Showing Students 700 Real Careers: A Career Platform for Wingspans
Career exploration works better when students can see real people in real careers, told as stories. Wingspans is built for the students whose families have no professional network to draw on.
The work
“Oomph really fulfilled their commitment to building an immersive and radically personal platform that brought my vision to life.”
The Challenge: Careers Stay Abstract for the Students Who Need Them Visible
Career exploration works when a student can see a real person in a real career — and most resources describe occupations abstractly, leaving the imagining to the student. For a young person whose family includes no lawyers or engineers or designers, that abstraction is the gap between what is possible and what feels accessible.
The Strategy: If You Can See It, You Can Be It
Built for an audience raised on platforms designed for engagement, where a slow or generic experience is abandoned in seconds.
- Real people, told as stories. 700+ written career stories and 40 mini-documentaries of professionals in their actual work, with lessons attached and a content architecture built to keep growing.
- Algolia search tuned to the individual. Results tuned to each student’s profile and interests — an encyclopedia that understands its users.
- The Career Builder turns browsing into a tool. Students assemble a roadmap from the stories and share it with parents, teachers and counselors.
The Outcomes: Careers as People, Not Job Titles
Careers made visible as lived experience.
- Engagement | 700+ career stories and 40 mini-documentaries, surfaced by a search that knows who is asking | A stack assembled piece by piece around the platform’s needs
- Growth | Students turn exploration into a shareable artifact | Which brings parents, teachers and counselors into a conversation about a young person’s future
The detail
Why the usual approach fails
- Most career resources stop at description. Occupations in the abstract, salary data, education requirements — and the actual work of imagining yourself in that career left to the student.
- The gap is structural, not motivational. For students whose families do not have professional networks to expose them to varied pathways, abstraction sits between what is possible and what feels accessible.
- The audience has platform expectations. Young, digital-native students arrive with the standards set by platforms designed for engagement: fast interactions, frictionless discovery, personalization that feels like the product knows them. A career platform built without those is abandoned in seconds.
How it was built
- A stack assembled around the product’s needs. Gatsby front end, Firebase database, AWS cloud storage, Algolia search, Cosmic JS content management — each piece chosen against what the platform actually had to do.
- Storytelling-driven content architecture. 700+ written career stories and 40 mini-documentaries showing professionals in their real work, paired with lessons, on a structure built to grow as new stories are produced.
- Search customized to the student. Algolia tuned to surface stories aligned to who each student is and what they have shown interest in. The personalization is the engagement mechanism itself.
- The Career Builder is the central tool. Students select stories and content to build a customized roadmap they can share with parents, teachers and counselors — which turns the content from a browsing resource into something they are constructing.
What it changes
- Careers become visible as lived experience. For a student whose family does not include lawyers or engineers or designers or scientists, the platform makes those paths visible as people.
- The conversation widens. A shareable roadmap brings parents, teachers and counselors into a discussion about a young person’s future that would otherwise not have a starting point.
Career exploration platform questions
Why do most career resources fail students?
They describe rather than show — occupations in the abstract, salary data, education requirements — and leave the work of imagining yourself in the career to the student. For students whose families have no professional network, that abstraction sits between what is possible and what feels accessible.
What makes career content engaging for students?
Real people, told as stories, found by a search that knows who is asking. Wingspans pairs 700+ written career stories and 40 mini-documentaries with lessons, and its Algolia search is tuned to each student’s profile and interests — the personalization is the engagement mechanism itself, not a bolted-on feature.
What is a career roadmap tool?
On Wingspans, the Career Builder: students select the stories and content that resonate and assemble a customized roadmap they can share with parents, teachers and counselors — turning exploration into something they are constructing, and giving the adults around them a starting point the conversation otherwise lacks.
Do career exploration platforms actually help students?
For the Wingspans build by Pare & Co: a platform where 700+ careers are visible as lived experience, surfaced by personalized search on a stack assembled around the product’s needs — and, in the founder’s own words, an immersive and radically personal platform that brought her vision to life.
Client leadership
Jack Hartman
Jack Hartman’s specialty is audience experience at institutional scale. He has led platforms for young audiences who leave the moment the experience stops being worth their time.