Try a profession before you choose it

Students choose a major from descriptions, advice, and rankings — almost nobody gets to try the actual work first. Many only realise a career is not for them in their second or third year, after losing time and money.

Internships and job shadowing are rare, and personality quizzes do not show what a normal working day looks like.

1. Pick a profession — 15 paths in 4 fields.
2. Work through 10 tasks in about 10 minutes: 7 decisions with 5 options and 3 written answers, each followed by a pro insight.
3. Rate how each task felt — the interest meter shows not only “right” but “is this me”.
4. Get your result: match score, strengths, subjects, universities, and next steps.

All 150 tasks are based on real work activities from the O*NET OnLine occupational database (US Department of Labor) and the European ESCO skills taxonomy, rewritten as short, plain-language scenarios for students.

It is an exploration tool, not a psychological test or a prediction of success.

PathFinder is the AI mentor. It reviews written answers against each task’s criteria (strong / partial / off the task), gives hints without revealing answers, and answers career questions with the current task in context.

It runs on Claude Haiku 4.5 (Anthropic) or a free open model served by Groq — requests go only through our server, and keys never reach the browser. If the AI is unavailable, PathFinder falls back to criteria-based review and catalog knowledge, so the site always works.

Safety limits: 1,000 characters per message, 20 requests per minute, refusal of harmful or off-topic requests, and no medical or legal advice presented as real advice.

• No sign-up and no accounts.
• Progress and results stay in your browser (localStorage).
• Written answers and PathFinder messages go to the server (and to the AI model, when enabled) only to generate a reply, and PathTry does not store them.
• We only receive a contact (email or Telegram) if you ask for a roadmap.
• Visit statistics are anonymous (Vercel Analytics, cookieless).

The idea of trying the work before choosing builds on international career-guidance research. The tasks themselves are based on the O*NET and ESCO occupation databases.

• OECD — Career Readiness project Teenagers who explore and experience work — workplace visits, job shadowing, conversations with professionals — tend to have lower unemployment, higher wages and greater job satisfaction as adults (11 indicators of career readiness).
• Harvard Graduate School of Education — Pathways to Prosperity (2011) Symonds, Schwartz and Ferguson argue that preparing young people only through classroom-based academics is not enough, and call for career pathways and guidance that connect school to real work.

Today PathTry runs on free tiers: Vercel hosting, the AI mentor via Groq, email via Resend. The only cost is the domain.

At scale we can switch to Claude Haiku: one answer review costs a fraction of a cent, and without AI the site keeps working in offline mode — so the cost per student stays very low.