Online Career Mentoring: Can It Work?

A new online career mentoring service launched yesterday. CareerDNA is an interactive career mentoring and counseling center that helps you find and manage a career you'll love. Based on the work of veteran career counselor Dr. A. Brian Schwartz, CareerDNA has taken an offline career discovery and assessment process and transformed it into a suite of interactive career management tools – it's available for $49.95 per year.

This service is broken down into four key components:

* Self-Assessment and Validation (identify psychological type, skills etc.)
* Career Finder (which job is right for you?)
* Marketing (how to market themselves as a product)
* Digital Coaching with Peter Weddle (valuable guidance and bi-weekly emails)

My Take: this service is the most ambitious online project I've ever seen to date that tackles the process of finding a career. It's obvious they have put a great deal of thought, time and effort into creating a world class product. The big question is will job seekers pay for it?

There are already many online career assessment products out there that will help you find a job you like. CareerDNA's value is that it combines that assessment with tools to help you create job search materials such as resumes, cover letters and your value proposition. It enables you to craft a "marketing plan" for your career. Marketing yourself is a skill that many job seekers fail to grasp so in this sense the program does a good job of steering the job hunter in the right direction. There is a quick tutorial on the site.

I'm impressed with the thoroughness of the service. I believe there is a market here. When you consider the recent trend in paying for career coaching, $49 bucks seems like a bargain. CareerDNA is a coaching service for the everyday job seeker. It will be interesting to follow their progress. I, for one, will be watching.