Measured Insights, June 2026

The Editor’s Note

The world of work as we know it is changing. Strong reading and math skills remain foundational to success in college, careers, and life, but alone, they are no longer enough. Employers also value soft skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and resilience. Together, these skills enable students not only to perform tasks, but also to lead teams, navigate challenges, and build meaningful relationships. 

Students who develop strong academic and interpersonal skills side by side are better prepared to succeed in college, careers, and life. That’s why having the right measures in place is imperative—so educators can understand the reading and math abilities students need to be successful in specific careers and use those insights to develop pathways that help students achieve their goals. 

[Research] Career Readiness Requires Reading Readiness

Developed in collaboration with the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Doctoral Student and Graduate Research Assistant, Yuzi Gao, PhD in Education (Culture, Curriculum, and Teacher Education)

College and career readiness is often discussed in terms of graduation requirements, employability skills, or preparation for postsecondary pathways. But one important piece of career readiness is sometimes less visible: whether students are prepared to read and understand the written materials they will encounter in future careers.

Why Text Complexity Matters for Career Readiness
In their study titled “Career Readiness: An Analysis of Text Complexity for Occupational Reading Materials,” published in The Journal of Educational Research in 2016, Wei, Cromwell, and McClarty directly examined this issue by analyzing the reading demands of materials commonly used across a range of occupations. The authors situated their study within the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the broader college and career readiness agenda, noting that students need to be able to read increasingly complex texts in order to be prepared for both college and workplace demands.

To investigate the reading demands of different careers, the researchers selected occupations from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, which classifies jobs into five zones based on the level of education, training, and experience required. Zone 1 jobs require little or no preparation (e.g., cashier, crossing guard), while Zone 5 jobs typically require extensive preparation, such as advanced degrees (e.g., statistician, optometrist).

The researchers:

• Selected 10 job types from each of the five O*NET job zones.
• Analyzed three occupational texts for each job type.
• Examined 150 occupational texts in total.
• Included materials such as employee handbooks, training guides, policy manuals, rules, and reference documents.
• Used the Reading Maturity Metric, a text complexity measure developed by Pearson, to estimate the quantitative complexity of each text.

What the Study Found
Wei and colleagues found that career-related texts often require substantial reading proficiency. Across all five job zones, the average text complexity was within or above the Common Core college- and career-readiness range. Importantly, this was true even for occupations requiring little formal preparation beyond high school. In other words, students who do not plan to pursue a four-year college degree may still need to read complex workplace documents.

The authors also found that text complexity generally increased as job zones increased. Occupations requiring more education and preparation tended to involve more complex texts. However, one of the more striking findings was the degree of variation within the lower job zones. Some texts associated with Zone 1 occupations (jobs requiring only a high school diploma or brief on the job training) had complexity levels as high as texts written for Zone 5 professionals. The authors themselves described this overlap as surprising. Much of this variability in lower zone texts appears to stem from authors who did not consider the reading level of their intended audience, resulting in unnecessarily complex language that could likely be simplified without losing meaning. Taken together, these findings complicate the assumption that complex reading is mainly a college readiness issue. Instead, reading complex texts appears to be a career readiness issue as well.

Reading Demands in a Professional Preparation Context
Although Wei et al.’s study was published nearly a decade  ago, it remains highly relevant because it directly connects occupational reading materials, text complexity, the Common Core State Standards, and career readiness. More recent research helps show how these reading demands appear in specific career-preparation pathways.

Orellana, Silva, and Iglesias’s (2024) study provides one such example. The researchers examined reading comprehension and text demands in teacher education programs in Chile, using data from 72 female students enrolled across three programs at a private university. Unlike Wei and colleagues who used the Reading Maturity Metric to analyze occupational texts, Orellana et al. used Spanish Lexile®-based measures to compare students’ reading comprehension levels with the complexity of required course readings.

The authors found a clear mismatch between students’ reading levels and program text demands:

• Students entered their programs with average reading levels around 930L, while first-term course texts ranged from approximately 1200L to 1250L.
• Reading comprehension made a modest but significant contribution to predicting first-term academic performance, even after accounting for admission scores and high school grades.
• A small subset of students improved by about 206 Lexile points by their final term, but their reading levels still remained below the complexity of assigned texts, which had increased to approximately 1490L.
• Because only 14 students retook the assessment, the progress findings should be interpreted with caution. The authors also noted that the COVID-19 pandemic likely suppressed gains, so progress under typical conditions may be greater than reported. 

The qualitative findings added further context: students reported spending limited time on academic or leisure reading, and faculty recognized students’ reading challenges but had few concrete strategies for addressing them. Overall, the study shows that students preparing for a literacy-intensive career may be expected to engage with texts that exceed their measured reading levels, making reading readiness an important part of career preparation.

Implications for Educators
These two studies suggest that career readiness depends not only on students’ exposure to career pathways or technical skills, but also on their ability to comprehend the complex texts required in postsecondary study, training, and work.

Preparing students for careers therefore requires attention to reading development across grade levels and subject areas. Students need opportunities to build:

• Reading stamina
• Academic and career-specific vocabulary
• Background knowledge
• Strategies for understanding complex informational and technical texts
• Experience with authentic workplace or profession-related materials

For educators, the implication is clear: career readiness and reading readiness should not be treated as separate goals. Whether students pursue college, technical training, or direct entry into the workforce, they are likely to encounter written materials that require careful comprehension. Helping students engage with complex, career-relevant texts can make literacy instruction more meaningful while also supporting their preparation for life after high school.

Relevance for the Lexile® Framework for Reading
Together, these studies highlight the value of the Lexile Framework for Reading as a universally valid scale for supporting career readiness. By placing readers and texts on the same scale, the Lexile framework helps educators identify gaps like the one Orellana et al. observed between students’ reading levels and the demands of their course readings, monitor progress toward the reading levels students will need, and select career-relevant texts that gradually stretch students toward postsecondary and workplace demands. Wei et al.’s evidence that career-related texts often reach or exceed the college- and career-readiness range, even in occupations requiring little formal preparation, reinforces a core principle of the Lexile framework: matching readers with text requires careful attention to the demands of real-world materials, making career readiness and reading readiness mutually reinforcing goals. 

Reference

Orellana, P., Silva, M., & Iglesias, V. (2024). Students’ reading comprehension level and reading demands in teacher education programs: The elephant in the room? Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1324055. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1324055

Wei, H., Cromwell, A. M., & McClarty, K. L. (2016). Career readiness: An analysis of text complexity for occupational reading materials. The Journal of Educational Research, 109(3), 266–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.945149

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