15 Best Online Career Exploration Tools for High School Students
December 28, 2024
I love remembering the weird stuff they had us do in high school in the early 2000s. We spent several class sessions in a computer room junior year, taking personal assessments that were supposed to culminate in the perfect answers to help us decide what career we should pursue. After agonizing over every answer to make sure I was properly securing my fate (because of course this rudimentary computer program was going to prescribe my future), I found out my #1 perfect career choice. (continue scrolling for the Best Online Career Exploration Tools for High School Students).
What was it?
Orchestra conductor.
I had no real musical talent to speak of. I sang in the choir, but I didn’t know the first thing about music theory. Sure, I had played the French Horn in 4th grade, but I gave it up because I couldn’t force myself to practice every day! But the computer program hadn’t asked me about playing the French Horn. It just said that I was probably good at directing things. So, okay, I should just rearrange my life, interests, and natural abilities and start thinking about how to conduct an orchestra.
Whenever I’ve faced uncertainty in my adult life, I’ve often thought back on that experience and said wistfully to myself, dang, maybe that computer program was right.
Exploring careers that are right for you
But of course, it wasn’t right!
Look, just like social media, online resources for career exploration have come a long way since the days of MySpace and LiveJournal. There are plenty of great online tools for you to check out different careers and assess your own strengths and interests so that you can begin to find the path that’s right for you.
Check out this list of the 15 best online career exploration tools. Each one does something a little bit different, whether that’s helping you to assess your interests, do research about specific jobs, or finding inspiration in your chosen field, these top tools will help you get to where you want to go.
Best Online Career Exploration Tools for High School Students
1) O*Net Interest Profiler
Sponsored by the Department of Labor, the O*Net Interest Profiler is a great place to start your career exploration process. Why? It’s a comprehensive assessment that takes your interests into account. Then, it lays out a series of possible “Job Zones” that you can investigate further. It breaks those Job Zones down into specific careers that you can then investigate, as well. I’ve used the O*Net Interest Profiler myself, and I’ve had it recommended to me in different career development seminars. It’s not a crystal ball that’s going to tell you precisely what to do with your life. But it will help you to start broadening your horizons to understand what job possibilities are out there for you.
2) Roadtrip Nation
Roadtrip Nation is a super cool resource. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from O*Net, which is very, well, plain in its presentation. But Roadtrip Nation is a documentary production company that creates videos and interactive resources for people to “get behind the wheel” of different career and life paths, seeing through the camera lens what it’s like to go in one direction or another. They say that their videos are designed to show you “why it’s OK to feel lost, and help you realize that you’re not alone—that moments of doubt and uncertainty are all normal on the road to building a fulfilling career and life.”
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3) Educations.com Career Quiz
More than 1.6 million students have already taken the educations.com Career Quiz, and with good reason. This tool is designed specifically to help students who want to start thinking about what they will study at college, what a “dream job” looks like, and what kind of degree might help them get to that dream job in the end. They advise quiz takers that there are “no right or wrong answers” and to “just go with what feels right.” This is the best advice out there! If you want a career in which you feel satisfied, it’s better if you start out with a solid feeling in your gut. The quiz takes just 10-15 minutes, and it can help you get a start on your career research process.
4) Career Girls Career Quiz
Look, it doesn’t take much to research to understand that, based on historical circumstances, there’s a gender gap in pay and job achievement between men and women. The Pew Research Center recently showed that the gender pay gap hasn’t changed much at all in the last two decades, despite efforts to the contrary. So, specific tools tailored to girls that address the long-standing cultural practices that often set girls and women back aren’t just helpful—they’re necessary. The Career Girls Career Quiz is specifically designed to help girls think about where they’re headed in life. You could easily pair this quiz with the O*Net quiz above to see how the results compare and contrast for you.
Career Girls also has a number of other resources, like a Role Models page, Careers, and Career Clusters page that will all help you explore different possibilities and imagine a brighter future for yourself. Let’s go, girls!
5) CareerOneStop Skills Matcher
Another great tool sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, the CareerOneStop Skills Matcher is a tool designed to help you figure out how your current skillset translates into a job. The Department of Labor wants to get you hired, y’all! The nice thing about the Skills Matcher is that it lets you assess your proficiency at 40 different commonly-held job skills, and then shows you jobs that use those skills. High school students could answer the questions honestly and see what comes back. Or, you could run a “hypothetical” version of the quiz. Answer the questions as if you were at the height of your career. What skills do you want to be able to use? Try answering the quiz in that direction and seeing where it points you, then do some research into that specific career field.
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6) CareerOneStop Interest Assessment
If you’re not quite ready to think about skills, you should check out the CareerOneStop Interest Assessment tool. Again, it’s all coming from the Department of Labor, so you can trust the validity of these tools. But this assessment is really going to look at what interests you as a person, and it will use those to help you think about what kind of career you could do. And it’s going to start at a very realistic level. For example, do you like to do any of the following?
- Be physically active
- Spend time outdoors
- Focus on real-world things, like plants and animals
- Take machines apart
- Fix things
Your answers will guide the tool toward jobs that will work for you. Time to be honest about what it is you really like! You can then use the rest of the tools on the CareerOneStop site, like the Career Clusters page, to help you investigate potential jobs.
7) JobShadow.com
Ok, this tool is super helpful. Once you have some interests, “career clusters,” and potential career paths laid out, come to JobShadow.com to watch some of their 400 videos about different careers. They have job categories broken down into Business/Finance, White Collar, Blue Collar, Medical, and Random, and you can browse through interviews with different types of workers to help give yourself a sense of where you might want to go in your life. Do you feel like one of the people in these videos? Start checking out the possibility of that career!
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8) CareerVillage.org
There are so many amazing resources out there, and there’s a reason Career Village is on our list. This website is completely free, and it’s designed to help students find answers to their burning career-based questions. The process is simple:
- Students ask a question about any career.
- Questions are matched to relevant professionals.
- Professionals answer those questions with their personalized advice.
It’s like finding a mentor, but for the specific questions you have in mind. And without having to search high and low for the answer. Create a profile and have fun asking away!
9) BigFuture from the College Board
The College Board—the folks who make the SAT—is a great resource for career information. Their whole existence is built around moving people to the next stage in life, after all. BigFuture is a great tool that provides three big resources: a career quiz, a college quiz, and a scholarship quiz. You can spend the day hanging out on BigFuture, take each one of the quizzes, and end up with tons of food for thought as to career paths you might explore, colleges you should research, and scholarships for which you might qualify. Take a swing at it!
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10) A Day in the Life by Vault
This page is so highly specific, it’s going to help you really zero in on your feelings about a job once you have an idea about where you’d like to go. With articles like, “A Day in the Life of a Jones Day Junior Associate” and “A Day in the Life: Social Media Manager,” you’re going to get a really clear idea of what it means to work in any particular job. This tool can help you sort through the noise and gain clarity about whether or not you might like a job.
11) YouScience
So far, we’ve listed all free resources. Access is important to us here at College Transitions, and we don’t want to limit anyone from finding the career that’s best for them. That said, YouScience is a paid resource that individuals can access for the cost of a $49 assessment. The assessment helps you discover your strengths and aptitudes, how you might work well with others, and what careers are in line with your specific personality and skills. If you try the free resources and aren’t quite satisfied, it could be worth considering the investment, if you think more information might be helpful on your research journey.
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12) RippleMatch
RippleMatch is going to be a great tool for anyone ready to get into the job or internship market. It’s an AI-driven tool that you can sign up for for free. It helps you find the specific jobs and internships that align with your skills and experience. No more scrolling online job boards for hours—spend your time and energy applying for jobs that actually apply to you.
13) The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook
Jobs for therapists and government administrators are on the rise—and positions in those fields are predicted to keep growing over the next 10 years. How do we know this? Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes it its business to take stock of job data and think about the future of employment in America. The Occupational Outlook Handbook is a super granular way to investigate the future possibilities of career fields that interest you. To continue the example, if you’ve thought about studying psychology and you see that jobs for therapists are set to keep growing over the next decade, it might help you feel more secure about choosing to major in psych. Take a spin around the handbook and see what your future holds, no?
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14) The Princeton Review Career Quiz
Need to come back to the drawing board? Check out The Princeton Review’s Career Quiz. It’s going to present you with a series of “Would you rather?” style questions, like “I would rather be a tax lawyer” or “I would rather be a newspaper editor.” Then, over a series of questions, it will help you to narrow down career possibilities. This quiz might work better if you have some knowledge of what different jobs entail. Without a little knowledge, you could make assumptions that might prevent you from exploring jobs you really like. Still, the tool can help you to narrow down possibilities if you’ve already done a little exploring.
15) MyFuture
MyFuture is a tool produced by the Department of Defense that contains helpful information about career, college, and military prospects. It’s not designed specifically for veterans or people in the military, necessarily, but it does contain options about the military intentionally. Our other tools don’t do that specific task, so we wanted to include an option that might help students who are curious about military service. The nice thing about MyFuture is that it can assist you in putting military prospects in context with your other options, so that you can compare and contrast between your various thoughts for the future. It is yours, after all!
Best Online Career Exploration Tools for High School Students – Additional Resources
