesn’t work out, I’m really confused as to like what I should do outside of golf. {What have you done so far to be prepared for looking for work, if anything?} Not much [laughs]. Because I’ve—I’ve just been trying to stay focused more on what I’m doing now, as in focusing more on my sport, so I haven’t really thought a whole lot about what I need to do to prepare for the future for when I do graduate and all that.

Some, such as Lo, a senior women’s volleyball player, remark upon the complications of preparing for such a search while simultaneously fulfilling their role as an athlete. When asked how prepared she feels, she says,

That, I feel like would be harder than—like no matter what job I get, I feel like just trying to find a job, that would be hard. ‘Cause I kind of already went through that process—over the summer I tried to get a job when I was back home, but I didn’t get hired because I wasn’t going to be there long enough, ‘cause I have to come back early for pre-season.

Propositions: Personal Qualities Associated With Career Readiness

As noted earlier, a systematic search for patterns across cases was conducted using the strategy of analytic induction. This search was aimed at identifying personal qualities that distinguished career ready student-athletes from those who were less career ready. Given Taylor and Bogdan’s (1998) considerations about adequately testing propositions, a criterion was established that if more than two cases in the data did not align with a tentative proposition, that proposition was discarded as not demonstrating a clear pattern.

Four clear patterns were uncovered while utilizing this criterion. Those who were classified as career ready tended to show optimism, resilience, adaptivity, and recognized that sports and work required some similar skills, knowledge, and personal strengths—referred to in brief as recognizing “crossover skills.” Similarly, those who were classified as minimally or not career ready tended to lack optimism, portrayed themselves as having little resilience or ability to adapt to new circumstances, and did not recognize the potential for utilizing crossover skills.

Optimism

Optimism is an attributional style in which a person has positive expectations about succeeding in the present and future (Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007). Optimism was common in the group of athletes who were career ready. Michelle a sophomore gymnast verbalizes a typical comment that it helps for her to stay “positive”:

I do think I’m fairly optimistic and positive, as a person, just in general. And I think I’ve kind of always been like that but it’s definitely gotten better being in sports and being around other people who are like-minded because it does get hard, and so I think that’s what I like to see myself as—someone who’s like super happy and lifts other people up.

Jaxon, a baseball player in his junior year, similarly remarks:

I try to keep a level head and I try to keep a positive attitude towards everything because, I mean, something could happen, you know, ten minutes from now that I’m going to have no control over. So it’s all about what’s going to happen, and like I said if you have a negative head towards it, yeah, it happens to me every once in a while but you have to find it within yourself to, you know, stay positive, think positive through any situation that is thrown at you…it keeps me going through the day.

The lack of optimism among those who show little career readiness was also apparent. Those who lacked a belief in their ability to succeed in the future often considered the issue in terms of sports. For instance, Travis, a baseball player in his senior season who recently came back from a shoulder injury, doubts his ability to play in the future. He does not feel optimistic about his future, despite his status a nationally, highly ranked player and likely Major League Baseball draft pick.

I mean, I think it all just depends on my shoulder, really, like if my shoulder holds up, because coming back from a shoulder surgery isn’t—isn’t very likely, I guess. I mean, like, a lot of people do it but you’re usually not the same after a shoulder injury.

Willow, the woman’s golfer described earlier and also in her senior season, did not feel at all ready to take on a career postcollege. Moreover, her recent struggles on the golf field have magnified her tendency to see things in a negative light. She explains:

I struggled fall season, I would say. And it’s very discouraging because it just makes—like, for me, I don’t know what to do in order to improve, and I felt like I was doing everything that I needed to do but I was not improving. I was actually going backwards. Lately, I’ve been trying to get my mental game down—I guess I’m a little too hard on myself. I’m very critical of myself. I’m judgmental of the things I do. Like, after a tournament, I’m very hard on my performance and it’s—in a sense it’s like I’m only looking at like the negative—what didn’t work out for me, instead of trying to look and see like what I did do—like what was positive and what can I take from it.

Resilience

Resilience refers to the capacity to bounce back from adversity, conflict, and failure, as well as from positive events such as increased responsibility (Youssef & Luthans, 2007). In student-athletes’ lives, they are often called upon to be resilient in order to effectively handle a performance lapse or slump, longer term difficulties with their team, or even when coming back to the next game or season after a record-breaking performance. Resilience was a common characteristic in the group of athletes who were career ready. Marshall, a fifth-year senior women’s soccer player, explains that she has developed resilience both on and off the field.

I felt like I became more resilient in some situations because we had off the field problems, as well, as a team. There was some stuff going on that we had to deal with, with [a sports-related administrator]. So, mentally, it made me start, like, it made me stronger having to deal with teammates that don’t like you, and you’re trying to do the right thing, and then, also, now, your team isn’t doing well. So, I just felt like I became, I’ve completed it all so I just felt like I was a lot stronger for that.

Jaxon, the baseball player, explains that sometimes resilience means forgiving oneself, putting aside thoughts of past failures, and focusing instead on the future. He explains:

When you make an error, it’s like a snowball effect with stuff like that. You make an error and you’re, like, “okay, please don’t hit me the ball again, please don’t hit me the ball again!” And in baseball, the ball will find you if you think that way. So every time something like that happens if I’m having that type of day, you know, I’m on the mound and I just can’t throw it over the plate I just step off the mound, take my hat off, take a deep breath and I “flush it” like my old coach told me to. Let it go, and it’s gone. You know what I mean? And that’s the mental part of it. You have to learn to let things go.

Those who were less resilient were also less career ready. One such athlete was MJ, a senior year men’s golfer who hopes to become a professional golfer. Although he has some plans for how to accomplish that goal, he has not explored any other career options. He remarks on how he often struggles with resilience as related to golf. He describes one tournament in which he had a particularly difficult outing; he wasn’t able to pull himself out of playing poorly:

For whatever reason I got to that tournament and I just—wasn’t playing well. I was just right back to where I was before. {So how did you handle it, when that happened?} Just kind of brushed it off. {While it was happening?} Not while it was happening. While it was happening, I was extremely frustrated. And I just—I kept getting in my own way, you know, trying to play so well and trying to not play bad, that it just kept going bad. {How aware of the problem were you?} I was extremely aware of it—we played three rounds and by the third round I was extremely aware. But I still couldn’t hit good shots.

Adaptivity

Adaptivity refers to an adaptive style of interacting with the present (Gysbers, 2013); it involves effectively adjusting to new conditions and changing one’s own behaviors to deal effectively with various situations. In some ways, adaptivity is similar to flexibility, but the distinction is that adaptivity connotes an individual making conscious choices to handle people and situations in a way that is healthy and beneficial to himself or herself. Ace, the soccer player with plans for medical school, describes how he handles new situations such having moved to another state for college:

How I’ve dealt with transitions in the past is that I love it. I always love something new. I wouldn’t mind going to grad school or med school on the opposite coast, you know. I love new life transitions like this mainly because I’ve just been thriving in it. I love making whole new friends and all that kind of stuff.

Kevin, the basketball player with plans to enter graduate school and eventually become a speech pathologist, also describes his ability to handle new circumstances:

Yeah, I would say I’m pretty good with adapting ‘cause growing up I moved a lot so I was used to change. So I feel like I’m pretty good at adapting to change and yeah, I think I’ll be able to transition pretty well. I like change. {How come?} Well even just like the basic things, like driving here. I took a new route I’ve never taken before. I just love exploring, trying new things so I enjoy change.

On the other hand, some participants did not feel as comfortable with adaptivity. Those were typically the participants who were also less career ready. Some didn’t like change at all, others described needing to handle change slowly. Lo, a women’s volleyball player about to graduate, was one such person:

I feel like the transition from high school to college at first was, it wasn’t easy but it was like doable, like we all went through that phase where you were homesick. Once I started to get like in a rhythm and had a schedule and that structure I was fine. But now I feel like since I’m not going to have volleyball and I’m going to be done with school soon, I’m not going to have that structure. I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do. I feel like at first when something changes for me it’s kind of hard at first.

Crossover skills

A final quality distinguishing those who were career ready from those who were not was the degree to which they recognized overlap between the interpersonal skills, knowledge, and personal strengths they obtain or develop from their sport and those required of the work world. Carson, a fifth-year senior women’s softball player who had prepared actively for her future career, was a participant who clearly saw that crossover:

This sport has given me so much that I could have never imagined. We don’t have much to put on a resume because this is, like, our life and we don’t really have time for jobs at all. But I don’t think any workplace would have taught me the things that I’ve learned being on this team and being a college athlete. Just organization, time management—making time for everything. I know how to accommodate with everything.

John a senior football player with plans to enter the firefighters’ academy says:

Our new head coach is teaching life lessons that are going to carry on for the rest of our life. And we go into the professional world, with the work ethic that we have—if I want to get that promotion, I know I have to put in the work and do it better than the person in front of me. You have to show up on time every day, get your stuff done at a high level. You have to stay disciplined. You have to be responsible. You have to be mentally tough. Some days you don’t feel good. You don’t want to come, but if you don’t put in the work, you’re going to lose your job. So I think that will transfer over to the work world.

Others in the sample described additional areas of overlap including managing conflict, handling adversity, developing strong communication skills, and showing passion for one’s activities.

On the other hand, athletes who showed little career readiness did not overtly recognize a connection between the skills and personal qualities they developed in their sport and a career future outside of sports. For instance, Alex, a men’s tennis player in his final season, muses about such a connection. In his mind, the connection is vague, associated with both financial stability and the goal of success. Unlike the more career ready athletes, he does not identify specific skills or personal strengths that might be used in both domains.

I think it’s just being able to figure out how you’re going to be able to sustain yourself, if that makes sense, financially and so on. Yeah, I mean that’s the big—just figuring out the kind of things you need to work on in order to get to that level and succeed.

Willow, the senior golfer with no clear career plans, also has a hard time seeing the overlap. After some consideration, she says she will have a better understanding of how to handle stress “out there in the real world,” but does not otherwise have specific ideas.

Stability of patterns

The general stability of the patterns described here indicate their relatively high degree of usefulness in portraying the personal qualities which distinguish career ready college student-athletes from those who are less career ready. However, data patterns are often fuzzy around the edges; fortunately, a qualitative approach allows for that fuzziness. Patterns for the three student-athletes who were identified as semi-career ready were not quite as apparent. Each struggled with optimism, resilience, adaptivity, and/or crossover skills, but there was not consistency across the three participants as to which ones they struggled with. Further, the qualitative approach encourages pursuing situations in which participants push the boundaries which demarcate patterns or, in some ways, act as “outliers.” Gio, a soccer player in his junior year, was one such boundary pusher. While he exhibited optimism, resilience, and adaptivity and recognized crossover skills, he was only minimally career ready. Although he hopes to play professional soccer, if he were to work in a nonsports capacity, his main thought is:

I kind of would have a backup plan. In case it [professional sports] doesn’t work out. My uncle, he came over here from Mexico and he has a type of like, kind of a construction company. But he needs his contractor’s license in order to be able to make more money and just be, like—have a better company, I guess you could say. So if soccer weren’t to work out, I’d help him in the aspect of getting his contractor’s license.

The specifics pertaining to this career choice are very vague, and Gio does not have a résumé, job contacts, or a job search underway in case his plans for professional soccer do not work out. He was a unique case in this study, making it difficult to generalize from his situation. However, he suggests that his experience as a first-generation student is related to his lack of readiness:

Well, I mean, this is kind of just an excuse, but like I’m a first-generation student. And I just—I don’t know how everything really works. I mean, I had no idea, like, how the whole general education thing and like the whole classes thing even worked until I came to college and kind of talked to advisors. And honestly, I didn’t understand until probably last semester how it all worked out. But as far as the resume, I mean, I’m not—as far as here at school, what to do, I’m not—not sure.

Discussion

The various levels and accompanying features of career readiness identified in this study align with Gysbers’s (2013) ideas that career readiness includes visualizing the future (e.g., expressions of specific career interests and specialties) and actively shaping one’s life (e.g., planning steps to achieve career goals) as well as behavioral steps (e.g., developing job contacts, resumes, references, pursuing job opportunities, or internships). The college student-athletes in this study illustrate a wide range of career readiness. Some are clearly well on their way to carving out a career postcollege. Although the career ready student-athletes sometimes still maintain dreams of becoming professional athletes, they also have parallel dreams of entering specific professions or graduate studies. Their ideas are clear, or what is often termed “crystallized,” and they have demonstrated a number of key behaviors to help make that plan a reality. Such athletes tend to feel largely confident about their ability to conduct an effective job search and ultimately achieve their goals. That feature is similar to the construct of career search self-efficacy (Solberg, Good, Fischer, Brown, & Nord, 1995), an important prelude to job search behaviors. Other athletes are in markedly different circumstances. Those who are minimally or not career ready often express vague interests about the future, sometimes contemplating a wide array of job possibilities with no clear direction; others have not really contemplated the issue in any depth. Minimally or not career ready athletes typically indicate they have not engaged in any behaviors related to securing work upon graduation nor do they typically have a resume or job contacts. Often, they express having spent a large amount of time on their sport and given little thought to what comes next. In addition, they typically find the idea of looking for a job to be somewhat anxiety-provoking.

The additional analyses demonstrate that career readiness is also related to four other key qualities in these participants: optimism, resilience, adaptivity, and the recognition of overlapping skills, knowledge, and personal strengths required for sports and work. Those who were identified as career ready were more likely to have those personal qualities. Those who were identified as minimally or not career ready were less likely to have those qualities.

In terms of Gysbers’s (2013) postulations about career readiness, two of the qualities he suggests are common among career ready students emerged in this sample—resilience and adaptivity. In addition, two other key qualities emerged—optimism and the recognition of the existence of crossover skills. By its nature, this final quality of recognizing overlapping skills between sports and work is unique to college student-athletes; consequently, it distinguishes this population from college students in general. Given the extraordinary amount of time student-athletes spend in their sport while in college, it seems reasonable that in order to feel career ready, they would need to intellectually connect the domain of sports, in which they have invested so much energy, to their imagined life after graduation.

Limitations of the Study

Although this study has offered an attempt to better understand the features of career readiness and the personal qualities associated with career readiness as they apply to college student-athletes, some limitations must be noted. The sample size is relatively small, though typical of qualitative research. However, this small sample could limit the generalizability of the findings. Further, though the sample was quite varied in demographic characteristics and type of sport played, it was drawn from only one Division I university. College student-athletes from other universities and/or other NCAA divisions may have differing experiences. Finally, with regard to the personal qualities associated with career readiness, this study focuses on internal psychological qualities. While adding to the broader body of literature on transitions in general among college student-athletes, it does not focus on other important characteristics, which prior research has identified as facilitating the exit of college student-athletes, such as developing sources of social support or practicing coping strategies such as seeking new interests. It is plausible that those factors, too, could add to a sense of career readiness among college-student athletes.

Implications for Practitioners and Future Research

There is a clear range of experience regarding college student-athletes’ preparedness to embark on careers after graduation; in this study, participants were approximately evenly split between those who were career ready and those who were not. As would be expected, some fell in between or were semi-career ready. This finding alone is worthy of attention, as it counters much of the literature on college student-athletes, which suggest that often, college student-athletes experience identity foreclosure, grief, confusion, and arrested career development rather than feel prepared to enter postcollege work. Career counseling practitioners cannot assume a lack of readiness in college student-athletes nor assume a desire to ignore career readiness.

The data also suggest several specific psychological capacities that may act as resources for athletes to draw upon in order to become career ready. This finding is in line with the growing body of research in positive organizational behavior focused on the notion of positive psychological capital or PsyCap (Luthans et al., 2007). PsyCap refers to a cluster of four positive capacities—efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience—that together produce positive outcomes including improved employee work performance (Avey, Nimnicht, & Pigeon, 2010) and goal orientation (Luthans, Avey, Avolio, Norman, & Combs, 2006). In this study, two of the positive capacities identified in PsyCap—optimism and resilience—are associated with the group of career ready college student-athletes. Given the potency of such positive capacities in predicting attitudes and behaviors in the work domain, their relevance to college student-athletes concerned with readiness to enter the workforce seems reasonable.

From a practical standpoint, there is evidence that people can be trained to demonstrate more optimism and resilience. Relatively brief training interventions result in improved optimism and resilience among employees from many industries (Luthans, Avey, & Patera, 2008). Similar training programs could also be devised for college student-athletes, with the hope of ultimately fostering career readiness. It may be that adaptivity is trainable as well. College student-athletes have many opportunities to practice optimism, resilience, and adaptivity, such as when handling losing seasons, performance struggles, integrating new teammates, getting to know new coaches, and managing travel for competition. Identifying effective training methods for improving upon those positive capacities would be excellent grounds for future research; college athletic departments or career services personnel could then pursue those trainings most productively.

The importance of college student-athletes recognizing parallels between their collegiate athletic experiences and the world of work, or crossover skills, should not be overlooked. This quality, too, seems inherently trainable. One program called the Positive Transitions Sports Retirement Model (Stankovich, Meeker, & Henderson, 2001) has experimented with this kind of training. It teaches athletes how to use crossover skills such as goal setting and effective communications to build confidence beyond the sports domain. The program resulted increases in career maturity and confidence in career decision-making skills, though it is not aimed directly at career readiness. It is notable that several athletes in the current study described their coaches as regularly teaching athletes about not only how to approach their sport but also their lives as a whole. Such coaches emphasize that the knowledge, skills, and qualities student-athletes develop in sports will carry over in a positive way to their work and personal lives. Although this approach might be considered informal training provided by coaches, it could easily be converted into formal training programs for all college student-athletes.

Given the time and energy devoted to their sport, college student-athletes are distinctively situated in their college experience and may consequently experience career readiness in a unique manner. However, exploring career readiness as it applies to college students in general is also important grounds for future research. It may be that the specific features of career readiness described in this study apply equally to college students in general, and/or additional relevant features may be uncovered. Moreover, further exploration of the personal qualities associated with career readiness is warranted. With regard to crossover skills specifically, college students in general may find that certain work or academic environments they engage in prior to graduation offer better opportunities than others to develop key crossover skills. Such connections, as well as the associations between career readiness and optimism, resilience, and adaptivity, should also be explored among college students in general.