Decode Your Career Pathways is a web app quiz that scores your interests, strengths, and study preferences against 24 careers across fields like tech, medicine, business, and engineering - then shows your top 5 matches with recommended subjects, degrees, and top universities.
Added a step where the quiz asks which country you’re from and whether you want live job listings for your country or the existing Canadian data. If you opt in, it pulls live results for your country; if not (or if there’s nothing available), it falls back to the built-in Canadian dataset. Makes the quiz useful beyond a Canada-only audience without losing the reliable baseline for users who skip it. Also cleaned up a handful of small bugs along the way.
TODAY’S WORK :
API Integration - Indeed’s job API turned out to be sales-gated with no self-serve access, so pivoted to Adzuna (free, self-serve). Wired up live job postings per career on the detail screen, with caching and graceful loading/error states. Also added a country-selection step before the quiz so postings can be localized, plus fixed a couple of rendering bugs that came with it.
Share Result - Added a “Share Result” button that generates a downloadable PNG summary card and copies a shareable link. Answers are encoded straight into the URL, so results travel with zero backend.
Compare with a Friend - New stretch feature built on the share-link encoding. Paste a friend’s link, we decode and recompute their results, then show a side-by-side comparison with overlapping matches highlighted.
Big polish day. Replaced hardcoded pixel positions with a percentage-based layout and made the canvas actually resize instead of being stuck at 1520×730. Added keyboard navigation (arrows + Enter) and in-memory progress persistence with a “resume quiz?” prompt so closing the tab doesn’t wipe everything.
Wired yesterday’s scoring work into the detail screen - you now see a confidence badge and a line like “You matched because you value Impact + chose Science” instead of just a bare result. Also wrote day-in-the-life blurbs for all 24 careers and added a related-careers section (Software Engineer -> Data Scientist, etc.) so the quiz doesn’t dead-end at your top match.
Split the quiz out of one giant file into data.js, quiz.js, scoring.js, render.js, with a basic test harness for calculateResults(). Then fixed the actual scoring bug: careers used to win on being consistently “meh” across every question instead of nailing a couple of perfect matches. Added a bonus for 3/3 scores on 2+ questions, confidence labels (“Strong Match” / “Worth Exploring”), and tracking for which questions drove each career’s score.
Built out the results screen (ranked cards with match score, salary, outlook) and a detail view for digging into one career fully - subjects, degree, specializations, and top universities.
Wired up the actual quiz - question progression, single vs. multi-select handling, and a scoring function that totals weighted points per career and sorts for the top 5 matches. Also added a university lookup table mapped by field, so the results screen can suggest real schools per career.
Before touching any UI, put together the career list - 24 careers across Medicine, Technology, Business, Engineering, Law, Education, and a few others. Each one has salary range, outlook, recommended subjects, degree, and specializations.
Then built a scoring table: every career gets weighted values across all 5 quiz questions, so answers aren’t just matched to one “type” - they add up across multiple signals (subjects, interests, motivation, study length, work style).
Started this because I kept noticing how scattered career research actually is — subject requirements in one place, degree info in another, salary data somewhere else, university rankings somewhere else entirely. Wanted something that pulls all of that into one quick interactive tool instead of 10 open tabs.
Plan: a short quiz (5 questions) that scores your answers against a list of careers, then shows your top matches with everything you’d need to know — subjects to focus on now, degree to aim for, and where to study it.
