Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions you’ll make in your life. Downstream of that choice is how you spend at least 8 hours each day, how much you’re able to earn, and even where you live. For some, a career is also a lifelong vocation, something that jolts you out of bed in the morning and your last thought before you drift off to sleep. Needless to say, choosing the right career at each point in your life is a remarkably important decision. Yet despite the amount of time that we spend building our careers day-to-day, we spend remarkably little time reflecting on the right career to pursue. Outside of a few recommendations from friends and family, popular media, and potentially a teacher or two, many Americans fall into careers by chance without having had the opportunity to reflect deeply on all the paths available to them. We spent some time over the holidays investigating what resources are available to people in exploring and comparing all the careers out there. Not just lawyers versus doctors or electricians versus plumbers. We wanted to compare hundreds of career paths across every dimension that matters. How long is training? What does education cost? How does pay grow over time? What’s a day on the job actually like? These seem like basic questions, but it turns out nothing exists that answers them well. In the process of our search, we discovered something surprising: millions of people already turn to government websites for career information. These are either federally funded websites like CareerOneStop or state funded resources like WorkSource Oregon. While comprehensive in some respects, these websites aren’t exactly the easiest or most welcoming to navigate. Yet they were still getting millions of views a month, showing that lots of job seekers are seeking out this critical career information wherever they can find it. We wanted to build something people could actually use. We didn’t just want to aggregate career information. We wanted to give people tools to compare career paths, project lifetime earnings, and find real training programs and job listings they could actually act on. The motivation was simple. Jake’s dad is navigating a career transition after 33 years in healthcare administration, and we watched him struggle with the same problem millions of Americans face: there’s no good way to evaluate your options and find job listings and training programs across them. When we talked to career counselors to validate this issue, they told us that a lot of the government sites that people are pointed to are almost impossible to use without professional guidance. Despite being 30 years into the internet revolution, these barriers to critical information help explain why many Americans get into their careers by chance and circumstance. Enter American Dream Jobs: an open-source and 100% free “Wikipedia for Careers.” The core idea is simple. First, capture the best data we can about the labor market. Leverage extensive government data (BLS, O*NET, etc) on career paths, skills requirements, and job growth. Add on an AI-resilience score from the best available research to help people understand how technology is changing the labor market. Layer on third party sources (currently Reddit comments) about each career so you can get different perspectives from around the internet from practitioners. That’s a pretty substantive foundation of important career information. Second, build tools that help people navigate and act on this information. Use AI to recommend optimal careers given someone’s previous job experiences, interests, income goals, willingness to invest in training, and skills. Build levels.fyi style comparison trees between different careers so people can compare pathways side by side. And let people calculate their lifetime earnings for each career by tweaking variables like savings rate and retirement age. Finally, empower people to act on that information so they can actually get a job. Let people find 50+ job listings in their local area for any career they want in a single click, and do the same for training programs. A quick walkthrough of the features we’ve built (check out the website here): Career Compass asks a few simple questions about your timeline and goals, then matches you with careers and real job openings. You can choose to upload a resume for better results. Find Jobs allows you to find 50+ job listings in your local career for any career in our database. Career Database covers hundreds of careers with filters for pay, training time, and category. Think levels.fyi but for the entire labor market. AI Resilience Scores rate each career’s exposure to automation. We synthesized research from the best available research into a transparent scoring system with four tiers: AI Resilient, AI Augmented, In Transition, and High Disruption Risk. The methodology is published on the site. It’s provisional and will evolve as AI does, but it gives people a starting point for thinking about long term job impact. Compare Futures lets you put up to three careers side by side: comparing lifetime earnings, education costs, and ROI. Earnings Calculator projects net worth over time based on different career choices, savings rates, and retirement age. Local Jobs shows real hiring data for your area from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Play around with all of the above and more at americandreamjobs.org This is an early prototype. We built it over the holidays, so please expect some bugs and rough edges. The whole project is open source. If something’s broken or you have ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Open an issue on GitHub or submit a feedback form! https://github.com/jzhao23/ameri...