Our career advisor is finally there!

Finally, we have a career advisor! A free career advisor for everyone!

After months of tests, delays and hardships, the first brick of the Jinn career advisor is available for the public to use.

How does it work?

The first thing to do is to go on this page.

From there, there is only one scenario available, as of writing. Other will come soon, I will tell more about it below. So let’s click on the early career scenario proposed.

You have now a quiz that appears. The answers you will provide might make other questions appear to be more specific. Generally, this form should be quite fast to fill. It is also recommended to visit the Jinn Career Encyclopedia while filling the form, to get information about some occupations or skills.

Once you filled the form, click on ‘Submit’. This will bring you to the result page.

And that’s it! In your results sheet, you have occupation suggestions related to the answers you provided. You can click on any occupation or skill to open the matching page and get more information. You can fill the form again, and change some answers to see the effects.

So, it is very easy to fill in the end, we tried to keep it as simple as possible. Buy what took us so long exactly to build it? After all, the idea of a career advisor goes back to more than a year and half ago…

Genesis of the Jinn career advisor

First of all, even with the best minds available, things rarely go as planned when you try to do something that you describe as complex. As far as I am concerned, starting a business to counsel people in their careers is certainly a complex matter.

With no business experience, apart from my theoretical knowledge I learned at the university, a lack of technical expertise in critical areas such as web programming languages or website building, little support to move forward, a full-time job in a field unrelated to Jinn and just my savings, the chances of us being where we are today were very slim.

On a personal note, I also had the unpleasant experience of losing both my younger brother and my father within 2 months.

All these factors have considerably slowed down the development of the site, to a point I think any other company would have considered unacceptable. But when you are alone in a project of this scale, it is easier to accept, as long as you keep your eyes on the bigger picture and keep moving towards it.

In July, I was joined by @Andi , who did a great job in converting my requirements for the algorithm into a code that can interface with the site. While it is not how I imagined it first, it does the job as I wanted, which means very well. Even if we had to be quite imaginative again for that on some aspects.

However, during the development, the feedback we got from some users led us to some changes.

Different scenarios for the career advisor

To begin with, we wanted to differentiate ourselves from other career advise websites. In many of them, you have to first register with your email address, then answer dozens of questions to finally get answers you are most of the time not so happy with, and a feeling of having wasted your precious time.

We intentionally reduced the number of questions to go through, so it should not take more than 5 minutes to answer in the worst case. We also decided to have different questionnaires, based on your professional situation. Thus, if you are still a college student, you won’t need to answer questions about your previous job.

In the coming weeks and months, we will be releasing questionnaires for other career scenarios, with the aim of finally offering a universal career advisor, which is useful whatever your background or location.

Will it be free?

Well, everything has a price, this is the world we live in.

But, to stay true to our mission, the career advisor will be affordable for everybody. In fact, the career advisor is based on the Jinn Career Encyclopedia. As you know, this encyclopedia will be fed by the users, just like a Wikipedia focused on careers. The career encyclopedia will remain free, no matter what.

The career advisor is free at the moment, and will remain so for some time. Indeed, to improve the algorithm, we need more data from the users. Furthermore, the idea of the career advisor in its current form is to show the extent of its capabilities with limited data. Of course, with more data, such as the company where you worked, or the university where you studied, we could definitely give more accurate suggestions. But this kind of service could be part of a premium package. To summarize, the career advisor as it is today is free, and it is our plan to keep it like this in the future, while more personalized career advice could be paid.

What will come next?

Knowing what to do in a career is cool, but doing it is much better.

The career advisor is just a first step. We hope in the future that not only we will bring you suggestions for a job, but also the job advertisements, the candidates, the courses and certificates, the coaching sessions and many other career-related services.

Wrap-up

We are very excited about this career advisor, as this may be a game changer for many people who did not have access to such tools before. Personally, this thought, and the idea of making something to solve this problem was a great fuel to continue working on it. I hope this will be of great help for many of you, and that you will share this tool with as many people as possible.