Everything You Wanted to Know About Careers But Were Afraid to Ask at punctuative! by Matt Winn

Everything You Wanted to Know About Careers But Were Afraid to Ask

Published by Matt October 23rd, 2007 in Entrepreneurship, Life, Science and Tech

How cool! Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called “Letter to a Young(er) Professional” which covered core recommendations for folks early on the career path. I hit off with the following:

First, know your options. If there’s one tool I wish I was given in college it would be a database of 100,000 graduates with historical career information.

And ended, “I doubt that career database is far away…”

Well, it’s officially in the works!

Charlie O’Donnell, whom I’ve gotten to know over the past couple years as an industry peer, has started his own business, Path101, and announced yesterday that they’ll focus on what he’s calling the “Resume Genome Project.”

I love it. Instead of 100,000 entries, he’s tackling 3 million+ publicly posted resumes on the web (and any others the company can get its hands on) and working on organizing that information. Here’s the vision:

What if you could show me what all the people with my major did for a living?
What if you could tell me what were the top three or four jobs that people held after they held mine?
What about jobs I really want? What do people do before they become product managers or venture capitalists? What’s the best route from the mailroom to the corner office?

Charlie, this is exactly what I wanted. It’s exactly what college students need. It’s exactly what I’d like to share with the person who emailed me yesterday about career steps leading to venture capital.

If you’re interested in following along on Charlie’s execution, sign up for updates.

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Graphic credit: resume.jpg, originally uploaded by Additive Theory

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5 Responses to “Everything You Wanted to Know About Careers But Were Afraid to Ask”

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1 Naomi Dunford Oct 27th, 2007 at 8:48 am

That is incredible! Then my brother could have known he would have worked at an outdoor barbecue right after he got his MA in English Literature and my husband would have had a heads-up about his six years as a bank peon with his Sociology degree.

In all seriousness, though, that is a completely brilliant idea. College and university students generally only have the institution’s promotional literature to go by, and of course THEY say you’re going to be wildly successful. I wish that had been around when I was in college. All two months of it.
2 Matt Oct 28th, 2007 at 11:11 pm

Nice! I recall hearing of a commencement address in which the speaker told graduates (of a prestigious school I believe) that they had sacrificed much chance of being truly rich by getting their degrees. After all, he noted, look at Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many others in the top wealth tier that never graduated college. There’s real value in alternative learning methodologies that I think will be better acknowledged in future. Actually, I think democratized media (e.g. blogs) is helping pave the way.

Best,
Matt
3 Naomi Dunford Nov 3rd, 2007 at 6:06 pm

I’m a little slow on the uptake here. I put the notification of your comment in my “Needs feedback” file. Well, I thought I did. Turns out I drag-and-dropped it to the one next to it - “Mom Whining”. No joke. And no wonder I didn’t go back and look!
i agree with your point about democratized media. Now that most of the world has access to the voices of people who are not The Powers That Be, I think many will be able to make much more informed decisions. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing some things the way we’ve always done them (i.e. college). I think there’s a lot wrong with doing things BECAUSE that’s the way we’ve always done them.

Have a great weekend,

Naomi
4 Matt Nov 8th, 2007 at 11:24 pm

Indeed. Thanks for coming back.

Best,
Matt