enScholar makes post-secondary and career decisions much easier. We walk teens step-by-step through self-exploration and career matching activities with personal video coaching. The result? More confident, independent teens.
Choosing a college major? Narrowing down your career options? The Interests Explorer will help you brainstorm, prioritize, and analyze the things that intrigue and engage you. In the end, you’ll have a better understanding of why you enjoy these things, so you can choose your education and career path with more certainty.
Here's a sample intro video to our Interests Explorer tool:
Here's How It Works
Step 1: Learn to uncover your interests
You may be great at something, but if it doesn’t excite or intrigue you, you likely won’t reach your full potential. That’s why it's important to understand what interests are, and how you can start to uncover your own. We’ll begin with a quick brainstorming exercise to get you ready to go.
Step 2: Define your interests
Next, put your learning into action by defining all the things that interest you most. You can add, adjust or remove interests at any time, so there’s no pressure to get it right on your first shot. The goal at this stage is to brainstorm freely – we'll sort and narrow down the list later.
Step 3: Stack and sort
Sure, most people can write a list of their interests, but have you ever compared them side by side? By clicking and dragging your interests into a ranked order, you’ll begin to distinguish between which interests are more like hobbies, and which have career potential.
Step 4: Digging deeper
The key to understanding an interest – and how it relates to a career – is knowing why it engages you. We’ll coach you through how to reflect on each interest, then you’ll be free to write your own thoughts. You can add to and adjust your reflections in the future as you learn more about yourself and gain experience related to your interests.
Step 5: Time audit
The final step is the time audit. Here we start to look at how much time you’re currently spending on each interest, and how much time you’d ideally like to be spending. This tool will help you to think about which interests hold the most career potential, and which areas to seek out further experience in.
Summary & Discussion
Here’s where we tie everything together and give parents an opportunity to get involved. We’ve created discussion pages to help analyze and make sense of the Interests Explorer results. It’ll help answer common student and parent questions, give example analyses of other teens, and walk you through a guided discussion that teens can do alone, or with a parent or friend.
The Strengths Pilot
Searching for your natural talents? Looking to build self-confidence? The Strengths Pilot will help you identify the areas where you stand out, provide you with quick insights, and reveal the famous women and men who share your strengths. You’ll also be able to view and explore careers that require your set of strengths.
Here's a sample intro video to our Strengths Pilot tool:
Here's How It Works
Step 1: Why are strengths important?
Understanding your strengths is essential to finding a career you can accel at. The earlier in life you start to define your natural talents, the more you’ll be able to foster and develop them.
Step 2: Assessing your strengths
If you’ve ever taken a personal assessment, you know as well as we do that no test or algorithm can perfectly define who you are. That’s why we’ve designed this tool to be quick and fun, while providing a snap-shot of where your natural talents lie. To help you keep your career options open, you’re able to retake the assessment over as many times as you wish, exploring all of the strengths profiles.
Step 3: Understanding your top strengths
Find out what your strengths can tell you about what to look for in a career, and view which group each of your natural talents falls under. Looking for more inspiration? Explore links to famous figures who share your strengths, and read about their personal stories.
Debriefing & Discussion
Here’s where we tie everything together and give parents an opportunity to get involved. We’ve created discussion pages to help analyze and make sense of the Strengths Pilot results. It’ll help answer common student and parent questions, give example analysis of other teens, and walk you through a guided discussion that teens can do alone, or with a parent or friend.
The Values Compass
Looking for a career path which will pay the bills and be fulfilling? The Values Compass will help you define, prioritize, and reflect on your deepest personal values. You'll emerge knowing what motivates you the most, and what elements to look for when choosing a career path.
Here's a sample intro video to our Values Compass tool:
Here's How It Works
Step 1: What are values?
Understanding your core values is key to finding a career that will be intrinsically motivating and fulfilling. If you have a general sense of your values already, we’ll challenge you to think about them more critically. By working through Values Compass activities, we’ll help you develop a better understanding, so you’ll be confident in using your values as a guide for all of your decisions – career and otherwise.
Step 2: Ranking your values
You’ll start off by thinking about and ranking a group of career-relevant values based on their importance to you. If you think back to your childhood, you realize that as you learn and grow, your values often change, or at least shift in level of importance. That’s why we’ve made it easy for you to re-rank your values at any time using this tool.
Step 3: Stacking and sorting
Now that you have your list of top values, you’ll click and drag to prioritize the list in order of how much each value resonates with you. This activity was designed to make the decision-making process easier when choosing between career paths and university majors.
Step 4: Digging deeper
After watching the quick video guide, you’ll be ready to start writing about why these values are important to you, and when you’ve demonstrated them in the past. You’ll examine your values in a way that will shed light on what to look for in a career, and post-secondary path. As you review notes you’ve written in the past, you’ll be able to see how your values have shifted, or increased over time.
Results & Discussion
As with the other tools, we tie everything together and give parents an opportunity to get involved. We’ve created discussion pages to help analyze and make sense of your Values Compass summary. It’ll help answer common student and parent questions, give example analysis of other teens, and walk you through a guided discussion that teens can do alone, or with a parent or friend.
Career Alignment
Want to make better career and post-secondary decisions for yourself? Our Career Match tool guides you through aligning each of your interests, strengths, and values with specific careers. In the end, you'll have a self-ranked list of careers, but more importantly, you’ll be able to think critically and independently about why careers match your personal profile.
Here's a sample intro video to our Career Alignment tool:
Here's How It Works
Step 1: Choose careers to explore
Now that you’ve uncovered your interests, strengths, and values, it's time to match them up with potential careers. There are three possible ways to begin: 1) Find careers that align with your Strengths Pilot results, browse careers by industry category, or search for specific careers in our database using the search bar.
Step 2a: Align by strengths
Need suggestions for careers that might be a good fit? We’ve provided you a group of careers that align with your Strengths Pilot results. You can learn about each career (salary, skills, educational requirements) through watching curated videos of real professionals and reading relevant career profiles from around the web.
Step 2b: Browse career categories
Have a career or general field in mind already? You can browse through the industry categories to explore careers related to each other. As above, you can learn more about each career (salary, skills, educational requirements) through curated videos and online career profiles from around the web.
Step 3: Align your first career
If you’re still interested in the career after learning about it, click ‘Align’. We’ll guide you step-by-step through thinking critically about how this career fits with each of your top interests, strengths, and values. You can align as many different careers as you like, and don’t worry, you can rank the same careers multiple times as you learn more about them.
Step 4: See your alignment results
After you’ve determined how you think each of your interests, strengths, and values match up, you’ll be able to view your personal alignment score for the career. After this step, you’ll be able to understand at a much deeper level why a career will or won’t be a good fit based on how it matches up with your unique profile.
Step 5: See how your career choices stack up
After you’ve aligned a few careers, visit your Career Summary page to see how all of your career prospects stack up against one another. The higher the score, the better the match. You’ll have the ability to compare and discuss how careers differ, based on their alignment with your personal profile. You’ll also be able to see a history (with dates) of how you ranked careers over time.