It Takes a Village: The Platform Adding AI to Help Career Searchers Find and Follow Their Paths The Future of Education

Where did you turn for help in deciding what you wanted to do when you grew up?
For more and more students, CareerVillage.org, an online platform that connects high schoolers to advice from real-world professionals, is serving as a trusted guide in navigating their career paths. I sat down with the nonprofit’s founder, Jared Chung, to discuss how they are sourcing and delivering career advice; developing AI that enables the scale needed to address the massive need; and ensuring the reliability, transparency, and accessibility of their services through their growth and innovation. I was particularly struck by some of the intersections with the book I’m working on to help people find their next job, which you’ll be hearing more about in the coming weeks. As always, subscribers can listen or watch the conversation or read the transcript below.
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Time Topic
00:54. The story behind Career Village
03:48 Career Village’s scale and services 
09:31 How end users engage with the platform
11:25 The AI Career Coach 
16:44 User reactions of the new AI
18:59 Ensuring the quality and transparency of the AI, from source data to end product 
26:18. Building access through scale and ensuring equity
29:36. The promise of the AI Career Coach and where to learn more
Michael Horn: 
Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and you are joining us on the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And part of that, of course, is really navigating the world and transitions from education into career and making sure that you're finding something that really helps you make progress, not just in the jobs that you hold, but in your life. And it's consistent with the purpose that you have. And to help us think about that, today we have Jared Chung. He is the founder and executive director of Careervillage.org, which we're about to hear a lot more about. So, Jared, welcome. It's great to see you.
Jared Chung:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Michael Horn:
I'm excited to learn about what you all are doing. I know you have a number of initiatives in AI and elsewhere that are very cutting-edge. But before we get into that, just level set us all what is Careervillage.org, and what's your founding story behind it?
Jared Chung: 
Careervillage.org is a nonprofit organization based here in the United States that helps people prepare for careers. And we do that using technology. We do that using people, the power of people. And importantly, we do it at a very large scale. And the reason we focus on scale is that the scale of the need is massive. The number of people who need support, advice, guidance, and information to prepare for their first or next career move is nearly ubiquitous. So, we focus on scale. The origin story, I think that it's almost such a universal mission. Everybody finds in it something that speaks to a part of their lived experience or the communities that they're in. For me, I, as a young person, was very career-oriented because I cared about financial stability for myself, and for my family. When I was in education, I knew that I wanted to get a job after an education that was going to allow me to put food on the table. And that was pretty much my only calculus at that time. I got very lucky to have some people in my life who served as mentors for me to help me navigate my way into college, help me ask questions that I was able to get answered about careers and help me navigate my way in my first job. So, when I started my first job, I turned back and was mentoring and advising young people, volunteering with nonprofit organizations and youth development, and helping young people prepare for careers. So th