Daily Endeavor Blog

We’re on a mission to create the most comprehensive guide to jobs that’s ever been written, and to fill a basic information need for every person on the planet. We’re focusing first on social change areas, both because they’re crucially important, and because they’re actually hiring — K-12 education, microfinance and human rights. Ultimately, our goal is to profile 100,000 types of jobs over the next 3 years, and make them available to every person of working age, and every student researching their future.

Today we’re excited to invite you to join in!

As the largest professional migration in history is about to begin, with tens of millions beginning to head for their next job, they’re heading straight into a wall. This is a problem. Every single person thinking about what they want to do next will first ask the question “what are my options?”, then, repeatedly, “what’s that job really like?” Despite the 160,000+ types of job in the US alone, there is no resource to answer these with the information most people want.

There are menus and recipes that tell us about what we could eat. There are travel guides and maps that tell us about where we could visit. There’s the market to give us pricing information. Yet there is no comprehensive guide to learn about the types of jobs one could pursue.

Many sites offer quality information on the top 100 or so types of jobs. But what if you want to join the movement to revolutionize education, or play a role in extending credit to entrepreneurs around the world who are making change locally? What if you want to pursue a job that wasn’t invented 10 or even 5 years ago? You could look at Job listings, but they certainly don’t tell you all you want to know. In fact they barely scratch the surface.

Today, the best source to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on a job is through your network — to ask someone who truly knows about it. Unless you’re a Twitter all-star, or extremely well known in your field, chances are your network is likely to be limited, and especially, limited to the area you already know. So the informational meeting, while high bandwidth and highly valuable, is not a silver bullet. It lacks scale and discovery.

We want to change that.

We want to help people discover jobs they never knew existed, make informed decisions about whether it’s a good fit, and make even better use of the existing job search tools out there. In an ideal world, the scope of your “informational network” is global and you have direct access to the experience of people who have actually been in the jobs you want to learn about.

Fortunately, this is an information problem we can solve with the web. Endless expertise lives in the heads of millions of people. We firmly believe many of you want to share it. Not only because you’ll demonstrate your expertise, but also because you’ll be helping others out. This is a problem we can all solve together. In fact, we’ve built a free, simple way to make it possible.

Daily Endeavor is a project to build the most comprehensive guide to jobs that’s written by real people. It’s a place to describe highlights, lowlights and a day-in-the-life for a given type of job. We want to help you answer questions like “What’s it like to work as a manager at a charter school network?” and “How do I get a job in human rights advocacy?” and “Are there any real estate roles in microlending?” Like Wikipedia, it’s a place to start your research.

By design, there are a number of things we’re not doing. Daily Endeavor is not a job listings site. There are loads of good ones out there and we will partner with many of them. It also isn’t a place to review organizations. Experiences vary so much from person to person that we believe figuring out whether you want to work with a team or a manager is best handled by talking with that team or manager.

This is a massive project, and we’re just getting started. I personally look forward to hearing your thoughts on how to shape it. We’ll be making blocks of beta invitations available while we get the project on its feet. If you’d like one, you can sign up here.

Here’s to a work life worth living. For everyone.