Special thanks to Jun Loayza, author of Living the Startup Life, for his guest post on the launch of FD Career.
As an undergrad, I played video games during the day, partied hard all night, and just barely had enough time for my classes. My future career was the last thing on my mind. I figured that if I got straight A’s, I’ll eventually find a job that I like and that pays well. If this is you, boy are you mistaken.
The time to think about your career is now. Monster.com and your career center help you apply for jobs. Vault.com helps you research companies. But there’s nothing out there that helps you find out what you want to do career-wise or that helps you get there. Furthermore, most career sites are so boring that you would rather go back to work or homework than to spend time on the site. That’s why we created FD Career.
Our career approach is simple, yet unique – live your life as if it were a video game. Think about the last video game you played. Did you just sit around idly waiting for things to come to you, or did you explore the map, slay demons, and gain new abilities and features? There is a direct relation to real life. Think about what you did last week? Did you sit around, watch TV, and play video games, or are you a go-getter who constantly meets new people, reads articles and books, and looks for every way to develop yourself personally and professionally?
In FD Career, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up. As you increase in level, you gain prestige, get new abilities and features, get access to new areas of the site, and are able to recruit with more prestigious firms. This is what we call the FD RPG.
What do you want to do with your career? If you want to be a Consultant, you can go on FD Career and choose the Path of Business. From there, you can take Quests to level-up in 5 different personal qualities:
- Education – Knowledge in your field
- Experience – Your ability to execute your knowledge
- Leadership – Leading teams
- Social – Your overall social influence
- Initiative – Your motivation and drive to develop yourself
For example, an Experience Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis quest. The user would have to solve a profitability problem that a company is having and submit their solutions online on our website. Our panel will judge your recommendations and give you experience points accordingly. A Social Quest could be to increase your social status and influence using Twitter. The quest could be to increase your number of followers to 100.
We plan on launching our first nation-wide competition this October. The competition will be to create a market penetration and product development strategy for a real life company. The winning team will be featured on our website and could be funded the money to execute their business plan.
The next time you’re watching TV or playing video games, ask yourself, “Isn’t there something more fun than this?” There is, and we have it at FD Career.