NextStep CTE
How NextStep CTE helps CTE students choose their professional future
Career guidance for technical education
The context
Helping students in Minnesota find their direction
NextStep CTE is a career-guidance platform created for students in technical and vocational programs — the courses that prepare young people for skilled jobs in fields like healthcare, manufacturing or technology. It was launched by the South Central Service Cooperative (SCSC), a public education agency in Minnesota, in the United States, with MetaMedicsVR providing the technology.
The goal was simple to state and hard to solve: give students a clearer, more personal way to explore what they could become, and connect what they study in class with the real world of work. The platform brings schools, local businesses and working professionals together around that single idea.
The challenge
Career decisions made with too little to go on
Many students reach the point of choosing a career without a clear picture of their options. According to the platform's own account of the problem, three gaps kept getting in the way:
- Students lacked clarity about which career paths were even open to them.
- There was a gap between what was taught in class and what employers actually need.
- Traditional guidance tools were static and outdated, so few students engaged with them.
This is not only a local issue. National surveys of recent graduates point in the same direction: a large share of young people finish school feeling unsure about their next step and unprepared to choose a career or major. In one widely cited national survey, about three in four high-school graduates said they did not feel fully prepared to make their college and career decisions. When uncertainty piles up like this, it can turn into frustration, lost motivation and, in some cases, dropping out.
What we built
One place to explore careers, talk to professionals and plan a path
Together with SCSC we designed a gamified digital platform — meaning it borrows the feel of a game, with progress and rewards, to keep students engaged — that pulls career exploration into a single, friendly place. Instead of a static booklet, students get an experience they actually want to use.
What students can do on the platform
- Explore interactive career profiles grouped by sector, so they can browse whole families of jobs at once.
- Have real conversations with working professionals through live video sessions, supported by artificial intelligence that helps guide the dialogue.
- Receive personalized career sheets and learning itineraries tailored to their interests.
- Track their own progress as they explore.
- Access everything 24 hours a day, from any device.
The mix matters. The interactive content sparks curiosity, the conversations with real professionals make a career feel concrete and reachable, and the personalized resources help each student connect their studies with their own interests and aspirations.
Why it matters
Students who connect with their future, not just read about it
Rolled out across technical and vocational programs in Minnesota, NextStep CTE shifts career guidance from a one-off conversation to something students can return to whenever they want. Because everything lives in one place and is available around the clock, a student can pick up where they left off at home, compare two paths side by side, or book another chat with a professional without waiting for the next counseling appointment.
By linking the classroom to local businesses and to the people who do these jobs every day, the platform helps close the gap between education and the real job market — the gap that left so many students unsure in the first place. Teachers and counselors get a shared tool to build on, and employers get an early, friendly point of contact with the next generation of skilled workers.
The cooperative that launched the program sums up the change this way:
NextStep CTE has changed how we guide our students. They don't just learn about careers — they connect with their future, both emotionally and strategically.
That is the real measure of the project: students who stop seeing their future as a distant, abstract question and start treating it as something they can shape, step by step.
If you recognise your own situation here, let's talk about how it could work for you.
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