About
Careers guidance by doing, not reading
“I got a job designing a flying computer game. I hate flying. But I conquered that fear and I ended up getting my pilot's licence. That's how you design a realistic game.”
When you talk to people about their jobs you learn all sorts of surprising things. Midwives inform the people in their care about their options but never tell them what to do. Hotel food managers think carefully about where the eggs and bacon go in the buffet line. Independent plumbers turn down more jobs than they accept.
Most careers advice describes jobs from the outside. Think Smart lets you try a few minutes of one from the inside. Each scenario comes from conversations with people who do the work: the situation they faced, the choices in front of them, and why one choice was better than another.
That is where our mission comes in. Someone who has never met a journalist, a lawyer or a nurse can still experience a real problem from their working day, and find out whether it is work they would enjoy and be good at. By the end they have a picture of their skills and strengths, and a better idea of what they might do next.
The library covers dozens of lines of work, from accountancy and software development to nursing, teaching and hospitality. Scenarios are reviewed before they are published, and every one is linked to the core skills of the UK Standard Skills Classification so that what you learn about yourself is expressed in the same terms employers, colleges and the Employability Skills Framework use.
The service is built for people at any stage: leaving school or college, studying, changing career later in life, or looking for work after time away. Colleges, employers and training providers can offer their own experience with a catalogue focused on their pathways; see how partnerships work.
The team
Rohin is passionate about increasing social mobility, particularly in education. His work experience spans asset management, public policy and management consulting, and he has been a governor at one of the UK's largest further education colleges. He holds an MA in Economics from King's College, Cambridge and an MBA from INSEAD.
First job: Burger King
Patrick has worked in software and startups for over a decade, across back- and front-end development, product ownership and team leadership. He has also been a sound designer, an interpretive naturalist at an aquarium and a carpenter, and once built an animatronic octopus that played the xylophone.
First job: Assistant stage manager at a pub theatre