About
Thirty years of the same conversation
ProfileUp is built by Expert Education, which has been guiding students for more than three decades. This product exists because the same conversation kept happening, and because the format of that conversation was the problem.
01 · The pattern
A student arrives too late, and we can only do so much.
A counselling session is ninety minutes. In that time you can establish what someone wants, be honest about the gap between that and where they are, and hand over a plan. What you cannot do in ninety minutes is any of the actual development — and the plan, however good, goes into a drawer within a fortnight.
The students who did well afterwards were almost never the ones with the best plan. They were the ones who came back. Not because the second session contained new information, but because something in between the two sessions had made them keep going.
The value was never the advice. It was the fact that somebody was still there in week six.
That is not something a session can deliver, and it is not something an app can deliver either. It needs both — which is the shape this product ended up taking.
02 · What that decided
Five decisions we made because of it.
Scores move on evidence, not activity
The easiest product to build would reward opening the app. We had watched enough students collect certificates that changed nothing to know what that produces.
Real people stay in the loop
Reviewing submissions by hand is the most expensive part of running this. It is also the part that made the difference in every case we can point to.
Strengths are named before gaps
Thirty years of watching what happens when you open with someone's weaknesses. They agree with you, they thank you, and you never see them again.
No rank, no cohort comparison
A league table develops the top three students and quietly tells everyone else the outcome is already decided.
The honest version of every career
We spent years correcting decisions made off incomplete information. Writing the hard parts down is cheaper than un-picking a wrong choice three years in.
03 · Where we are
Honestly, early.
The student app is the first thing being built. The parent view and the institution dashboard follow it, deliberately — all three are windows onto student data, and none of them is worth much until the student layer is real and a first cohort has actually used it.
The career library is being written a career at a time, each one reviewed by somebody who has done the job. Seventeen are published. The target is around forty, and we would rather have seventeen honest pages than forty generic ones.
Now
Student app, career library, mentor network. First cohort.
Next
Parent view with the privacy partition built in from the first screen.
After
Institution dashboards — cohort skill maps, so a college can see what to intervene on.
Built for students wherever they are. The five dimensions and the ten career directions do not change by country — the entry routes, the qualifications and the pay ranges do, and those are being added market by market rather than guessed at. Tell us where you are and it moves up the list.
How the product worksStart with the twelve-minute version.
No card, no call. Twenty-four questions and the first honest picture of where you stand across all five dimensions.
Free to start · Nothing shared without your say-so