Career Explorer

Loom link: https://www.loom.com/share/6a95f217d7b446e984070de261487f99?sid=08450157-6720-4f69-b4a3-8d3504ef227e

Inspiration

Millions of students try to choose a career through a "job-title" test. The test matches them, inaccurately, to one job for life! We can do a much better job of inspiring to work on problems they care about, and to work backwards to find purposeful career paths.

What it does

Meet Ana: She is 17 and she is no idea what to do. When she starts career explorer, she has no idea what she wants to do! First, she identifies challenges she wants to solve at work. She picks what inspires her. Then, she discover a customized, curated set of career paths linked with her challenges. These include companies, jobs and learning options. The experience is engaging and purposeful for her. She walks away with interesting options to explore, and a new confidence and outlook on her career.

How we built it

Our team came together following an inspiring introduction by JD. We kicked things off by drafting a high-level application design to guide our work and ensure a clear division of responsibilities. We structured the system so that each component could be developed independently, then integrated into a central web UI.

To encourage productivity and creativity, each developer was free to use the technologies they were most comfortable with—provided the final component could be deployed and made accessible to the main web app hosted on Vercel. This led to a diverse and effective tech stack, including Python scripts for data parsing, a LangChain-based application, a Vercel-hosted frontend, and a Django app deployed on Render.

This modular approach allowed each team member to focus deeply on the core logic of their part of the system, leading to a smooth and collaborative development process.

Challenges we ran into

What do we prioritize for v1? Which tool is best for what? Do we use LLM vs scrape the web? What's the simplest UI to accomplish this?

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It actually works! This MVP is ready to be tested in classes with students.

What we learned

Students need very simple prompts and guidance. We can integrate a lot of these tools on the fly. (Because we had very bright minds that were collaborating!)

What's next for Career Explorer

At the end of her report, Ana will be able to see: -LinkedIn profiles of inspiring people working on her challenge (Bright Data) -Examples of company's vision, mission and values (Tavily) -Salary data: including ranges, averages, and localized data relevant to her area. -Glassdoor company reviews -And much more...

We will take this MVP to classrooms and get real user feedback