Tool that helps people find next career move based on their skillset - is this useful? 🤔
I recently built Pivot, a tool that helps young professionals instantly figure out their next best career move. It parses thousands of job postings to reveal the best career paths and skills you can invest in to maximize your potential, based on your current skillset.
Really just looking for validation - any thoughts?
People have a lot more skills than you have listed! I'm a UX and UI designer, with tons of other skills. If you want it to be more broad, you will need to consider that.
@handheld - Sorry for the tardy response! (was overwhelmed over the last week, and day job didn't help 😿).
Anyways, thanks a ton for the feedback - agreed that many paths are not there yet in the skill mapping (UX being one of them). Let me deep-dive on the analysis for UI/UX tomorrow, and get your thoughts on what I propose as the "core" and "nice to have" skills.
Good idea. One thing I will say is the soft skills or personality characteristics that are associated with a given profession that people may not take into account - eg I like talking with others could be relevant to service design. Whereas, I like to focus on the details could be product design or QA. Soft skills were very beneficial to me in terms of changing my career
Hi Jae - how does one get in touch with you? this is very cool, and I've been working on something similar with a couple of datascientists....market validation has not been too promising because its the sort of thing (like LinkedIn was in 2003-2006) where
1)a substantial amount of market education is needed and
2) there is no immediate value for the user (it shows them what effort is required and people dont view effort as value ;-P)
For these reasons in my limited research it takes a bit of flywheel building (read: years ) to get this to meaningful value delivery to user.
@zeuscoder Sorry for the late response (I was in the middle of refining my investment thesis and wanted to make sure I gave you a thoughtful response + have a day-job getting in the way 😢).
Totally agree that the lack of "immediate manifestation of value" (i.e. career pivots can take months, where "value" is realized when the person lands the job or gets a promotion/raise) poses a challenge for most users.
However, I believe it can be solved with:
Laser-focus on early adopter segment (i.e. ppl stuck in jobs they don't love)
Since they are going to do the process anyway, they'll use anything that helps them in that process.
Pinpoint the acute step in the career development process:
a) Research & identify career path(s)
b) Assess & prioritize missing skills
c) Form development plan (e.g. courses, books, interview prep services) ❗
d) Execute learning & development
Gamification
As you may also know as an ex-pivoter, one of the biggest frustrations is "how do I know I'm ready to start applying". Providing accurate & concrete milestones as the user "levels up" will help them track progress (as well as exciting them).
These 3 factors underpin my thesis and the core product (under development). For #2, I believe (c) is the biggest pain point (hence the ❗), where an overly high behavioral barrier deters most people from executing their pivot.
Where I think things will get really interesting is when this starts integrating with workplaces, as it enables users to shape their current job to fit their goals. I'm thinking: connecting them to unique projects & internal job opportunities, and rewarding them for developing skills crucial to the organization.
If interested, here's a short post I wrote on the vision (mostly to convince myself): https://medium.com/@pathbase/pathbase-master-plan-66a4e56ce1ac
I would really love to hear your thoughts, especially given you've explored this problem as well! 🙌 You can also reach me at jbbae@pathbase.io.