Many of today’s top jobs didn’t exist ten years ago; it’s likely that many of today’s school-aged students will work in jobs and industries that haven’t been invented yet. Preparing students for their future careers is certainly not the sole purpose of education, but teachers and guidance counselors do strive every day to empower students in understanding and anticipating their post-graduation-options. But how? How can teachers help prepare students for careers that don’t exist yet? How do guidance counselors help students understand the jobs that are already available? And how do students, educators or counselors find out what jobs might be options in the future?

There are many answers to these questions, and schools and education organizations have become increasingly resourceful in developing methods to set students up for 21st century success. However, according to many teachers and students in the TED-Ed community, there’s still work to be done to bridge the knowledge gap between what happens in school and what happens in the modern workplace.

With this challenge in mind, TED-Ed set out to design an interactive, open-ended series that helps young learners find out more about careers they’re potentially interested in … and careers they simply never knew existed.

The series is called “Click Your Fortune.” Watch the preview below, or check out the full set of demo videos here.

Click Your Fortune was created in the style of “choose-your-own-adventure.” Each video features four professionals (selected from among the awesome attendees of TEDGlobal 2013, as well as some TED speakers) reading career-related questions submitted directly by students. Once all four questions are read, the viewer can click the path that most relates to their interests.

Students can also suggest questions, participants and careers to be featured in future videos. Yes, this series is a work in progress — because we believe it has to be. Career options change fast, and we want to ensure that the series is serving the actual, and always evolving, curiosities of young learners.

The TED-Ed team is excited to get feedback from teachers and guidance counselors regarding the usefulness of this series’ approach. We’re also extremely excited to see some brave students already suggesting content for the next batch of Click Your Fortune Videos!

This was originally posted on the TED.com Blog on Aug. 7th, 2013.

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