Creative Ladder's new quiz helps young talent find a creative career they could love

The ad industry continues to struggle with how to make it easy for underrepresented talent to learn about creative careers. But new digital tools from The Creative Ladder, built by Work & Co, couldn't be any easier to use—pointing young talent to some 45 creative industry jobs, and narrowing down that list based on their skills and interests. Creative Ladder’s newly launched Career Finder is a simple online quiz that takes just minutes to complete, asking respondents everything from how they approach projects, to what they like to do in their free time, to what skills they're proud of, and more. At the end, the site then suggests potential job in creativity—going into detail about what each one entails, with testimonials from execs who do each for a living. The result is a clear and colorful experience that should help young talent begin to understand what creative jobs are out there, and which might be a great fit for them. Check out a quick overview of the creative here: "When it comes to your career options, sure, you can Google anything, but first you have to know what to even search for. You have to know a career path exists, what kind of specific jobs it entails and what skills or personality traits help you thrive in that path," said David Griner, the advertising journalist who co-founder The Creative Ladder—a nonprofit that makes creative careers more accessible and inclusive—with Ryan Reynolds and Dionna Dorsey Calloway. "Since the earliest days of developing The Creative Ladder, we've wanted to have a simple, shareable tool that any talented young person could use to learn about creative careers in marketing, advertising, design and commercial production," he added. "The Career Finder is exactly what we'd envisioned. Our hope is that it will introduce thousands of tomorrow's top talents to potential jobs that help them turn their passions into potential careers." The 45 jobs included in the quiz results at launch are divided among six larger career paths—design, technology, writing, production, project management and strategy. Those who take the quiz a few times can be exposed several more possible paths, to match the nuances of their interests. "It's possible, and a great outcome, if people with a variety of skills can see where those skills are transferable—as you could be well suited to do more than one thing, but wind up choosing based on your interests," said Rupal Parekh, partner at Work & Co, the digital product agency that built the experience. "To introduce people to—and then keep them in—the creative industries broadly means also helping them see how they can try different areas." Parekh said it's not just the quiz results that are personalized to the user. The colors and shapes are, as well—delivering different combinations based on a user's answers. The Work & Co team behind the project explained further: "We wanted to double down on the idea that everyone is unique and creative in their own way. So within the quiz and the content that it surfaces, we defined shapes and colors around personal characteristics and played with layering them based on how users would answer questions in the quiz to reveal a custom combination. Once all the questions are completed, the results show a personalized design that helps define a user's possible career path. As we continued to get further into the details, we realized the shapes would be a super fun way to transition between questions, adding more color and movement to the experience." As for the backend technology, the team added: "To rapidly deliver a fun and inspiring quiz experience that scales, we built the experience as a Next.js Application integrating with Sanity for management of content throughout the flow and Framer motion to bring the shape transitions to life. Building with this stack on top of the Vercel platform allowed us to quickly iterate and ship, while also laying an incredibly robust foundation on which the organization can scale in the future. Features like Vercel’s dynamic Open Graph generation library ended up making a huge difference, allowing us to easily dynamically generate social imagery for the 60 different quiz results pulling from CMS content."

Creative Ladder's new quiz helps young talent find a creative career they could love

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