Mozilla is proud to share Discover, a prototype for a tool that empowers young people to identify an amazing career, then map the skills and experiences needed to land it.
Finding a career can be challenging. Cool jobs exist, but attaining them can seem impossible — especially for young people with varied interests and skills. Mozilla’s Discover project helps identify great careers by profiling the learning experiences of working professionals, then allowing youth to map their own path to a rewarding job tailored to their skills and interests.

“This is awesome, it’s like a much cooler and helpful version of my career adviser at school. And it looks like a game app.”

– Sarah, 10th grader from Brooklyn user testing at a Hive event

Discover works by connecting Open Badges to young people’s education, experiences, personality traits and interests. These paint a picture of  their skills — and where they need to  grow — to apply for their dream job, volunteer position or learning  opportunity.
Learners begin by browsing career paths of real-world professionals on the Discover site. The skills and experiences necessary for exciting careers are visualized as badges within editable maps. Learners can pledge to follow a similar path, or design their own career pathway from scratch. The pathways feature progress indicators and room for notes, so the experience is entirely customizable.

Working in partnership with industry leaders and professionals, the Discover project has created badge ecosystems in three major fields of employment: technology,  healthcare and service. While pathways are primarily intended to help young people maximize their own strengths to access careers, they are also aimed at meeting the expectations of employers, and can function as a valuable tool for matching candidates with opportunities.
The team behind Discover was greatly inspired by game-like mechanics and based their prototype on the following design principles:

Learning Pathways Are Malleable

Pathways are non-prescriptive and highly customizable experiences that evolve  according to a learner’s personal needs. In her book MindSet, psychologist Carol Dweck introduced the idea of a “growth mindset” in which intelligence and talent are malleable  factors. Dweck writes that cultivating a growth mindset “creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” As such pathways were imagined as puzzles, where users can rearrange their badges and add new ones as they progress in non-linear ways. 

They Are Playful

And They Help You Tell a Story!

While interviewing many professionals in the field and listening to their stories, the team realised that it’s a story that people love to  both tell and hear. That’s why in the prototype you will find little journal looking icons called “story bits,” that highlights the narrative side of learning and career pathways. Savitz-Romer & Bouffards’ book, Ready Willing and Able: A Developmental Approach To College Access and Success, illustrates that trying on an identity and pursuing a narrative approach when engaging youth in career options is especially important to that demographic.

Get Involved

• Explore the Discover site. Check out a featured pathway and pledge to follow a similar path or create your own from scratch.
• Discover is an open source project built by the Mozilla community. If you are interested in helping us improve it, please visit our GitHub repo or reach out directly to Chloe Varelidi, chloe at mozillafoundation dot org.