Q&A: Patrick Mineer & Matt Chaussee discuss partnering up and bringing CareerViewXR Experiences to Compass

Golden Path Solutions has been dedicated to helping students connect to well-matched careers and employers by using their application Compass to assess a student’s skills by looking at their current experiences in high school. Recently, we at Golden Path teamed up with Be More Colorful to allow students to explore these potential careers and employers more deeply and realistically on the Compass platform.

We’re excited to announce the gradual rolling out of 12 new job profiles in Compass, each with a CareerViewXR (CVXR) experience that allows students to explore a day in the life of that job online through interactive 360-degree digital job shadow experiences.

Choosing a career as a student is a big deal! We recognized that by working together to help students understand whether they are a good fit for a specific career or company (using data collected in Compass), and then give them the opportunity to virtually experience a day in that career or company from their own home (through the CareerViewXR experiences), we could change the game for not only career exploration and selection, but for hiring as well.

Here’s how students and companies can find each other through this partnership:

  • If you’re a company who has interest in making yourself accessible to students this way, you can reach out to us at Golden Path, or to the Be More Colorful team, and we’ll work together to get your CareerViewXR experience created, and make a Career Overview and Profile for you in Compass (containing overview information, which students see first on Compass. Career Profiles have in-depth information and are what they see when they click into the Career Overview).
  • Students in Compass create their own profile, completing it with information about their classes, activities, hobbies, and personality – this information is used to identify their skills.
  • Students are then provided access to a list of Career Overviews in Compass, with the application indicating their best-fitting careers based on their skills.
  • Students can explore each Career Profile, including in-depth written information on each company or career.
  • If a career has a CareerViewXR experience, students can click on the CVXR logo to begin exploring that 360-degree digital job shadow experience.
  • If a student wants to get in contact with a company about an opportunity, they are provided a contact or link to do so.

You may have some more questions about this partnership and how it all works for employers and students, so we did a quick Q&A with Patrick Mineer, CEO and Founder of Golden Path Solutions, and Matt Chaussee, CEO and Co-Founder of Be More Colorful.

  1. What is your organization’s mission as it relates to career exploration?

Patrick: We at Golden Path want to help students use their current experiences in high school to figure out what skills they have and use those skills to help connect them with careers and employers that might be a great fit.  By experiences, we mean classes, activities, hobbies, and personality – actual data on what a student does.  Using that information, we want to then help students understand what companies and careers are a good fit for them, a day-in-the-life of someone in that career, get to know a company’s personality, and understand what are the traits of people who are successful at careers and help a student understand if they have those same traits.  We want to do this through a scalable platform that helps get careers in front of students in a quick, easy way, again based on data.

Matt: At Be More Colorful, we believe the future of healthy, engaged communities lies in creating and providing access to immersive digital experiences that innovate and inspire, educate and entertain. For career exploration, that means creating a diverse set of digital experiences that helps students, teachers, and parents have more informed discussions about career choice.

 

  1. How do Compass and CVXR work together to help connect students to careers and companies?

Matt: Compass provides students with a wealth of knowledge around the skills, interests, and aptitudes for people who are successful in a particular career path. CareerViewXR allows people to visualize themselves in those environments through either self or guided exploration. Through both objective and subjective means, the combination of these technologies helps students and companies more effectively determine the right fit.

Patrick: Using the Compass algorithm, we look at a student’s classes, activities, hobbies and personality to align them to skills and therefore careers.  We can essentially tell a student that they are a good fit for a specific job.  In our application, students can then explore that career through Golden Path’s Career Profile (developed by talking to people that are doing that job at that company), and then go a step further by actually experiencing what it’s like to walk through the building, what a normal work day is like, etc. using the CareerViewXR experience.

 

  1. Why is Compass/CVXR a valuable resource for companies to invest in?

Patrick: Imagine being in front of thousands of students instantaneously, across the state, with the ability to target the students that have the exact skills you’re looking for.  Imagine having to do that by going to every school and every career fair, vs. doing that through a scalable digital platform in a quick and easy way.  It just makes sense.  It can also be a way for employers to secure future talent by offering students who match what they are looking for through tuition reimbursement programs.  Ultimately, every organization needs to do this, because students today will be the workforce of tomorrow.

Matt: At their core, both platforms help companies make direct connections with schools and provide students with increased opportunity for career exploration. Compass does this by literally connecting students and companies through a data-driven approach based on interests and aptitudes. CareerViewXR does this by providing an authentic and interactive glimpse into what different career pathways are actually like. Either of the platforms on their own are a great resource for helping amplifying a company’s recruitment efforts.  Combined, these platforms are a powerful tool that will transform how students select their career pathway.

 

  1. Why is Compass/CVXR a valuable resource to use in schools?

Matt: CVXR provides instructors with immersive day-in-the-life experiences that go beyond traditional video. A CVXR module is truly a “choose your own adventure” experience that allows for flexible use in the classroom for all grades in K-12.

Patrick: Compass is a great tool for schools because we are essentially building a scalable way of connecting students with employers.  We hear a lot that counselors just don’t have the time to connect with employers, and getting students out of the classroom and to an employer is even harder.  With Compass, counselors now have a way to get employers directly in front of students.  Couple that with some of our work-based learning capabilities that were just released, and now students have a way to connect with employers across the state, and counselors can facilitate those employer connections in the application.

 

  1. Walk us through how CVXR is integrated into the Compass platform.

Patrick: For each company working with us, we have a Career Profile where we describe the company, the position, the location, whether or not a tuition reimbursement opportunity is available, and some other information.  We also provide a link to a Career Profile describing quite a bit about what it’s like to do that job. On the Career Overview, we show a CareerViewXR icon if there’s a VR experience available for that job.  Students click on that icon and they are immediately brought into the CareerViewXR platform, and away they go!

Matt: Like Patrick explained, its really pretty simple… career overviews that have a CVXR experience will display the CVXR logo. Students who want to explore that experience can simply click or tap on the logo to begin exploring that career!

 

  1. What are some valuable features of Compass/CVXR?

Patrick: Our biggest advantage is the fact that we use actual student experiences to get them aligned to careers and to companies.  By interviewing people that are already in the role, we can make sure the careers are well described. By providing information to the student about that career, including the Career Profile and the CareerViewXR experience, students can decide if they want to learn more or get connected, which provides a pipeline for employers.  Counselors can use Compass to find out what students like or don’t like, help with curriculum planning, learn more themselves about careers, or have connections to employers across the state.  We are truly building an ecosystem that is powered by technology.

Matt: CareerViewXR consists of several different products that all work to accomplish the same goal… providing opportunities for immersive and interactive career exploration that helps people make more effective decisions about career choice. We accomplish this through several distinct features.

  • 360-degree imagery allows people to move and interact with each scene. If a picture says 1000 words, a 360-degree scene says a million more!
  • Hotspots are active areas within each 360-degree scene that allow people to dive in and get more information.
  • Embedded video is incorporated within each 360-degree scene to give people a true sense of what the work being performed is like.
  • Interviews with real employees in the field provide rich context for telling students and teachers what they do on a daily basis and why they made their career choice.

 

Interested in learning more or getting started with the Compass and CareerViewXR platforms? Reach out to us at info@goldenpath.net!