NextStep

Home Page – Landing screen of NextStep
Description View - Explaining our mission and what we offer
Skill Tree View – Interactive visual paths for various careers
Mentor Form – Forms for mentors to add custom career journeys and insights
Learner Dashboard – Track saved paths and learning progress

Inspiration

Many people navigating career changes, especially women re-entering the workforce, neurodivergent learners, or those from rural areas, struggle to find clear, accessible guidance. Existing platforms are either paywalled, too generic, or not actionable. We wanted to change that with NextStep: a platform offering visual skill trees and real mentor insights to guide users through unconventional but meaningful careers.

What it does

NextStep helps users explore career journeys as visual roadmaps. Each career is represented as a skill tree, showing essential steps, required skills, and learning resources.
Mentors can contribute their own journeys, offering personal advice, tips, and curated materials.
It’s a community-driven platform with built-in trust signals, users can upvote paths, track progress, and request new careers to be added.

Features & Workflow

For Learners

Explore Career Paths: Browse visual skill trees across different industries
Access Mentor Insights: Click on the steps to see real advice and resources
Compare Journeys: View different real-life routes to the same career
Track Progress: Save paths, mark steps as done
Rate Effectiveness: Vote on useful content
Request New Paths: Suggest career trees that don’t exist yet

For Mentors

Share Experience: Build new paths based on real journeys
Contribute Knowledge: Add resources and guidance to existing trees
Build Recognition: Gain visibility for expertise
Track Impact: See how many users follow your guidance
Join Community: Collaborate with other mentors

How we built it

We built the frontend using Next.js, focusing on an intuitive and responsive interface.
Mentors can submit paths via dynamic forms, which feed into a growing library of interactive visual skill trees. We designed the platform to scale with crowdsourced input while maintaining clarity and structure for users.

Challenges we ran into

Creating responsive, scrollable skill trees was a design and coding challenge, ensuring nodes remained clear and clickable on all screen sizes.
Integrating mentor forms with structured path data, maintaining consistency across journeys, and building a reputation-based contribution model were key technical hurdles — but we successfully implemented them all.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developed a fully functional UI with career roadmaps, mentor insights, and upvoting
Built dynamic mentor contribution forms with real-time path updates
Created a working system for community-rated guidance
Won the Gender Equality Award at Open Geneva 2025

What we learned

Visual guidance makes career planning more approachable and less intimidating
Community contributions make the platform smarter and more adaptive
Users value real stories more than generic advice, and visualising them builds trust

What's next for Next Step

Explore partnerships with schools, NGOs, and returnship programmes
Add user accounts to save progress and personalise the experience

SDG Alignment

SDG 4 – Quality Education: Provides structured paths to learn without formal institutions
SDG 5 – Gender Equality: Highlights women mentors and re-entry paths into male-dominated careers
SDG 10 – Reduced Inequalities: Supports marginalised users like rural and neurodivergent individuals