Finding Your Passion: Step Two

*Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts leading up to the launch of Sokanu. In this series we will be discussing the core purpose behind the Sokanu vision as well as outline what our product does. For a full list of posts in this series see the left hand column of the blog.

In our last post, we began to discuss what steps Sokanu is going to take in order to help you find your passion. We explained how difficult the problem is to solve because humans are organic creatures. We began to discuss the first step in the process, which is helping you identify a cluster you may be interested in.

In this second post, we are going to talk about how we can begin to segment individuals into careers that they may be interested in. Imagine that you have found one or two clusters that you resonate with. Let's use Trades as an example. Under that cluster, you will see a number of careers. such as:

  • Sheet Metal Worker
  • Electrician
  • Plumber
  • Carpenter
  • etc...

 

Obviously these careers all have attributes related to the cluster that you are in. When you click on one of these careers, you will see a lot more information on it. Absolutely everything we have discovered about that career is packaged into something we call a "career portal". The goal of each career portal is to have the highest quality, best curated content on the internet brought to you in one place. In order for the content to make sense to you the user, you will need to be able to quickly assess whether you are potentially interested in that career or not. In order to do that, the career portals need to present the experience of each career in a beautiful way.

Our theory is that you, the person looking to find your passion in life, already know internally what you resonate with. By virtue of being in one cluster, you have elimated 90% of the careers on the site. Already Sokanu is getting a lot smaller for you. Now, when you see these career portals, you can easily let us know your intent by "following" the careers that interest you most. I won't say much more about the details of the career portals, because that's something we will reveal when we launch.

So how does this help? How does following a few careers help you find your passion in life? Well, this is just one piece of the puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle is your social graph. We all have Facebook accounts, but do we know what all of our friends do? What careers are they interested in? Are all of our contacts really "friends"? Are some of them more job-based? Some distant connections? Some people you don't even know at all?

Sokanu's goal here is to help you understand better who your friends are, how they relate to you and what help they can potentially be in your quest to find the perfect career for you. Once again, I'll leave the details until launch - but your "social graph" is a very powerful thing, and the way that we all consume information and advice has drastically changed over the past few years. We are guaranteed it will change again soon.

At first glance, Sokanu is going to look very large. But as you begin to use it, it will become smaller and smaller, eventually only showing you exactly what you need in order to help you make an informed decision about what your passion is. Our goal is to build an experience that is totally customized to your needs and situation at your point in life. This is the only way we can truly adapt to organic, growing people. Will we build the perfect system off the start? Of course not. But what you are going to see in the near future is the first step in a journey to help every single person on the planet find the career they are meant to be in.

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What if you have no idea where to start? How can you identify with a certain "type" of career to know if it is right for you? These are all questions that make Sokanu "tick" and I can't answer them in detail right now. But in our next post I will talk about the problem of having no direction to start in. I will also talk about some strategies that we will be taking to start to shift the current model of thinking about career decisions into a more intelligent, collaborative world. Stay tuned.