This free career change roadmap shows where to start and how long a switch will take. Tell it the job you are leaving and the one you want. See which of your skills carry over, what is missing, what to learn first, and a plan that fits the hours you have.
The job you are leaving. The skills you use in it count toward the new one, so the plan starts from what you already know.
Pick from 910 jobs, or type your own title and add a job post below.
Your plan is saved in this browser. The text of your resume, and what you send to the AI, are saved to ClapAssist so our tools can fill them in for you next time. See or delete.
We ran one sample through the tool on this page, the way you would: the job now “Teacher” (read as Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education in the job data), the sample resume below, the job wanted “Instructional designer” (read as Instructional Coordinators), 6 hours a week, no job post. Everything below is what the tool showed, from the O*NET 31.0 job data; nothing was typed in by hand.
68%
17 of 26 skills match · Some way to go.
Next to the score it also says: most people in this job have a master’s degree or higher; the resume shows a bachelor’s degree. So it never says “Ready to apply” here.
Education and Training, Learning and teaching methods, English Language, Critical Thinking, Active Learning, Monitoring, Reading people, Coordination, Instructing, Problem solving and 7 more.
From the resume itself:
In the roadmap’s order: the tools the new job names come first.
About 23 to 36 weeks at 6 hours a week. The longer end counts 3 tools the resume does not show and nobody rated yet (Articulate Storyline, TechSmith Camtasia, Adobe Photoshop); rating them moves the dates.
Sam Carter sam.carter@example.com Experience Grade 5 Teacher | Riverside Elementary School | Aug 2017 - Present - Planned and taught math, reading and science lessons for 28 students a year - Built a unit of 12 self-paced lessons in Google Classroom that 4 other teachers now use - Tracked reading scores in Google Sheets and regrouped students every 6 weeks - Trained new teachers on the school's reading curriculum - Made short how-to videos for parents during remote learning Education Bachelor of Education, 2017 Skills Google Classroom, Google Sheets, Microsoft PowerPoint, Canva, Zoom
What it shows: 17 of the 26 skills the new job needs come with the teacher, so the plan covers the other 9, not all 26. Press “See a sample” above for another change (customer service to data analyst), or put in your own two jobs.
Pick from 910 jobs, from nurse and electrician to teacher, accountant and developer. Each comes with the work skills, knowledge and tools it uses and how important each one is, from the O*NET 31.0 Database of the U.S. Department of Labor. Paste real job posts and their skills are added and counted.
Your resume does most of the work: every job on it is read as its job in the data, with the level that job builds; your degree fills in what you studied; the tools you name count. One AI button rates the rest from your resume, and you can change any level in one click. You see a readiness score, how many skills match, and where each of your levels comes from.
The job’s tools first, then the must-haves, then the important skills, then the everyday work skills you practice as you go, the extras, and proof and applying. Each step has free courses and videos, a practice task from the job itself, and the line to put on your resume. Mark steps done, learning or skipped, and add the plan to your calendar.
Your levels are compared with all 910 jobs, at your level or one above. Jobs O*NET itself lists as related to yours are marked. See how alike the work is, how ready you are, the skills you share and the few to build, and set any of them as your target in one click.
Our own rules, printed in full. Nothing here is a guess dressed up as data.
| Source | Must have | Important | Nice to have |
|---|---|---|---|
| Work skills and knowledge (O*NET importance, 1 to 5) | 4 or more | 3.25 or more | 2.75 or more |
| Tools in the job data | – | “In demand” for this job, up to six, most important first (see below) | “Hot” across job posts and named by related jobs too, or any tool when you give job posts |
| Skills in your job posts | In half or more of the posts, as a requirement | Asked for in fewer posts | Only in nice-to-have parts |
Which tools come first: for the most searched jobs (data scientist, software developer, data analyst, web developer and a few more) a list we checked by hand, and for the everyday name you picked (“AI engineer” puts PyTorch before SAS). For every other job: 3 points if the job data marks the tool “in demand” for this job, plus 2.5 × the share of related jobs that name it, plus 1.5 × how much more often related jobs name it than all jobs do (Excel is everywhere; Tableau is a data tool). A short list or a list of skills in the job post box counts each skill as asked for. A choice in a post (“Tableau or Power BI”, “Pinecone, Weaviate or FAISS”) is one requirement that any one of them meets.
None, Basic, Working, Advanced. The level a job needs comes from O*NET’s level rating (0 to 7): under 2.75 is Basic, under 4.5 is Working, higher is Advanced. Tools asked for need Working. The level you choose changes it: entry level needs nothing above Working and nice-to-haves only at Basic; senior needs the must-haves at Advanced and the important ones at least at Working; mid level is the job data as it is.
Your level is the first of these that applies: your own rating; the AI’s reading of your resume (the button, if you press it); then the highest of: a work skill your current job uses (its level); each job on your resume, read as its job in the data (the job’s level after two years in it, one level lower before that, internships included); your degree (its main subject is Working for a bachelor’s and Advanced for a master’s or doctorate, nearby subjects one level lower, an earlier or lower degree one level lower; any degree gives reading, writing and learning skills); the tools your resume names (a tool is Working; Programming and Computers rise with the number of tools named); a line in your resume that shows a work skill (Basic, Working when three or more lines show it). Every estimate says where it came from, and your rating always wins.
| Importance | Weight |
|---|---|
| Must have | 3 |
| Important | 2 |
| Nice to have | 1 |
Readiness has two parts, scored apart: the tools (the software, tools and hard skills the job data or your posts name) and the work skills (work skills and knowledge areas). Each part = the sum of weight × (your level ÷ level needed, at most 1), divided by the sum of the weights. Readiness = the average of the two parts, and the label (Ready to apply from 80%, Close from 60%, Some way to go from 40%, Early days below) follows the weaker part. A part with fewer than two skills counts together with the other, as one list. A skill with no level from any source counts as none until you rate it. A job whose usual preparation is above what your resume shows (O*NET job zone: a master’s degree against your bachelor’s, for example), or a post that asks for a higher degree, is never marked “Ready to apply”: the report says what is missing.
How alike the work is: the cosine similarity between your levels and each job’s levels on the 35 work skills and 33 knowledge areas, each one centered on its average over all 910 jobs (so reading, speaking and critical thinking, which nearly every job needs, do not make a nurse look like a physicist), with a job’s level weighted by how important it is there; plus a share for the job’s tools you already use (85/15, or 75/25 when your resume names three tools or more). Single-line keyword hints stay out of it. Jobs O*NET itself lists as related to your current job or the jobs on your resume come first, marked, when their work is at least 25% like yours; then the rest by how alike the work is plus 0.6 × how alike the job is to the job you want, so the list leads toward your target (“Work much like yours” from 45%). The list shows your level (job zone: from the work you have done, or your degree) up to one above it or up to the level your degree opens; with a degree and no work yet, from one level under the degree up to it. You can choose otherwise. The number on each card is the readiness rule above on that job’s own list. The list needs at least four known levels.
The job’s tools first (most asked for first), then the must-have knowledge and hard skills, then the important ones, then the everyday work skills such as speaking, writing and problem solving, which you practice while you learn the rest, then the nice-to-haves, then four steps to prove it and apply. Inside each group, the heavier skill comes first.
O*NET has no product manager, UX researcher, AI engineer or DevOps engineer. For these titles the tools come from real job posts: we read the posts for the title on the public company job boards our job finder uses, counted how many of the companies name each tool or skill, and keep the ones named by 15% or more of them (must have from half, important from a quarter). Words that name a company’s industry or product (SaaS, fintech) and hiring boilerplate (recruitment, benefits) are left out. The work skills come from the closest O*NET job, named on the report with the reason. The date the posts were read is on every skill.
“About the job” shows US figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, to everyone, marked as US data: the median yearly pay and the range most people earn (OEWS, May 2025), and the change in the number of jobs from 2025 to 2035 with the openings each year (Employment Projections 2025–35, released 27 Aug 2026). When the job data is more detailed than the BLS, the figures are for the wider group, and the page names it. We have no official pay figures for other countries, so we show none.
A starting guess you can change on every step: levels to climb × 15 hours for a tool, 20 for a work skill, 25 for a knowledge area. Steps run one after another at your hours a week; skipped steps drop out. A skill not rated yet counts as missing, so the roadmap shows a range (with and without those skills) until you rate them; past two years it says so in words instead of a far-off date.
Five steps, whatever field you leave and whatever you move into.
Choose one job to move into, list what you already bring to it, learn the must-have skills you are missing in order, prove them with one project, then apply and tell the story of the move. This page does the counting for you: it compares the job you have, your resume and your degree with what the new job needs, and turns the rest into a week-by-week plan.
It depends on how far apart the two jobs are and how many hours a week you can give. The plan adds up hours per step (levels to climb times 15 hours for a tool, 20 for a work skill, 25 for a knowledge area) at your hours a week. In the worked example on this page, a teacher moving into instructional design gets about 23 to 36 weeks at 6 hours a week.
Skills from the job you have that the new job asks for too, like teaching, planning, serving customers or working with numbers. The roadmap lists them under "What carries over", from the job data for your current job, your resume and your degree, and leaves them out of the plan.
Type your best guess and press the button. Then open "Jobs close to you": it compares your skill levels with all 910 jobs and lists the ones whose work is most like yours, at your level or one above. "Make this my target" builds a new plan in one click, and the first one stays saved.
Often, but not always. When the job data says most people in the new job have a higher degree than your resume shows, or a job post asks for one, the report says so next to the score and never says "Ready to apply". Jobs in health, law and teaching also get a note to check the license your area asks for.
Lead with what carries over, then the new skills with proof. Every step on the roadmap has a resume line and an interview line for that skill, and the AI can write resume lines from facts you type; it marks any skill your facts do not show, so nothing false slips in.
Yes, with no account and no limit. The plan, the calendar file and the downloads are free. The AI buttons have a small free daily allowance per connection; everything else works without them.
The file is read in your browser, and your plans are saved in this browser, with a delete button and a backup file you can download. The text of your resume, and what you send to the AI, are saved to ClapAssist so our tools can fill them in for you next time; see or delete them at clapassist.com/my-data/. Only the AI buttons send text, and each one says what it sends.
From the O*NET 31.0 Database of the U.S. Department of Labor (August 2026 release), used under the CC BY 4.0 license. It rates how important each work skill and knowledge area is for 910 jobs, based on surveys of people doing the work, and lists the tools the job uses. The jobs and skills are the same in most countries; add a job post from your own country to see what employers there ask for.
The links go to each site's own search for that skill: YouTube, Coursera and edX (most courses can be audited for free), Khan Academy, Microsoft Learn, freeCodeCamp, MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenStax and Alison; SWAYAM in India, TESDA in the Philippines and OpenLearn in the UK. We have no deal with any of them and earn nothing from the links.
ClapAssist is a Mac and Windows app that listens to the interview and shows you what to say, so your new skills come across when it counts.
Download with 10 free minutesThis page includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license. ClapAssist has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. Learning links go to each site’s own search; we have no deal with any of them.