The origins of Inspired2Work

The idea for Inspired2Work arose through what John Krumboltz might call "happenstance.” John, a professor of counseling psychology at Stanford University, has long been interested in finding ways to help people establish meaningful careers. His dream has been to create a way for people to explore different occupations, not just by reading about them, but by having the opportunity to do some of the work involved.

In the 1970’s John created educational materials called Job Experience Kits, which had activities related to different professions. For example, the carpenter kit included nails and wood and had you do some basic tasks related to framing. The kits were distributed by an educational publisher, and were well accepted in schools and counseling centers. In the late 1990’s, John continued working on his dream by developing the Virtual Job Experience, an immersive multimedia program that allowed you to see what it was like to work at a given job. His first prototype was about working as an advertising account executive. The resulting multimedia CD-ROM was a tremendous accomplishment. John, who is a natural story teller, designed the entire story board. The program is interesting, humorous and challenging. It gets you involved in tasks related to working as an account executive, like pitching proposals and doing market research. Unfortunately, the production costs were prohibitively expensive, and John was unable to raise the necessary funding to create the library of programs that he envisioned.

My consulting work focuses on educational technology, and I have been getting more and more interested in the ways that user contributed content can be used in education. One day, I was thinking about home made videos, and I wondered if they might provide a way to create career related content. I met with John and posed the following question. What if we could create a web site that had a library of thousands of amateur-made movies about different jobs—would this be something he would be interested in doing? It turns out that John is a movie hobbyist and has been making home videos for years. He immediately saw the power of using videos as an educational resource, and he liked the idea of focusing on user contributed content. We then began moving forward to make the idea a reality.

We ended up naming the web site Inspired2Work because it expresses the focus of our endeavor. Too many career related resources focus on information rather than inspiration. They are full of facts and data, but leave you feeling bored about jobs. Both John and I feel that establishing a rewarding career requires trying out lots of activities to find out what you like and dislike. Ultimately, the career that is right for you is the one that you have fun at. The goal of Inspired2Work is to allow people to explore many types of work, and to hopefully find work that inspires them.