Stage 3 · Decide
Asking a seventeen-year-old to name their career is asking them to guess. Most answer with whatever they have seen most recently — a relative’s job, a series, a video, a parent’s hope.
So we ask a better question: what kind of problems do you actually enjoy solving? Then we show where that leads, including the parts nobody puts in the brochure.
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01 · The method
Most career tests can be gamed the moment you work out what they are looking for. Ours cannot, because the interest questions carry no score at all. They carry tags, and the tags only decide which directions rise — not whether you did well.
Finding the pattern nobody else noticed.
Getting someone to say yes, or to work together.
Making something that works, then making it better.
Deciding how something looks, reads and feels.
Making sure nothing slips through.
The weights behind this are not secret and not fixed — they are product configuration, tuned as we learn which pairings actually hold up. A direction that keeps getting recommended to students who then dislike the reality of it is a weighting problem, and we treat it as one.
02 · The promise
A career page that only sells is worse than no page at all, because it sends someone into a ten-year decision with a marketing brochure in place of information. So every Career Reality page carries a section headed “the hard parts”, and it is not optional — the content model will not accept a career record without it.
Investment banking
Pays extremely well. Will take your weekends for two years, and burnout is common. Entry is genuinely narrow.
Design & content
The most open door of any cluster, and the most crowded. A portfolio outranks a degree — which cuts both ways.
Mechanical engineering
Improving with EV and aerospace. Entry pay is markedly lower than software, and the jobs are where the plants are.
Content writing
AI has collapsed the bottom of this market. What survives needs judgement or real expertise. Aim there from the start.
Every career page here has ten sections. Three of them are about what will be hard.
Each one also lists projects that would prove you can do the work, and the kind of person worth talking to before you commit — because one honest conversation with somebody two years into a job beats every article ever written about it.
03 · Ten directions
Industry groupings are useless to someone choosing — “banking” contains a trader, an auditor, a designer and a salesperson, and they have almost nothing in common day to day. These ten cluster by what the work actually asks of you.
Work out what the numbers are really saying.
Roles that turn financial and operational data into decisions someone acts on. Suits people who enjoy finding the pattern nobody else noticed, and who are comfortable being the person in the room who says the plan does not add up.
About this directionBuild the systems that answer the question.
Where analysis meets engineering. You are not just reading the data, you are building the pipeline, the model or the tool that produces it — and then defending how it works.
About this directionFind the buyer, earn the yes.
The most meritocratic path in business and the least understood by students. Performance is visible weekly, progression is fast, and the skill transfers to every other function you might move into later.
About this directionMake people care, then prove they did.
Half creative judgement, half measurement. Modern marketing lives or dies on whether you can connect what you made to what it changed, so a comfort with numbers matters more than students expect.
About this directionDecide how it looks, reads and feels.
Craft roles where the work is judged directly and publicly. A strong portfolio outranks a degree here more than in any other cluster, which makes it unusually open — and unusually competitive.
About this directionMake the whole thing actually run.
The function that keeps promises the rest of the business made. Suits people who see a messy process and cannot leave it alone, and who take quiet satisfaction in a week where nothing went wrong.
About this directionGo in, work out the real problem, leave it fixed.
Structured problem-solving for someone else, usually at speed and usually with incomplete information. Demanding hours and a steep first year, but the fastest general business education available.
About this directionDecide what gets built, and why that first.
You own the outcome and none of the people. Influence is the entire job. Rarely an entry-level role straight out of college — most people arrive via engineering, design, analytics or support.
About this directionBuild the team the strategy needs.
Hiring, developing and keeping people, plus the systems that make that fair and repeatable. Undersold to students as paperwork; in practice it is one of the few functions with a view of the whole organisation.
About this directionDesign it, build it, make it hold.
Physical and applied engineering — the work still gets done in plants, sites and labs rather than only on a laptop. Rewards people who want to point at something real at the end of the year.
About this direction17 careers written so far, with more being added. Each is reviewed by someone who has actually done the job before it goes up.
04 · After deciding
Plenty of products stop here, at the point where a student knows what they want and still has no idea what to do on Monday. A direction with no plan attached is just a nicer kind of anxiety.
From the ranked list, with the reality read rather than skimmed.
Which turns into a one-year goal, then a 90-day plan, then a week you can see.
Every Career Reality page lists the skills that matter and which dimension each one builds. Those become your daily work.
Not a generic coach. Someone matched to that direction.
Or shows that it is not, which is equally useful and much rarer to be told.
The full eight-stage journey is here, if you want to see where this sits.
Twenty-four questions, about twelve minutes, and you get all ten directions ranked against how you answered — not one suggestion you have to take on trust.
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