Hi everyone,
On behalf of SparkPath and the Challenge mindset community, I’d like to thank you for a wonderful 2024.
This year, you took the idea of the Challenge mindset and helped spread our reach to over 100,000 students! Thank you. I appreciate everything you do to make these ideas come to life and to help our students reach their potential.
This year, you also helped us get over 1,000 copies sold of The World Needs You. The launch exceeded my expectations, and it's thanks to the word of mouth you created.
New tool alert!
Your feedback over the last few years launched the creation of three new tools that will be coming out in the new year.
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Career Myths Cards - Help your students discover career myths that can hold them back, as well as new empowering beliefs that can carry them forward.
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Action Cards - The Action Cards help students answer the following question: What do you do once you've sorted the Challenge Cards? How can you take action on your new options? Imagine a card sort with fun, short activities that let the student identify what they need, instead of assigning homework. Launching soon!
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LifeDesign Workbook - A K-12 tool to make the careers curriculum come to life over one or two weeks of classroom time, an hour a day. Find our latest and greatest thinking on Myths, Challenge Cards, Generative AI, and inspiring action. This workbook is already classroom-tested, and features the right balance of concrete applied action and meaningful scaffolded reflections to meet them where they are. All in small bite-sized activities that you can plug and play into your curriculum. Stay tuned for launch info!
Wins
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Presenting at NACE and NCDA. Our presentation with Harvard at NACE led to new connections and new institutions using the Challenge Cards.
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Connecting with Australia and New Zealand: I also really enjoyed meeting a whole group of wonderful folks, from Australia and New Zealand. For this privilege, I have to thank Kate McBeath, who's been a wonderful champion for us, internationally, as well as David Carney, for the opportunity to speak to CICA members about ChatGPT.
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Professional development for your team: We've also met many institutions through the Purpose-Driven Training Program providing professional development for their team members.
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Introducing the unique Ivey Business School custom Challenge Cards: We co-developed a custom-made Challenge Cards deck to help students at the undergraduate and graduate levels explore challenges to solve, based on the unique opportunities offered at their school.
Ivey's visionary leader, Jennifer Baytor, tapped into a unique asset at their institution: their faculty's research. Based on a collaboration with their internal research institutes, along with Sarah Willsey and Apurva Lagwankar, we created cards that made their challenges come to life. The results so far have been terrific. Students are introduced to their purpose, Ivey Business School, and a career conversation that is deeply engaging and personalized.
Challenge Cards in Action
Personal Updates
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Selected as a Forty Under 40 recipients for 2024
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Added Samuel to our family (thank you, Jeremy for the adorable LinkedIn jumper!)
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I’m also proud to announce that I was selected as the closing keynote speaker for the 2025 National Career Development Association Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. This has been a goal of mine and I’m thrilled for the invitation and opportunity.
Team
I’d like to highlight three important collaborations that have helped SparkPath serve you better:
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Jodie Boyer, SparkPath’s Support Specialist - If you purchased the physical or digital Challenge Cards, you’ve likely experienced Jodie’s speedy and friendly service. Jodie has answered hundreds of questions about our tools, and she is ready to answer hundreds more!
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Ally Gaeckle, Project Manager - Operational mastermind driving our product creation and overall team capabilities. Recently, Ally was heavily involved in the creation of our set of tools coming out in 2025.
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Nicola Edwards, Career-Advisor-In-Residence - Nicola acts as sounding board and provides ongoing feedback for our new solutions, our latest writing, and the authoring of our philosophy to support students.
What’s on the Horizon for 2025
We hope you'll engage with all of our new tools and experiment with them. Beyond this, we will also be creating new engaging YouTube videos for students that you can use with your students. Be sure to subscribe to our channel to stay in the loop!
We'll also continue to experiment with creative ways to help students flip the model using GenAI, our database, and some potential new tools. I’ll be sharing our progress along the way!
Thank you for all the wonderful work that you do. It's a pleasure and a privilege to collaborate with you on this important mission.
Thank you to Farnam Street and Khan Academy for the inspiration to write this post.
SparkPath Annual Letter 2023
SparkPath Annual Letter 2022
SparkPath Annual Letter 2021
SparkPath Annual Letter 2020
SparkPath Annual Letter 2019
SparkPath Annual Letter 2018
