Nadira Berman

PathSource App Review: Find Your Perfect Career

pathsource app

Being a teenager is confusing. This is the time when we have to figure out what we’re going to do with the rest of our lives and pick a college that will help us do it. But luckily PathSource, a career navigation iOS app, is here to help.
 

How it works

In order to get started, you’ll need to take two assessments, one to find a suitable career and one to calculate the salary you’ll need to support your lifestyle. After you’ve completed both, the app will list your career matches.

If you like taking personality quizzes, you’ll find PathSource not only helpful, but fun.
 

Career assessment

My assessment was accurate for the most part, although I was a little frustrated at some of my potential matches. For example, “Music Directors and Composers” was a 94% match for me, although I answered that I didn’t want to compose music. But this is the risk of any assessment of this type. They don’t tend ever to be 100% accurate.

The evaluation would probably be more useful for someone who has less preconceived notions about what kind of career they want. Because I already have a specific career in mind, I found myself answering the questions to try to place myself into that field. When I think back, I’m not sure if I answered as truthfully as I could have.
 

Lifestyle assessment

For teens, this assessment is useful because it allows us to see all of real world expenses that we’ll have to deal with in the future, such as mobile phone service, internet, gas, electricity and water. The app factors in everything, from how much you plan on eating out to what kind of car you want to drive. After you put in all of your expenses, your assessment lays out how much money you’ll need to make in order to support yourself. This information is important when choosing a potential career.
 

Useful features

 

Tons of info

I love this app because it gives you tons of information about each career. You can find salary ranges, typical work environments, educational requirements, suitable majors, and so much more.
 

College Finder tool

This feature simply lists all schools in your city (or whichever city you choose). You can filter by size, distance, public, and private. Use the College Finder if you have a specific major in mind and you want to find all schools in a certain area which offer that major.

If you want information about any given school, the College Finder has all the statistics you could ever need. You get average SAT scores, diversity numbers, graduation rates, percentages of students receiving aid, and even information about the varsity athletic teams. This resource is invaluable if you are researching specific colleges.
 

Video interviews

PathSource offers a plethora of video interviews with people in every possible career. I enjoyed these because I got to find out about actual real world positions and how a person can get there. The interviewees all explain their path to where they are today, from their high school interests to their college major to their first jobs. They also talk about what their day-to-day work entails, which is really helpful, truthful information that can be hard to decipher from verbose and complicated job descriptions.
 

Job Board

Once you have a pretty good idea of what kind of career you want to pursue, you can search for actual job openings in your area! So PathSource can take you from having no idea what you want to do with your life to actually applying and finding a real job. The app is with you every step of the way.

 

Author

  • Nadira Berman

    As a Summer Marketing Intern, Nadira is excited to help high schoolers prepare for the SAT and ACT. As a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, she is considering studying economics. In her free time, she reports for the school newspaper and styles photo shoots for the school’s fashion magazine. Besides fashion and journalism, her passions include bagels, smoothies and Netflix.

More from Magoosh