CICA releases new national Benchmarking Resource for career development services
The Career Industry Council of Australia (CICA) has today released the Career Development Service Benchmarking Resource, a national self-assessment tool for reviewing the quality of career development services.
Free to download, the Resource is designed for services wherever career development happens, from school careers programs to employment services. It gives the sector a common reference point for what quality looks like, and a structured process for strengthening it.
The release marks a significant step in CICA’s work to build a quality career development ecosystem in Australia, one in which practitioners, services and the people who fund them share a clear understanding of good practice.
Why benchmarking matters
Career development services are increasingly asked to demonstrate the quality and impact of their work. Schools, governments, employers and funders want assurance that the support people receive is well designed, well delivered and making a difference.
The Benchmarking Resource offers a consistent national framework for answering those questions. Services can review their practice against shared outcomes, identify where they are strong, and describe their progress in terms that others recognise.
Inside the Resource
The Resource is built around fourteen outcomes, grouped under five elements of quality service delivery. Each outcome is supported by performance criteria that make the expectation concrete and observable.
Services rate their current practice against each outcome on a four-point scale: Emerging, Developing, Establishing and Embedding. The scale recognises that quality is built over time, and that a service may sit at different points across different outcomes.
The Resource also includes:
- worked examples showing how the scale applies in different service settings
- a review template that guides a team through each outcome using a Plan-Do-Study-Act improvement cycle
- a self-assessment summary that brings the results together in one place
- guidance on adapting the Resource to different sectors
- cross-references to the Professional Standards for Australian Career Development Practitioners
Part of a quality career development ecosystem
CICA Executive Director David Carney said the Resource fills an important gap in the national picture.
“Australia has clear standards for career development practitioners, but practitioners work within services, and the quality of those services matters just as much,” Mr Carney said.
“The Benchmarking Resource gives services a practical way to look honestly at their practice, recognise what is working and decide where to focus next. It is built for continuous improvement, not compliance.”
The Resource is one of four national frameworks that together describe quality career development in Australia:
- the Professional Standards for Australian Career Development Practitioners, which set expectations for individual practitioners
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the Guiding Principles for Career Information Products and Services, which describe the features of quality career information products and services
-
the Australian Blueprint for Career Development, which sets out the career management competencies people build across their lives
- the Benchmarking Resource, which gives services a way to assess and improve their practice against those expectations
Getting started
Services can begin a review in four steps:
- Download the Resource from the CICA Resources page.
- Bring together a small review team, ideally including practitioners and those who lead the service.
- Work through the outcomes using the review template, rating current practice and recording the evidence behind each rating.
- Bring the results together in the self-assessment summary and agree on improvement priorities for the next cycle.
Learn more
CICA is hosting two free professional learning sessions introducing the Resource:
- Wednesday 4 November 2026, 2.00pm AEDT
- Thursday 5 November 2026, 10.00am AEDT
Click here to register for one of the professional learning sessions.
