About Career Studio
This started as a question I couldn't answer.
“What should I actually do with my life?” — asked seriously, with a deadline, and with nothing solid to stand on.
- 6
- axes of work
- 2
- short quizzes
- 10
- minutes, start to finish
- 0
- accounts required
The problem
Everyone had advice. Nobody had answers.
When it was my turn to choose, this is what was on offer: “follow your passion” (which assumes you've already found it), a five-minute quiz that hands you four letters and walks away, salary rankings that say nothing about what the work feels like, and the quiet pressure to pick whatever sounds impressive.
What nobody could tell me was the thing that actually matters: what is this work like, day after day? How much of it is people, how much is ambiguity, how fast do you see results, what happens when you get it wrong? Careers were described by their titles. Never by their texture.
What's already built
Careers, measured by the shape of the work.
Career Studio scores a career along the dimensions that decide whether you'll be happy in it: what you work on (things, information, people, or ideas), how much uncertainty it holds, how quickly your work talks back to you, how many people fill your day, how abstract the thinking gets, and how much a mistake costs.
None of it is guesswork. The scoring is built from O*NET and Bureau of Labor Statistics data — the same research that occupational scientists use — and every match can show you the axis it came from.
The six axes
What you work on
Uncertainty
Feedback
People
Abstraction
Cost of a mistake
- Two quizzes — one for what pulls you in, one for how you like to work. About 5 minutes each, no account.
- A fit score on every career, broken down axis by axis, each with a written reason for where you land.
- A ranked shortlist across the whole catalogue, ordered by how closely the work matches you.
- Career profiles covering the daily tasks, the skills that get you hired, how people got there, and the conditions.
Where it falls short
The matching keeps that promise. The profiles don't yet.
The scoring does what this page says it does. The career pages around it haven't caught up. Their opening paragraphs are still the reference description we imported — written to classify an occupation, not to help someone picture themselves inside it. You get the tasks, the skills, the conditions, and almost none of the feel.
That's the distance between what you just read and what you'll find when you click through. Naming it seemed better than letting you find it on your own.
What we're planning to build
Making the profile feel like the day.
All of it aimed at one thing: closing the distance between reading about work and knowing what it's like to do it.
An opening worth reading
A written introduction for each career instead of an imported definition — the same work, described by someone who wants you to understand it rather than file it.
A day in the life
An hour-by-hour timeline of an ordinary day, so the rhythm stops being abstract: when it's quiet, when it isn't, and what a Tuesday actually asks of you.
Where the hours go
A breakdown of what genuinely fills the week. Most jobs are not what their title suggests, and this is the part that shows it.
The highs and the hard parts
What people in this work say makes it worth it, and what wears on them — the weight of a mistake, the pressure that comes with it, and the moments that pay for both.
What holds either way
The rules we're building against.
Matches that show their work
Every recommendation can explain itself — which parts of you it fits, and where it doesn't. If a tool can't tell you why, it's a horoscope.
The texture, not the title
A surgeon and a researcher can share a title's prestige and have opposite daily lives. We match you to the day, not the business card.
Yours, not ours
No account. No email wall. Your answers live in your browser, and your results belong to you.
A starting point, honestly
No quiz knows you better than you do. This is a map for exploring, not a verdict — the final call was always going to be yours.
How it got here
Six years, a long pause, and a rebuild.
2019
Problem discovery
A master's in hand and still unemployed. Looking back, not one of my choices had rested on anything solid.
Late 2019
First concept
The user journey, the interface screens, and the core features — all sketched and prototyped on paper before a line of code.
2020
Customer discovery
Interview after interview with strangers, to find out whether the problem was mine alone. It wasn't.
2020–21
Research and method
Months deep in personality assessment and matching algorithms. This is where the six-axis engine came from.
2021
Design and prototype
Content writers, designers and engineers joined. The writers' work held up — much of it is still in the product today. No designer could picture the interface, so I built the Figma prototype myself.
2021–22
First build
Contract engineers kept reaching for shortcuts I wasn't willing to ship. It never became a live product.
2022–24
Strategic pause
If a chatbot answers any career question, why build this? With no good answer, I shelved it and worked elsewhere.
2025
Rebuild
AI tooling closed the gap between what I could specify and what I could build alone, so I wrote it myself.
Today
MVP, live
The smallest honest version of the idea. It earns a full rebuild by proving useful first.
A note from the person who built this
I'm not a career counselor. I'm someone who went looking for why I was still unemployed with a master's in hand, traced it back through every choice I'd made, and couldn't find one I'd made on anything solid. That's the question I couldn't put down: how is anyone supposed to know a job suits them before they've given it years? Six years, one incubator, a stack of paper prototypes and one long pause later, this is my answer so far. If this tool saves one person from choosing a decade of their life based on a dinner-table opinion, it was worth building.
The whole thing takes about 10 minutes.
Two short quizzes. Ranked matches with reasons. No account.