Case Study | 98 Companies, One Assignment: Career Exploration at Scale with Advize in the Classroom

Business Undergraduate Honors Class of 42 Students |  Large Public University  |  Spring 2026

The Challenge

Every career educator faces the same impossible math.

You have one semester, one syllabus, and — in many cases — one of you. Your students have dozens of different majors, backgrounds, and ideas about what they want to do with their lives. Some already know. Most don’t.

The goal is real: give every student a clearer picture of the working world, a stronger sense of what fits them, and the confidence to act on it before they graduate. But the traditional tools — career panels, guest speakers, job shadow days — are by nature limited. A guest speaker reaches the whole room, but only speaks to a few students’ interests. A career fair is broad but shallow. Live one-on-one conversations require a professional network, and for students to already know what questions to ask.

What students actually need is something that feels impossible to provide at scale: a real conversation with a real professional who works in the field they’re curious about, at the moment they’re curious about it. Personalized. Specific. Honest.

And even when you do pull off an alumni guest speaker or a panel, another problem remains: you have no idea what students actually took away. What clicked. What surprised them. What they’re now considering that they weren’t before.

That’s the problem this assignment was designed to solve.

The Approach

The instructor directed students to a career assignment link from the Advize platform — a library of short-form video interviews with working professionals across hundreds of industries, roles, and career paths. Each student would receive AI-powered content recommendations and search through all professionals (or even their university's alumni) by industry, job function, company, job title, traits and identities, or major, and find someone whose career resonated with their own questions.

The experience was designed to feel less like coursework and more like having access to a professional network most college students don’t yet have. One instructor. Forty students. Ninety-eight companies represented in ~143+ watched videos.

Students completed three structured reflection questions after watching — designed to build genuine career awareness, not just information recall. And because everything happens on the platform, the instructor gets something most classroom activities can’t provide: a clear window into what each student watched, what they learned, and what they’re thinking about their future.

The Assignment

Students were asked to find two professionals (Advizers) on the Advize platform, watch their interview videos, and then answer three reflection questions. Specific instructions:

• FIRST Advizer: search for someone with "supply chain," "logistics," or "operations" in their profile (searchable by industry, role, major, and more)

• SECOND Advizer: your choice — search any topic that interests you

Students were told to give specific examples from the videos to earn full points, then export their results and submit via Brightspace.

Reflection questions:

1.  Is this a career path or company you would want to pursue? Why or why not?

2.  For the second Advizer, why did you choose that person, video, or profession?

3.  What did you learn about the Advizers’ job roles, and/or what surprised you?

Engagement & Participation

Of 42 enrolled students, 40 had started the assignment at the time this data was exported. Two students had not yet begun. All averages below reflect the 40 who participated.

Thirteen students had their Advizer lists truncated at five in the export, meaning their actual viewership was higher than recorded. Nearly 30% of the class went beyond the minimum requirement without being asked.

Self-Directed Exploration

One of the most telling signals of genuine engagement was voluntary playlist usage. Beyond the required Advizer videos, 32% of students independently explored curated Advize playlists — thematic collections grouped by industry, major, or career question. This was not prompted by the assignment.

Playlist topics students chose on their own included:

•       Landing Entry-Level Roles in Finance

•       Career Paths as a Film, Media Arts, or Visual Arts Major

•       Favorite Parts of Working in the Apparel, Beauty, Retail & Fashion Industry

•       How Identity Impacted Career: Former Foster Youth

•       A Day in the Life in the Finance Industry

•       Career Paths as a Business Management & Admin Major

•       Who Thrives in the Healthcare, Medical & Wellness Industry?

The playlist selection reflects the range of backgrounds and interests in an honors cohort — students were not just consuming assigned content. They were investigating their own questions. And they did it entirely on their own.

Understanding Gains: Before vs. After

Advize measures self-reported career understanding before and after each playlist on a scale of 1-5. Among the 27 playlists with complete before/after data, the results showed consistent, meaningful gains.

Zero-change playlists were concentrated in areas where students already had baseline familiarity — Finance, Business, and Supply Chain. This is consistent with an honors business cohort. The largest gains came from content students had no prior exposure to:

Career Awareness in Action

The richest data in this assignment was qualitative. Student reflections show what happens when students are exposed to real professionals across industries they had never considered: they discover things they didn’t know they didn’t know. Three themes emerged across the cohort.

1. Soft Skills Over Technical Skills

Across nearly every reflection, students noted surprise at how consistently Advizers prioritized interpersonal skills — communication, curiosity, and relationship-building — over technical expertise. This reframing is significant for business students who often assume credentials and hard skills drive career success.

2. Identity-Driven Discovery

Students frequently chose their second Advizer — the free-choice pick — based on shared identity, background, or personal history. This pattern reflects Advize’s “who is like me” search behavior in action: students are not just looking for career information, they are looking for themselves in the professional landscape.

3. Exploration Beyond the Familiar

Several students deliberately chose Advizers outside their intended field — treating the assignment as an opportunity for genuine exploration rather than validation. One student’s reasoning captures this spirit directly.

Even students with strong existing career clarity demonstrated self-awareness worth noting. Rather than dismissing the content, they articulated why a path was or wasn’t right for them — a distinct and measurable learning outcome.

Alignment with NACE Career Readiness Competencies

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) defines Career & Self-Development as a core career readiness competency: “Proactively develop oneself and one’s career through continual personal and professional learning, awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses, navigation of career opportunities, and networking to build relationships within and without one’s organization.”

Student reflections in this assignment demonstrate direct evidence of four of NACE’s listed sample behaviors:

What This Means for Your Program

You can’t be in 98 companies at once. You can’t schedule 40 guest speakers or personally connect every student to a professional in the field they’re curious about. That’s not a failure of effort — it’s just the math of teaching.

What this assignment shows is what happens when you stop trying to deliver career insight yourself and instead give students the tool to find it. They self-direct. They go deeper. They make connections between what they’re watching and who they already are. Your role shifts from content provider to reflection guide — and the outcomes follow. 

Here is what the data from this course suggests for educators considering a similar approach. 

Short-form video works for students

An average of 27+ minutes watched per student, across multiple videos, demonstrates that students engaged at depth, not just to complete a task. The specificity of their written reflections confirms the videos were actually watched.

Free choice drives the most authentic learning

The second Advizer pick, fully self-directed, produced the most revealing and personally meaningful reflections. Structured exposure followed by open exploration appears to be an effective sequencing model.

Self-awareness is an outcome, not a byproduct

Students who concluded a career was not for them demonstrated the same learning outcome as students who found a new passion. Knowing what you don’t want is career clarity. The reflection questions surfaced this consistently.

Playlist gains are highest where students know the least

The +71.6% average understanding gain from playlists (~approximately 30% above average) — with peaks of +400% — was driven by content outside students’ existing areas of familiarity. This suggests Advize is most powerful as an exposure tool, not a reinforcement tool.

98 companies, one assignment, in less than 30 minutes per student

Students collectively explored professionals from 98 distinct companies through a single class assignment. No career fair, panel, or guest speaker series produces that breadth. For students who, "don't know what they don't know", that kind of range matters.

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One assignment. Easy setup. Real professionals and data that show exactly what your students discovered.

Set up your first assignment in under 15 minutes — no keynote, no coordination, no curriculum to build from scratch. Visit advizehub.com to get started or schedule a conversation with our team.