As COVID-19 upends the workplace and the economy, students and young adults face unprecedented uncertainty. Millions of high school and college seniors are about to graduate into the most turbulent job market since the Great Depression. The picture is equally complicated for young adults who were just starting their working lives, and suddenly find themselves furloughed or laid off and questioning what’s next.

Career navigation and guidance has, perhaps, never been more important. But it is at high risk of falling aside, as educators grapple with a whole host of urgent issues.

Fortunately, technology—in particular, the growing market of career navigation products—can help. New research from my venture firm, Entangled Group, released today in “Unlocking Career Potential: An Analysis of the Career Navigation & Guidance Product Landscape,” outlines how those digital products are using technology to augment and scale the work of teachers, advisors, and other career guides.

The paper, informed by researchers and practitioners and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shows that these products not only can stand in for in-person services no longer available at this time, but in many ways actually improve on the old status quo. As Jeremy Podany, Founder and CEO of The Career Leadership Collective, says, “Career services have successfully scaled information—job postings, recruiting events—but not advice and navigation.”

The growing product market can help with that. Nevertheless, it faces challenges and has left opportunities untapped—especially for serving low-income, Black and Latinx students who face the biggest barriers to attaining economic stability and mobility.

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Growing and Evolving Market

This new product landscape maps more than 150 career navigation products for the K12, postsecondary and early job seeker sectors, and draws on a growing body of research on how learners navigate from education to career. It shows that, long before COVID-19, career navigation products were helping to push the market beyond transactional last-mile services, offerings like jobs boards or resume support, to more holistic career support.

The career navigation product market is growing, with almost three quarters of the products on the market less than 10 years old. As we worked to segment and make sense of the market, in partnership with researchers and entrepreneurs in the space,  we landed on a framework we call the Career Navigation Cycle. It has four distinct stages:

1. Expose is the process through which students develop an understanding of their interests, aptitudes, and career aspirations.
2. Discover is active and targeted exploration—through experiences, learning materials, and relationships—of work activities and specific career paths.
3. Demonstrate is about acquiring skills aligned to a specific career path and learning how to demonstrate and explain them to employers.
4. Achieve is the active job search phase and includes networking, practicing for interviews, creating required assets (e.g., resume, digital presence), interviewing, and negotiating offers.  

This Career Navigation Cycle is not a linear process, but a cycle that individuals will repeat, starting and stopping at different points, across their work life. The current product market (map below) has promising offerings in all four categories in the cycle, plus a fifth focused on infrastructure.Market Map: Career Navigation Products (downloadable version).

5 Ways Career Tools Can Innovate

‍In order to expand its reach and impact, the market will need to evolve and continue to grow. Five areas for particular focus are:

#1 The market needs to get more creative about offerings outside the “Achieve” category.

‍The common discourse treats “landing a first job” as the primary, and often only, goal of career navigation and guidance. As a result, the Achieve category dominates the market and is growing. But this focus overemphasizes the final phase of the Career Navigation Cycle, ignoring the importance and influence of the other phases.

#2 Career navigation and guidance should happen early—but the product market largely ignores this.

‍Career navigation and guidance are critical throughout education and early adulthood, and  starting early is best. High school and postsecondary are important periods for career navigation—but research has shown that middle school is a particular sweet spot for starting career exploration that is tied to realistic planning. As Mizuko Ito and her colleagues write in “Influences on Occupational Identity,” adolescence “is a critical window for decision making for occupational pathways, and for introducing youth to career-relevant experiences and opportunities.” However, very few products serve middle school.

#3 Career navigation isn’t one-and-done, but the product market treats it that way.

‍The career navigation process is iterative and nonlinear, and learners need support and guidance across their trajectory. But today’s product offerings too often treat navigation as a circumscribed process, limiting students’ and young adults’ ability to experiment, test, and develop their interests over time.

#4 Postsecondary is an important sector, but the market needs to think beyond traditional college-goers.

‍Career products disproportionately serve postsecondary education (53% of products), compared to K-12 (19%) or the two combined (9%). This outsized focus on postsecondary education excludes millions of learners—potentially widening the gap between students who attend traditional postsecondary education and those who stop at a high school education or pursue non-traditional learning beyond high school

#5 The market needs a sharper focus on equity and outcomes.

‍The product market is responding to existing structures, funding avenues, and incentives—and runs the risk of reproducing many of the inequities it would ideally reduce. Products should not just provide market-driven solutions for high-opportunity learners in well-resourced schools and colleges. Rather, they should create solutions for the low-income, Black and Latinx learners who could most benefit from additional navigation support and guidance.

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Career Navigation: 2020 and Beyond

‍As COVID-19 disrupts institutions and systems, we cannot lose sight of the fact that we aren’t just trying to get students through the next few months but also are preparing them for the rest of their lives. Career navigation, especially in turbulent times, is more critical than ever.The emerging market of career products is designed to take advantage of real-time data and online delivery in ways that could prove powerful for today’s students and young adults. But the research is clear: we cannot simply deploy these products more quickly and hope for good results. Rather, we must scale them up with core principles in mind—an understanding of the full navigation cycle, a focus on providing guidance early and often, and an unrelenting focus on equity and outcomes.Doing so will require innovation and renewed investment, and both will pay dividends well beyond this current crisis.