Research
CloseUnderstand the people
To develop a deeper understanding of the problem, we conducted user research through a combination of interviews and surveys, reaching over 100 respondents across different backgrounds.
Our goal was to listen carefully to their experiences, frustrations, and wishes around career discovery during their school years.
The findings revealed a clear and consistent pattern.
Many students shared that they were expected to make life-shaping decisions at a very young age, often without enough real-world exposure to what different careers actually look like.
Their understanding of the working world was usually shaped by a narrow range of influences such as family expectations, conversations with school counselors, or random information found online.
Few had the opportunity to interact directly with people working in the fields they were interested in.
As a result, many felt that their choices were made in a fog of uncertainty, leading to decisions that later required correction through career switches, additional education, or new investments.
There was a strong sense that a more direct, authentic, and diverse exposure to real career experiences would have helped them make more informed and confident choices earlier on.
This highlighted a clear gap in the traditional education-to-career system that needed rethinking.
Contextual Interview
We interviewed 5 professionals who have shifted their career, instead of high school students to understand how their careers evolved and what shaped their choices. Many were uncertain about their future in high school, and some pursued careers different from what they had imagined.
Quantitative Survey
We surveyed 53 participants: 60% are working adults, mostly seeking career changes for financial growth, and 40% are master's students looking to expand job opportunities and knowledge. Over 80% define a job based on its tasks and responsibilities.
Analysing the informations
I developed a customer journey to better understand the experience of career decision-making from a student’s perspective.
Early career decisions are often made without clarity, agency, or real understanding, yet they shape a student’s life path for years to come. By the time students reconsider their direction, they have often already invested significant time and money into a path that may no longer fit who they are or what they want.
This gap between early decisions and later realization highlights the need for a better system, one that helps students explore, reflect, and understand before making high-stakes commitments.
Early career decisions are often made without clarity, agency, or real understanding, yet they shape a student’s life path for years to come. By the time students reconsider their direction, they've often already invested significant time and money
To further explore the ecosystem around students, we developed a stakeholder map.
One key insight was:
"Parents and the inner circle are key to how students discover their career paths."
Students often do not have direct connections to real-world professionals, relying mainly on their parents’ networks. When they do manage to connect, the view they receive is often one-dimensional, lacking the nuance, diversity, and real-world complexity that a career truly involves.
This limited exposure shapes how students imagine their futures, sometimes reinforcing narrow or outdated ideas about what is possible.
Our survey revealed that even professionals have vastly different interpretations of the same job title, from daily tasks to team dynamics. This inconsistency leads to one-dimensional and often misleading advice for students, who are trying to make life-shaping decisions with incomplete information. Without a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what a career truly involves, students risk building their futures on assumptions rather than real insights.
Casual Loop Diagram
After synthesising insights from research into student behaviour, school constraints, and socio-cultural influences, we mapped the interrelated variables into a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) to better understand the dynamics shaping career discovery among high school students. This systemic analysis revealed reinforcing and balancing loops that influence students’ self-awareness, confidence, motivation, and decision-making capacity. By examining these feedback structures, we were able to identify three high-leverage points within the system: (1) raising awareness of diverse and evolving career pathways, (2) increasing exposure to real professionals with relatable stories and trajectories, and (3) ensuring equitable access to multiple educational and occupational routes beyond university. These leverage points now serve as strategic anchors to guide the formulation of interventions that are not only user-centered but also system-aware, addressing both individual empowerment and structural constraints.
Solution Development
Theory of Change
To guide the development of our solution, we built a structured If–Then hypothesis stack.Starting from research insights, we mapped out the key barriers students face when making career decisions: limited exposure, biased advice, shallow exploration, and rigid expectations about career paths.We then translated each insight into a testable hypothesis, asking: "If we intervene at this point, what positive change could happen?"This process helped us break down a complex challenge into focused, actionable beliefs.
To ensure our solution was grounded in a clear logic of change, we developed a Theory of Change.It maps how early, real-world career exposure, holistic reflection, and peer dialogue can empower students to make more informed, confident, and adaptable career decisions.This framework helped guide our design priorities, test our assumptions, and visualise the long-term impact we aim to create.
