Reflection
I built WorkFeel out of a persistent frustration with how we push teenagers to make high-stakes, lifelong career choices based entirely on abstract prestige and job titles. A career isn't a static noun; it's a verb—a daily sequence of social environments, cognitive loads, and specific tasks. I wanted to create a workspace where students could look past the noise of high-status labels and directly engage with the visceral reality of day-to-day work, giving them the true agency to navigate their own futures.
To achieve this, I skipped the low-engagement surveys and built a localised database schema designed to capture immediate, intuitive reactions to concrete operational scenarios. During our early pilots, I watched students repeatedly try to game the choices to find the "correct," highest-status outcome. That behaviour confirmed my suspicion that passive reflection isn't enough; clarity is only built through action. I structured the system to close with a practical commitment: guiding students to translate their preferences into a low-risk, 4-week micro-experiment, like organising a project or facilitating a meeting. My responsibility as an educator isn't to hand them a fixed map of a volatile world, but to design the safe, structural playground where they can safely test it for themselves.