About Career Lab
Try a job before you pick it. Read what it is like, then do a realistic piece of it.
- 29jobs written so far
- 36situations you can play
- 0scores, types or grades
What it is
What you can read
What the work is like, what it pays, and how people get in. Every figure says where it came from and when we checked it.
What you have to do
One realistic task from that job, using the kind of judgement the work requires.
Then we show you what your answer did. What you spotted. What you protected. What it cost. No marks.
Who it is for
People aged 14 to 18
Picking options, courses or a first job, and still cannot picture the day.
Career changers
Facing months of training or a pay cut, and wanting more than a job profile first.
Schools and colleges are welcome to use it. Nothing here reports on a young person to an adult. See the safeguarding position.
What it does not do
This list is the point of the page. Every one of these is a thing careers products normally do.
Not a personality test
No type at the end. No four-letter code. No colour. The quiz tells you which kinds of work your answers pointed at, and why.
No score, ever
No mark, no grade, no percentage, no leaderboard. We tell you what your answer did, including when it went badly.
No right answer hidden in it
Nothing is marked against a preferred answer, because the real job does not have one.
Not a recruitment ranking
Vacancies, applications and CVs are tools you control. Sponsored roles never alter Career Match.
Not a replacement for advice
Pay and entry routes are published figures, so treat them as a guide. A careers adviser knows your situation. This does not.
Safeguarding
Every situation has an age band and only opens for someone old enough. The people in them are made up. The hard moments are the ordinary ones the job contains, not upsetting detail added on top.
Every reply is safety checked before anything answers it. The check runs twice, on the server and in the browser, so it still works if the network drops. If someone says they are being harmed, the roleplay stops. No character talks over it.
Career Lab is not a counselling service, a crisis service or a reporting route. If someone is at risk, contact one of these or the relevant statutory service.
Both free, both open at any hour.
Where the facts come from
Pay, hours and entry routes come from published sources. Each page says which one and when we checked. We write the situations ourselves.
- National Careers Service
- ONS earnings data
- SOC 2020
- Institute for Apprenticeships
All published under the Open Government Licence.
Start with any job
You do not need an account to read. See whether the job matches what you imagined.