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Have questions about CareerOS × Highered?
We’re hosting a live Q&A on January 29 at 15:00 CET to walk through the partnership and answer your questions.
Today marks an important milestone for us.
We are announcing that CareerOS and Highered are joining forces to build a more connected, global, and outcome-driven infrastructure for early careers — one that better serves students, universities, career teams, and employers across borders and institutions.
This decision brings together two companies that have been working on the same challenge from different sides of the ecosystem: how to help education lead somewhere real, and how to ensure early-career opportunities are accessible, structured, and transparent at a global scale.
Early-career development has long been defined by fragmentation.
Students are expected to navigate complex career decisions using disconnected tools, informal advice, and job boards that rarely reflect the full picture. Universities and career teams are asked to support increasingly diverse student populations with limited visibility, siloed systems, and growing expectations around outcomes. Employers, in turn, struggle to reach early-career talent efficiently, particularly across borders and institutions.
Despite the importance of early-career decisions, the infrastructure supporting them has remained fragmented, manual, and inconsistent.
CareerOS and Highered were both founded in response to this reality.
CareerOS was built to bring structure, execution, and transparency to the student side of the early-career journey. Founded by former MBA students who experienced firsthand how broken early-career recruitment can be, CareerOS focuses on helping students organize, manage, and execute their career journey — from exploration and networking to applications and outcomes.
Highered, based in Norway, has built one of the world’s strongest global networks connecting universities, career teams, and employers. As a long-standing partner to EFMD, Highered works closely with leading academic institutions, including many of the world’s top-ranked business schools, to support international talent mobility and early-career recruitment at scale.
While the two platforms evolved independently, the underlying mission has always been closely aligned.
Over time, it became increasingly clear that CareerOS and Highered were not solving different problems — they were solving different parts of the same one.
By joining forces, CareerOS and Highered are combining complementary strengths into a single, more powerful ecosystem.
This partnership brings together:
The result is a more connected, scalable infrastructure for early careers — one that reduces complexity for institutions, expands access for students, and improves hiring outcomes for employers.
Importantly, this is not about short-term change or rapid consolidation. It is about building a durable foundation that can support early-career development globally over the long term.
From a customer and user perspective, nothing changes immediately.
Highered will continue to operate as a standalone platform, serving its existing university and employer network as it does today. CareerOS customers can continue using the platform without disruption. Existing contracts, pricing, access, and support arrangements remain unchanged.
What does change is the direction.
Over time, the two platforms will integrate thoughtfully, with a clear focus on improving outcomes rather than adding complexity. This integration will be gradual, transparent, and communicated clearly as new capabilities become available.
At the core of this partnership is a shared belief: early careers should not be left to chance.
Career development is not a moment, but a system — one that requires structure, data, coordination, and long-term thinking. By aligning CareerOS’s execution layer with Highered’s global reach, the combined ecosystem can support students earlier, guide them more effectively, and connect them to opportunities with greater clarity and fairness.
For universities and career teams, this means stronger tools, broader reach, and clearer insight into outcomes. For students, it means access to global opportunities within a structured, supportive system. For employers, it means more efficient access to high-quality early-career talent across institutions and geographies.
This partnership is a foundational step, not a finish line.
In the months ahead, CareerOS and Highered will continue working closely to align teams, platforms, and roadmaps, with the goal of building one of the most comprehensive early-career infrastructures globally.
As always, we remain committed to transparency and to working closely with our community as this next chapter unfolds.
For customers, partners, or anyone interested in understanding what this partnership means in more detail, we have prepared a comprehensive Q&A addressing the most common questions.
If you would like to discuss this further, please reach out to your account manager or contact our team directly, we are always happy to walk through the details and answer questions.
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