(Our first published article in May 2021)

Our goal at Jobtrees is to empower people to make informed choices for their career which spans from their first job to their last. Our approach is to build data driven tools that compliment the more traditional paths of searching job boards and seeking the opinion of individual experts. We know there are a variety of ways people arrive at their career choices and the commonality we are working to create is that they are all made with confidence. To us, a confident career choice can’t be made without the knowledge of what other options are available and where the choice will lead. We believe that searching through postings on job boards isn’t the best place to start for many job seekers as they haven’t yet had a way to determine what types of roles would be best for them. We also see that relying on the guidance of an expert limits seekers to the bias of that perspective. Our approach and tools are designed to provide a starting place to inspire the career search while also serving the needs of career seekers throughout the career process. The end goal is enabling them to choose, with confidence, their next career step and specific right job for them. If we do our job right, many people will stop feeling like they ended up in a career and instead feel like they chose it.

Finding a career – find your inspiration

It’s virtually impossible to choose a role or career if you don’t know it exists so the first step in the process to us is creating ways to inspire people to find them. For many of us, our career planning started as kids when we tried to answer “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. The options we considered likely included the traditional career paths (doctor, lawyer, police officer, fireman, etc), were also probably influenced by what we saw on TV or movies, and even more significantly, the jobs that our parents or other close relations around us were doing. This evaluation evolved as we got older and closer to making a real decision but the information available to inform that decision didn’t improve much. You may have read a list of careers, taken a career assessment test or even had the opportunity for access to a career counselor to provide some inspiration. If you are like us, you probably found a list of roles uninspiring, felt a multiple choice test could not capture the complexity of your personality and found the options shared by counselors mirrored the set of traditional roles you were already aware of. This inspired us to create new ways to connect people with roles.

There are currently over 4k unique roles within our site and we know there are even more to highlight and curate for our users (help us add more). We created a few different tools to help people wade through the sea of options with a focus on pictures and diagrams over words, searchable role content over static lists, and overall a variety of choices for their inspiration methods (we even took inspiration from dating sites).

We see the tools linked above as a great place for inspiration but also see that new roles or career paths can also be found from the roles you already know.

Choosing a career path – the common path may not be what you think

For people that have already started down a specific career path or have narrowed their search to a specific role, the question is usually less about inspiration and more on information. Those already in the career want to know what’s next, those just getting started what to know how to get there and they both want to know how long it’s going to take. By aggregating data on people’s actual career paths, we show job seekers a variety of potential ways to and from careers based on the specific path taken by many people who have all had the same role in their history. We recognize that connecting job seekers to individuals in the careers and roles they are considering is valuable (we encourage using those resources) but through aggregating real career paths we work to eliminate the bias of an individual experience by showing the commonalities from the many. Another benefit to this approach is that often a person doesn’t have access to anyone within the career they are considering. This is something many of us have encountered and a driver of why we decided not to pursue what we considered potentially interesting career paths. With our unique Jobtree tool and the complementing hierarchy view, we are working to take the mystery away from how to get roles and where to go from them once you get there.

This is just the start

This is the beginning for us with other career focused tools already in the works and development continuously happening to improve the ones already in place. We are excited by the opportunity to enable better career fits both for the individual and the company which we believe will lead to happy and more fulfilled lives. We hope you will join us on this journey and if you’re reading this you’ve already taken a big step in doing that.