The target audience of the following concept is college, high school, or precocious elementary school students. It seems that a large number of people make it to their mid-20's somewhat lost and unsure what to do with their life. This site will try to eliminate this problem by providing information about how someone can leverage their skills, hobbies, and interests into a rewarding career. It will simultaneously circumvent misguided advice from uninformed and insular thinking parents and guidance counselors (if they even care at all).
The user inputs their preferred skills, hobbies, or interests. Some search algorithm compares these to a constantly updated database of every job classified site on the web. It outputs a number of matching careers along with a wealth of supplementary information. This would include current salary estimates, academic course of study rec's (if any), common obstacles, common paths to an entry level job, best sites for additional information, etc. Armed with this knowledge, teens will have tangible answers to asinine and unimaginative questions like 'What are you going to do with THAT degree?,' or, 'Why waste your time reading about THAT?'
You could create forums for users with similar interests to interact. You could make special subscription portions of the site, such as useful college rankings with criteria related to your specific interests. Something where the user says 'I like X, Y, and Z' and they are given the best places to study X, Y, and Z. Finding out where those 'best places' are would be the tricky part of this potential startup, however; there's a great need for reliable and personalized ranking information. The predominant college rankings, US news & world, aren't based on anything normal humans should care about. They're horribly flawed:
'College presidents are a fairly unflappable lot, but nothing gets their goat quite like the issue of rankings. Take a complex institution, crunch it down into a single number, and the adjectives start flying: "Silly." "Snotty." "Scandalous." Echoing many of his peers, Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University, blames the rank-ordering of diverse schools for much of the current college-admissions frenzy. "It's almost as though we've created a monster," he says. And yet, despite years of vituperation, most schools keep dutifully filling out the surveys that make these ratings possible. Why?'
...
'But schools complain that the surveys lock them into the same relative space on the list, often because of decades-old impressions. They also argue that the rankings' formula overemphasizes selective admissions data like low acceptance rates and high SAT scores for incoming freshmen while giving short shrift to what really matters but is much harder to measure: the education students receive once they get on campus. Even more pernicious is what critics call "ranksteering," i.e., specifically tailoring administrative decisions to move higher up on the list. The rankings encourage more per-pupil spending, which makes up 10% of a school's score and certainly doesn't help keep tuition down. Indeed, Bowdoin College watched its ranking slip from fourth to eighth in the '90s as it balanced its budget rather than keep pace with peers' spending increases.'
There is already a movement in place against U.S. news and world rankings. You could partner with them to develop your own ranking methodology for the subscription based portion of this startup idea.
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