Animus

Making an informed career decision is certainly no easy feat, but it is made that much harder by a lack of understanding of what is truly at the root of the problem. Scholars have identified specific behaviors that hold learners back in their career decisions, such as their lack of awareness and utilization of available career center services or their failure to set concrete career goals or plans, but their proposed remedies come across as generic blanket statements that fail to address the true issues at its core.

So it should come as little surprise that most of the literature surrounding career readiness today points to a clear lack of it. Students are rather confused.

The lack of self-knowledge and the focus placed on a single employer without a proper match between student’s personal interests and values and the professional environment turns the entire decisional process into an incondite matter.

Current Situation

Let’s consider the typical experience of an early career seeker in the United States.

• Expected to know how to choose the right pathways for themselves before their mental faculties and maturity have fully developed (age 18-21)
• Aptitude or personality assessments (e.g. MBTI, Strong, Big5, etc.) and interpersonal advice can be outdated or too generic/one-size-fits-all
• Most learners never interact with any dedicated or professional career counseling until they are at least in college
• Over 90% of a person’s career decision is influenced by external sources, like parents, friends, faculty, and the media

The real problem is not that they don't know HOW to choose...but that we are not training them to develop the critical self-reflection, introspection, and metacognitive skills they will need to compete in the job market.

Suffice it to say, what we know for sure about the coming economy is that change will be a constant in all of our lives going forward; so it is up to us to prepare ourselves adequately for the coming challenges. It is therefore not enough to treat the career exploration process as a one-off event that ends when a job or career is chosen.

• Workers will need to continuously upskill and reskill in order to stay competitive. 
• Workers will need to continuously change jobs (and potentially careers) in order to stay competitive.
• Organizations will demand more soft skills, with a particular emphasis on communication, conflict management, collaboration, and critical thinking.
• Continuous technological advances (particularly in AI) will change what is demanded of workers on an ever-evolving basis.
• Hiring decisions will be based more on skills and less on degrees (breaking through the so-called “paper ceiling”).
• AI will bring diverse new opportunities, but it can also worsen the digital divide between those who know how to use and manipulate it and those who don’t.

What learners really need is the ability to learn about who they are, what the world of work is actually like, and how to align the two.

When it comes to designing something that takes all of the above into consideration, therefore, I hypothesized that an effective solution must ideally contain the following elements:

1. Learner-Centric Design: Perhaps the most important element of all is that the experience must be designed by and around the learner so that it stokes their own intrinsic motivation to gain self-efficacy. I draw heavily from Barry Zimmerman’s work on self-regulation and metacognition as the theoretical guide for my hypothesis as well as the works of Albert Bandura and his socio-cognitive theory of self-regulation.
2. Socratic Dialogue Methodology: If Zimmerman’s Self-Regulation Theory is to be the driver behind the wheel of this solution, then it is the Socratic Dialogue Methodology that is perhaps one of the best vehicles for delivering results.
3. Scaffolding: While students are very much in the driver’s seat of their learning experience, they will still need help steering in the right direction. This is when the role of the “teacher as facilitator” comes into play, where socio-cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “more knowledgeable other” provides timely and relevant scaffolding all along the learner’s journey. This role is typically undertaken by a live human, but what happens when there are too many students for one facilitator to handle? Or what should students who don’t have access to such people do, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds?
4. AI Assistant: In the absence of live humans, generative AI assistants can make excellent stand-ins to provide the type of timely and relevant feedback that learners need but cannot always access. This AI assistant can be trained to ask the kinds of questions that will help learners develop the self-reflection, introspection, and metacognitive skills that they need in order to be able to put together their own informed career development plans.

The ultimate desired outcome was for learners to be able to develop the critical skills mentioned above; but the more immediate actionable goal, through the use of this solution, was for learners to design their own career development plans. The graph below presents a rough idea of the learning objectives and how they feed into this goal.

There is consensus among experts within the career development community that proper career exploration involves understanding two domains: oneself + one's environment. Only by understanding both of these contexts are learners able to make well-informed decisions for themselves. And that is precisely what Animus helps learners do during their journey towards designing their very own career development plan.

In the original sketch, the idea was called Gnothi after the Greek phrase for "Know Thyself." In the final iteration, Gnothi became the name of the AI assistant while the overall product was called Animus, the Jungian concept of what makes a person who they are (passion, personality, intellect, pride, etc).

Below is the high-fidelity iteration:

The following are some of the key takeaways I would love to share with others who are considering exploring this same problem space.

It's not just about finding a job.

After all, jobs will come and go.

The demands of the future economy are ever-changing.

The job you have 5 years from now may not even exist today.

We need to be resilient and adaptable.

In this kind of future economy, we must build the skillset to be ready for whatever comes.