Unpacking Cannexus 2026 - Part 1: Career Development in Post-Secondary: Two Perspectives, One System Under Pressure

As a private organization working at the intersection of talent and the systems designed to support it, I often describe our work as sitting in the middle of a triangle.

One point is employers, grappling with attraction, development, retention, and succession in volatile labour markets. Another is post-secondary education: colleges, universities, career colleges, and private training providers delivering everything from credentials to self-directed learning. The third is community and not-for-profit organizations focused on labour market attachment, things like reskilling, upskilling, employment supports, and professional development.

At the centre of that triangle are people at all career stages: Early career, Mid-career, Returning to work, Reinventing themselves in career, and/or Navigating career transition. 

Alongside them sit organizations like ours, built around a clear aim: helping people build meaningful careers. We use mentorship as a core lever and work with post-secondary institutions, not-for-profits, and employers to strengthen their career development capacity, confidence, and connections within the systems surrounding individuals.

From this vantage point, I’ve been reflecting on the conversations, both formal and informal, from Cannexus 2026.

One theme continues to surface: career development in post-secondary education is experienced very differently depending on where you stand in the system. As a student (who landed in a co-op program almost by accident), I never once visited the career centre. I don’t remember it playing a visible role in my experience.

Today, much of our work involves complementing career development teams in post-secondary and parallel roles in the not-for-profit sector. Sometimes we reinforce similar messages from a different voice. Other times, we add capacity where teams are under-resourced or where expertise lies in program delivery rather than career development itself.

What follows draws on insights from the CACEE Career Centre 2025 Survey (to get a copy of the survey, reach out to CACEE), Brainstorm Strategy Group’s 2025 student research, and our own observations from this work.

The bottom line: career centre staff and students are operating within the same constraints, but from fundamentally different vantage points.

What Career Centre Staff Are Experiencing: Escalation, Constraint, and Triage

From the staff perspective, the story is one of rising demand under tightening constraints. The CACEE Career Centre 2025 Survey shows student usage increasing from a historical 10–15% to closer to 33%, all while staffing levels and budgets remain flat or decline

It is not just more students. It is different needs. Fewer are coming for discrete technical support, like résumé reviews. More are seeking:

• reassurance and confidence building

• a sense of belonging

• help navigating uncertainty and ambiguity

• support making sense of identity, direction, and choice

This shift was reinforced in a keynote by career development professional Sonny KH Wong, M.Ed., RP , who shared student survey data exploring when students prefer accessing career centres and when they would rather use AI. So what happens when demand grows, budgets shrink, and staff capacity does not expand?

Many centres are adapting in pragmatic ways:

• relying more heavily on tiered service models

• shifting from 1:1 appointments to group programming

• narrowing partnerships to those deemed most strategic, including faculty and select external vendors

• working around rather than through slow institutional systems, particularly when adopting technology, including AI

If I put on my “design” hat for a moment, when we build career development or mentorship programs, we always start with two questions: What does success look like, and for whom?

If the needs of the end user are not central to both design and delivery, the program will not work, no matter how well intentioned. That is the lens I bring to this. For career centre leaders navigating these pressures, I suspect you are asking similar questions. Brainstorm Strategy Group’s 2025 student survey offers an interesting counterpoint, highlighting both divergence and common ground between staff assumptions and student experience.

What Students Are Reporting: Clarity, Anxiety, and Missed Touch Points

Students are not experiencing the system as overstretched. They are experiencing it as fragmented, uneven, and often invisible. Brainstorm Strategy Group’s research shows students are highly pragmatic. Preparing for a job or career is their top reason for attending post-secondary education, and career clarity is closely linked to retention.

The data reinforces this:

• 63 percent want career planning embedded into curriculum

• 82 percent believe institutions should invest more in helping them discover career interests

• Nearly 45 percent want additional career planning support

Yet only 40 percent report accessing career services. That disconnect matters.

Students are juggling significant pressures. Finances are their top stressor. They report fewer extracurricular and informal learning opportunities, limited professional networks, and inconsistent exposure to employer connections. Fewer than half say a faculty member has initiated a career conversation. Formal mentorship remains limited, with only about 15 percent seeking guidance from a career mentor.

Some of the gap may be definitional. Students may not associate attending a job fair with using career services. They may not label a relationship with a faculty member as mentorship, even when mentorship elements are present. Timing is also a factor. In running hundreds of programs with clients, we have seen a consistent pattern: if students do not see the immediate value of career development activities, they will not engage. Efforts introduced too early, or without clear relevance, often fail to gain traction.

At the same time, today’s students are signalling a desire for more structured and integrated support. Front-line career centre staff already understand this reality. When you meet students where they are and design multiple entry points into career development, the impact is significant.

As I consider these two perspectives and how we support post-secondary institutions in creating meaningful touch points, I am reminded of a conversation after Cannexus several years ago. A seasoned career centre leader shared their guiding design question: How can we make career exploration structurally unavoidable for all students?

That feels like the right question, paired with another: Are we designing those touch points in ways students actually want to engage with?

The opportunity now is not to defend the current model, but to redesign it together. 

What would shift if we treated career development as core infrastructure rather than an optional service? 

Let’s compare notes, test new models, and share what works.