The 6A's Framework:
A Competency-Based Approach to Career Navigation
Career navigation is a learnable capability.
This is the proposal for what it consists of.
Download the whitepaper (PDF)
Version 1.1 May 2026
No one has been taught how to manage a career. Pieces of the work exist, scattered across resume coaching, assessment instruments, networking advice and counseling sessions. None of them, alone or together, amount to a body of teaching for career navigation. That absence used to be absorbed one career at a time. The current labor market has made it visible at scale.
Workers change roles every two to three years, and roughly 39 percent of existing skill sets are projected to transform or become obsolete by 2030. A career is no longer a trajectory launched once and sustained. It is a sequence of consequential decisions, each made in a labor market that looks materially different from the one before it.
The frameworks we use to define career success were built for a different problem. Career readiness standards, the NACE framework prominent among them, describe what employers want to see at the point of hire. They were not designed to develop what a worker needs to navigate multiple transitions across a working lifetime. The counseling-and-placement model that organizes most career support treats career difficulty as a personal challenge to be resolved through self-knowledge. Decades of decision science point in a different direction. Career decisions are among the hardest cognitive challenges people face: feedback is delayed, identity is at stake and information is asymmetric. Those conditions require structured support, external information and purpose-built tools.
The 6A's Framework is a competency-based response to that gap. It identifies six interdependent capabilities for career navigation: Agency, Awareness, Alignment, Action, Allyship and Agility.
The framework is grounded in research from organizational psychology, social cognitive theory, decision science, social capital theory and adult learning. Each competency is defined conceptually, traced to its research base and described as something that can be taught, practiced and assessed over time. The competencies are not a checklist. They function as a system: deficits in one compound through the others, and they are most useful when treated as a diagnostic for where development is most needed.
The whitepaper is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0). It is free to share, adapt and build on, including for commercial use, with attribution. The framework is offered to the field the way open source is offered to a software community: use it, test it, improve it, build programs and products on it.
About this work
The 6A's Framework: A Competency-Based Approach to Career Navigation was written by Susan Morrow and published by Career Strong in 2026.
Preferred citation
Morrow, S. (2026). The 6A's Framework: A Competency-Based Approach to Career Navigation (v1.1). Career Strong. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
Feedback and engagement
The framework is a working model, not a finished one. Feedback from practitioners, researchers and program designers on what it gets right or wrong is welcome. Validation through instrument development, longitudinal outcome studies and cross-population testing remains to be done, and partners interested in any of that work are invited to be in touch. Contact: info@getcareerstrong.com