At a time when access to career guidance can shape opportunity and economic mobility, millions of job seekers, especially those from underrepresented or low-income backgrounds, still lack the support to navigate education and career pathways. Jared Chung is the CEO of CareerVillage, a nonprofit that combines community mentorship with AI-powered guidance to make career navigation accessible and personalized. CareerVillage connects individuals to actionable advice, helps institutions integrate guidance into programs, and provides real-time labor market insights. We have been working with Chung on CareerNet, a Renaissance Philanthropy-led project to develop three state-of-the-art benchmark datasets that leverage CareerVillage’s crowd-sourced career question and answer data. In this 5 Questions interview, Chung reflects on the surprises of combining human mentorship with AI and the vision for a future where anyone can receive high-quality, on-demand support to build meaningful careers.
What is the nature of your work?
At CareerVillage, we’re reimagining what it looks like to explore, navigate, and find new career opportunities. We started as a platform that connects job seekers with actionable advice from professionals in real-world fields, leveraging both community knowledge and AI-powered insights. Today, we’ve developed Coach, an AI powered career coach that provides personalized guidance on careers, skills, or pathways informed by real-time data on labor market trends. Coach is available to individuals for free, but we also work with education institutions, workforce training providers, and national nonprofits to integrate the Coach platform into programs that support job seekers at critical transition points, whether moving from high school to college, entering the workforce, or pivoting careers.
My particular role as CEO is to guide the organization’s strategy, develop partnerships, and ensure our technology and programs truly meet the needs of job seekers and workforce stakeholders. Ultimately, our work is about creating an accessible, scalable career navigation ecosystem that meets people where they are and helps them make informed, confident decisions about their futures.
Why is this work important?
Career guidance has traditionally been limited by geography, resources, and access to mentors. Millions of job seekers, particularly those from underrepresented or low-income backgrounds, lack the support needed to navigate education and career pathways effectively. This gap contributes to opportunity inequity and missed potential in the workforce, which doesn’t just hurt the job seekers themselves, but also businesses in search of new pools of talent. By combining a community-driven model with sophisticated AI-enabled support, CareerVillage democratizes access to guidance that was previously out of reach for far too many people. Job seekers can ask questions anytime, receive contextually relevant answers, and explore pathways aligned with both their interests and the realities of the labor market.
For employers and educators, our platform provides insights into skill demand and learner needs, helping to bridge the gap between education and employment. In short, this work is critical because it empowers job seekers to take control of their futures, builds access to career knowledge, and strengthens the connection between education and the workforce in a rapidly evolving economy.
What’s been the biggest surprise so far?
One of the biggest surprises has been seeing how quickly job seekers adapt to AI-powered guidance and the depth of questions they ask. Many adults and youth alike bring highly nuanced concerns, ranging from career pivots to specific skill development, that require tailored, actionable responses. While we anticipated curiosity and engagement, the variety and specificity of questions have exceeded our expectations, reinforcing that job seekers are hungry for relevant, trustworthy guidance. In turn, watching Coach learn from the community and provide increasingly personalized responses has been exciting; it demonstrates that technology can amplify mentorship rather than replace it. Each interaction is a reminder that career navigation is deeply personal, yet with the right tools, we can make it accessible to all job seekers, regardless of background or circumstance.
Where do you see your work in five years?
In five years, I see CareerVillage as a central hub for lifelong career navigation, supporting job seekers from middle school through adulthood as they navigate their career journeys. Coach will be even more sophisticated, proactive, and agentic. We aim to expand our partnerships with schools, workforce programs, and nonprofits so that guidance is seamlessly embedded into job seekers’ daily experiences, and to provide actionable insights for organizations and policymakers about workforce trends, skills gaps, and equitable opportunity access. CareerVillage will be a core leader in supporting our ecosystem to adopt and build AI tools for career development responsibly. Ultimately, the world we’re aiming to build is one where anyone, anywhere, can receive high-quality career guidance on demand – reducing opportunity inequity, increasing workforce readiness, and helping people build meaningful, sustainable careers in the evolving economy.
What else should people know?
CareerVillage isn’t just a platform; we’re at the forefront of a movement to make career guidance universally accessible. Our approach combines community, technology, and data to create an ecosystem that scales mentorship in ways that were previously impossible. We’re also one of the founding members of the AI for Career Development (AICD) Coalition, a group of about 150 diverse organizations within the career development ecosystem, working to ensure that AI supports and enables job seekers rather than perpetuating inequity in the labor market. Relationships are in many ways at the heart of career guidance, and while Coach is proving that it’s possible to provide transformative career navigation support at scale, it’s the work of our partners around the country that show what the combination of AI and dedicated individuals and organizations can do to build an equitable and inclusive economy.
