52% of graduates don't work in jobs requiring their degree. Yet they spend 5.7 years and $156K earning it. Why? Students choose careers without testing the actual work. CareerLab fixes this. Complete hands-on tasks - build financial models, debug code, analyze consulting cases - across multiple careers. Our AI learns what you actually enjoy and recommends careers based on reality, not personality tests. Test careers before you waste years. Built by students who switched majors 4x.
Hey Product Hunt! š
I'm Ibrahim, co-founder of CareerLab. My co-founder Sanan and I are UW-Madison seniors who collectively switched majors 4 times and wasted years figuring out what we wanted to do.
**The problem we're solving:**
52% of college graduates don't work in jobs that require their degree. Yet they spend 5.7 years on average and $156K earning that degree.
Why does this happen? Students choose careers without ever TESTING the actual work. They rely on:
ā Personality quizzes (too generic)
ā Career Advising (not relatable, or even credible)
ā What sounds prestigious (not what they'd enjoy daily)
We interviewed 40+ undecided students and kept hearing: "I thought finance would be interesting. Now I'm a year in and I hate it."
**What we built:**
CareerLab lets you test careers through hands-on tasks BEFORE you commit:
- Build financial models (finance)
- Debug real code (software engineering)
- Analyze strategy cases (consulting)
- Clean datasets with Python (data science)
- Write product specs (product management)
You rate each task, our AI learns what you actually enjoy, and recommends careers based on reality - not assumptions.
**Why it's different:**
1. Multi-career testing (compare 2-3 careers simultaneously)
2. AI learns from your self-reflection (not static one-time assessments)
3. Reality-based (includes the boring/frustrating parts of work)
4. Built by students who lived this exact problem
**Current stage:**
ā Live product with first UW-Madison cohort
ā 300 professor-vetted resources
ā Free to try (freemium model)
**What we'd love feedback on:**
- How do we reach more undecided freshmen at scale?
- What marketing channels work best for student-focused products?
- Any advice on getting universities/orgs to pilot CareerLab with their students?
Thanks for checking us out! Happy to answer any questions š
Try it free: thecareerlab.live
- Ibrahim & Sanan
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