TryCareerMatch
A full-stack career-discovery app that maps 125+ skills against 85+ roles across 10 sectors, built to help professionals with non-linear backgrounds find where they actually fit.
Professionals with non-linear backgrounds (people who've combined design with finance, or technical work with product strategy) struggle to articulate where they fit in the job market.
Traditional career tools assume you fit a clean archetype. They don't account for the reality that many valuable professionals span multiple domains and their strongest matches aren't obvious from a job title alone.
The result: misapplied CVs, wasted applications, and a persistent feeling that "I'm qualified but I don't know what to call myself."
TryCareerMatch builds a full profile through a guided 6-step onboarding that covers education, experience, skills, interests, and work style. Users pick the skills relevant to them (with search and suggestions) and rate proficiency on those. A server-side rule-based engine then scores their fit against 85+ roles across 10 sectors.
The output isn't a single "best match"; roles are ranked into three tiers (Ready now, With upskilling, Long-term goals), each with a per-dimension score breakdown, skill-gap analysis ("top skills to develop"), career-path and seniority guidance, and a narrative read of the profile, topped by a hybrid career archetype that names the user's blend of strengths.
No account needed for your free report. Optional paid add-ons (a deeper report, coaching) and a save-your-results flow exist, but nothing is required to see your results. Results in about 5 minutes.
How It Was Built
From a client-side prototype to a full-stack product, rebuilt and iterated since launch.
The Scoring Model
Each of the 85+ roles has an importance profile across the 125+ skills, plus required ("must-have") skills and typical education and experience.
The engine scores four weighted blocks: core skills (50%), adjacent skills (20%), education (15%), and experience (15%). It then penalises missing must-have skills, infers behavioural skills, aligns interests (RIASEC), and lets strong education and experience compensate for each other.
This is why a Data Analyst with strong SQL and Power BI but limited stakeholder management scores higher on analyst roles than on product roles, even when both surface in their results.
The skill taxonomy spans 11 groups across business, data, finance, product, design, and more. A separate rule-based pass writes the narrative in the free report. The matching and ranking engine is 100% rule-based, and always will be. The only LLM anywhere in the product sits in a newer paid report tier, which uses Claude to generate a deeper personalised narrative on top of those same rule-based scores.
Your career archetype
The report doesn't just rank roles. It opens with who you are. Eleven hybrid archetypes are built from five career forces: Insight, Craft, Market, People, and Order.
The forces are never asked. They're inferred from the same profile the user already filled in. Each skill group and experience domain maps to a force. The top two combine into a named "bridge" (ten of those); a strong third makes you the eleventh, The Polymath.
It's purely additive. It reads the scoring snapshot and never alters a score. And it's honest: with too little signal it returns no archetype rather than inventing one, and every result carries a confidence level.
Stack
A full-stack app where the depth is in the scoring engine and data model.
Lessons Learned
What worked, and what I'd approach differently next time.
See where your skills lead
Complete the assessment in about 5 minutes, free and with no account required. Just an honest look at where your profile fits.