CareerGraph

Skill Readiness
Career Roadmap
Career Assistant
CareerGraph Dashboard
Mentoring & Booking

Inspiration Choosing a career is one of the biggest decisions a student makes, yet many students struggle to understand what a career actually requires.

Students often find information scattered across websites, courses, job descriptions and online communities. They may know they want to become a software engineer, lawyer, designer or analyst, but they don't necessarily know which skills to develop, how to measure their progress or what to do next.

We wanted to build something that makes this journey easier.

CareerGraph was created around one simple idea: career guidance should not end with telling someone what career to choose. It should help them understand how to get there.

What is CareerGraph?

CareerGraph is a student-focused career exploration and development platform that connects career discovery, skill assessment, evidence tracking and actionable roadmaps in one place.

Instead of overwhelming students with generic advice, CareerGraph aims to turn a career goal into a structured and understandable journey.

Students can explore career paths, understand the capabilities and skills associated with them, assess their current abilities, identify gaps and work towards improving their readiness.

The platform also includes mentorship discovery and a booking workflow to help students explore guidance related to their career interests.

How we built it

CareerGraph uses a full-stack architecture.

Frontend: React, TypeScript and Vite provide the interactive user experience.

Backend: Node.js, Express and TypeScript handle application logic and APIs.

Database: PostgreSQL stores career information, user progress, mentorship offerings and bookings.

AI-assisted guidance: The platform is designed to help draft career-related guidance and plans, with a rule-based fallback where AI services are unavailable.

Payments: PayPal Sandbox is integrated into the mentorship booking workflow to support test order creation and payment approval.

We focused on connecting the different parts of the student journey instead of treating career exploration, skill development and mentorship as separate experiences.

Challenges we faced

One of our biggest challenges was designing relationships between careers, skills, mentors and mentorship sessions.

Initially, the mentorship data model did not properly associate mentors with professional fields. This could result in students seeing irrelevant mentorship offerings. We addressed this at the database and backend levels so that career-specific filtering and booking validation are not dependent only on the frontend.

Another challenge was making career exploration flexible. A small predefined career catalogue is not enough for students with different ambitions. We therefore worked towards supporting additional career exploration while distinguishing drafted guidance from established catalogue information.

We also worked on payment reliability, including server-side order creation, payment verification and booking confirmation rather than trusting information sent by the browser.

Finally, we learned that adding more features does not automatically make a product better. A platform can contain useful information but still fail users if its interface is confusing. This made simplicity, clarity and a guided user journey important parts of our development process.

What we learned

Building CareerGraph taught us to think beyond individual features and consider the complete user journey.

We learned about full-stack application architecture, relational database design, API validation, payment workflows, AI-assisted guidance, testing and the importance of making technical systems understandable to their users.

Most importantly, we learned that career guidance should be actionable. Students need more than information about their future; they need a clear idea of what they can do today to move closer to it.

What's next?

We want to expand the career catalogue, improve the quality of career-specific recommendations, simplify the student experience further and develop a more complete mentorship ecosystem with genuine mentor profiles and scheduling.

Our long-term vision is to make CareerGraph a place where students can move from career uncertainty to informed, measurable progress.

CareerGraph — Turn career confusion into clarity.