Today, I couldn’t be prouder to share with you that we are relaunching the CareerVillage.org platform with a new look and a new website.
Five years ago Jen and I started CareerVillage.org as a passion project in our living room with the help of some friends and a hundred volunteers willing to give career advice to students in five New York City public school classrooms. Our mission to democratize career advice was born out of our own experiences and the experiences of millions of youth who lacked access to career guidance for reasons outside of their control. Since then CareerVillage.org has become a community of tens of thousands of youth and professionals sharing experiences, curiosities, ambitions, and dreams. For many students, CareerVillage.org is the very first experience they’ve had learning about careers, and I’ve heard stories from countless young people about how the advice they found at CareerVillage.org helped them pick a career goal and create their first resume and get an internship and get into college and so much more.
Over the past few months, I’ve been asking myself what it is about our community that has made it so successful. What I’ve come to realize is that CareerVillage.org is not just a place where questions get answered. It’s really a place where people believe in each other. What makes this community so special is that it’s a place where every young person, regardless of their background or their ambitions, can be welcomed and believed in. That’s what sets us apart, and it has been my honor to be a part of such an inspirational community for the past 5 years. Today we’re rededicating ourselves to the CareerVillage.org mission and announcing a new look and website.
A vision for what this community could achieve together
What if every single young person knew of a place where they could find the definitive answers to every question about every career? What would that mean for the millions of young people who have no access now to career advice? We believe that you, the CareerVillage.org community, can create that place. We all have a role to play: students by posting heart-felt questions about how to prepare for your future, and professionals by posting comprehensive and well-written guidance that is encouraging and supportive. Working together, we can build a trusted source of career guidance for youth that every single young person can trust to quickly find the absolute best piece of career guidance available anywhere for any situation they might be in, no matter how specific. Imagine career advice for every underserved or underrepresented group. Imagine a piece of career advice from this community at the top of the Google search results page for every single time a young person searches for information about a career. Imagine a million career questions answered! We could do for youth career guidance what Wikipedia did for general knowledge, and what StackOverflow did for programming questions: make it so easy to find what you’re looking for that it becomes just a part of everyday life. Nearly 100% of internet users use Wikipedia. Nearly 100% of programmers use StackOverflow. Can we get 100% of young people to use CareerVillage.org? If we can do that for a whole generation, we will have the most active, most prepared, and most career-ready generation of youth ever. The impact of what we could achieve together could be astounding.
A new logo and look
To get recognized by all students as a high-quality and trust-worthy community, we need to stand out from the rest of the crowded internet. We need a recognizable brand. The logo we started with five years ago wasn’t designed with this kind of goal in mind, so we got input from over 100 community members and learned that our logo and website was not recognizable enough and was getting ignored and washed out whenever we tried to use it outside of our website. We redesigned a whole new logo and color scheme that we can use consistently not just on our website but everywhere we try to reach out to new community members online. It’s easy to read, has a unique color scheme that reflects our values, and is flexible enough for us to use in special campaigns of any kind (which means we’ll be able to use it anytime and anywhere).
For the graphic designers and semioticians out there wondering what it all means: The mint color reflects our dedication to being a calming and reassuring force in the lives of our youth, who are often faced with far too much negativity and stress when it comes to preparing for something as uplifting and exciting as their future careers. The purple color represents exploration and curiosity, which are values we should all encourage. The stacked chat bubbles represent the variety of perspectives included in our community. The CV inside the chat bubble does double-duty as a quick abbreviation of our name as well as an allusion to the curriculum vitae, a classic representation of one’s career path.
But this is more than just a logo. It’s a whole new system we can use to support you, the community. By changing what is inside the chat bubble, we can highlight what the CareerVillage.org community is talking about at any given moment. This can help us shine a spotlight on the topics you care about, the questions you have, and the people in the community.
A new website experience
We’re also relaunching our website, our email notification system, and all of our social media accounts with this new look. The new site has a large font, a de-cluttered layout, and tons of subtle changes on nearly every page. The result is an easier to read, more modern, more distinctive, and more trust-worthy design. We think the new website does a better job of giving your questions and answers the weight and credibility they deserve.
There are far too many changes on the website to list all here at once, but one thing hasn’t changed at all: the process to ask or answer a question is 100% the same, and works just as easily as it always has.
What comes next
The initial feedback has been great so far, and we would love to hear from as many of you as possible about other ways you think we all can work together to achieve the vision of truly democratizing access to career advice. We’ve also been working on a lot of new features and community resources which we will be launching over the coming few weeks, including features that will help young people turn knowledge into action, features that will help professionals find tips they can use to write the highest quality career advice possible, and features that will make it easier for community members to celebrate their career successes with the rest of the CareerVillage.org community.
To visit the new website, head to CareerVillage.org. If you need a high res version of our updated logo, let us know. To see our new look in action elsewhere on the web, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.