CareerCoach

About & data sources

Built by a parent, for the decision every family faces.

One job: help students and families make the career-and-college decision with honest research and real data, instead of guesswork, brochures, and rankings.

Who we are

CareerCoach started with a straight question from my own son and a realization that I couldn't give him a straight answer. (The full story is on the home page.) It's a solo-built product with one purpose: to connect who a student is to a career, a major, and a college worth going to, and to be honest about all of it.

What we believe about data

  • Honest beats aspirational. We show real salary medians, not best-case figures, and we tell students when a career is exposed to AI, even when that's the less comfortable message.
  • Both halves matter. A great career pointed at a college that loses half its students isn't a plan. We carry honest data on careers and colleges.
  • We never invent numbers. Every figure traces to a real source. Where something requires judgment (like AI-disruption risk), we say so and we review it by hand.

Where our facts come from, and what's our own work

We tell you where our facts come from. How we select, weight, and connect them into a plan for your student is our own work. Anyone can download a government spreadsheet. The value is in turning it into an honest path, and that's the part we've built.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
Salary medians and ranges (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) and the job-growth outlook (Employment Projections).
O*NET (U.S. Dept. of Labor)
Occupational interests and work characteristics behind the RIASEC matching.
U.S. Dept. of Education College Scorecard (IPEDS)
Net price, first-year retention, six-year graduation rate, and enrollment trend for every college.
AI-disruption research
Our ratings draw on published academic work on AI task exposure (including Eloundou et al.) and observed real-world AI usage (the Anthropic Economic Index), combined with our own editorial review.
SimpleMaps
U.S. ZIP-code location data used to find colleges by distance.

A word on method

Career matching uses the Holland RIASEC model, a validated framework, computed from real occupational data rather than a proprietary personality black box. Our AI-disruption ratings start from published exposure research and observed usage, then get a human editorial pass, because exposure ("AI can do this task") is not the same as displacement ("a person gets replaced"), and only judgment can tell those apart for a given job. We publish our sources; we keep the specific scoring and connective logic proprietary.

Attributions

  • ZIP-code city, state, and location data © SimpleMaps.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  • Career and salary data courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET.
  • College outcome and cost data from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard.
  • AI task-exposure research: Eloundou et al., "GPTs are GPTs." Observed-usage data: the Anthropic Economic Index.

Privacy

We don't sell data, run ad trackers, or track students across the web. Read the full privacy stance on our Privacy page.

Find the right fit - $29