Know Yourself First. Then Choose What to Study.
The story behind our latest product launch — Prime Career
Prime Career is one of the products we own and run, and today its new version goes live. It didn’t start with a market analysis. It started with a parent at the end of a school year, and a question nobody in the house could answer.
Morné du Toit, who founded Prime Career, describes where it began:
“When my own teenage son reached the final stretch of high school, I assumed the ‘what comes next’ conversation would sort itself out. It didn’t. He didn’t know what he wanted to study, I didn’t know how to help him work it out, and every option — university, college, a gap year — came buried under someone else’s opinion about what was ‘right.’”
Most parents of a matric learner will recognise every word of that. Looking back, the whole product is an attempt to answer it, and the answer turns out to be very old.
The oldest career advice there is
Two words were carved into the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself. Plato credited them to the Seven Sages of Greece, collectively. Others credited Apollo himself. Most likely it was a common proverb long before anyone carved it into stone.
What isn’t in doubt is where it was placed. The Greek travel writer Pausanias recorded it in the forecourt, so every visitor read it on the way in, before they had asked the oracle anything at all.
That order still holds. Before a young person can sensibly ask what should I study?, somebody has to help them ask a better question first: who is this person, and what are they actually built for?
The advice is more than two thousand years old. What has been in short supply is the help to follow it.
The biggest question, at seventeen
South African schools schedule one big decision: choosing subjects in Grade 9. The larger one, what to do after matric, arrives without a scheduled moment at all. The system schedules the small decision and leaves the big one to whoever asks first, which is usually a parent.
The stakes are real, and they arrive early. In February the acting CEO of NSFAS told Parliament’s Select Committee on Education that the scheme had received around 890,000 applications this year and approved around 670,000, for roughly 350,000 first-year places across all universities and TVET colleges. A place is not guaranteed, and a place in the wrong course is an expensive way to find that out.
A wall of price
The help exists. Registered career practitioners and psychologists run thorough assessments, and many do excellent work. But a private career assessment in South Africa commonly costs somewhere between about R1,500 and R7,000. For most families that puts the most useful conversation of the school years behind a wall of price.
So the question was never whether good career guidance could be done. It was whether it could be done well enough, and cheaply enough, that price stopped deciding who got it. Prime Career’s answer is a personalised report for R225, once off.
Strategy before software
Prime Career already existed before this version: one personality assessment and a report, sold through an older system. The easy thing would have been to rebuild it as it was. Instead the first stretch of work was questions.
Who is it for, exactly? Grade 11 and 12 learners, and the parents standing behind them. The person who takes the assessment is a teenager; the person who pays is nearly always a parent. So every report is written for two readers. It has to be clear enough for the teenager to act on, and honest enough for the parent to trust.
What are we actually measuring? The original product rested on the Enneagram, a personality framework many people find useful and whose scientific standing is, honestly, mixed. We didn’t want a product that leaned on a claim it couldn’t carry. So we added a second axis: interests, measured with the 30-item short form of the O*NET Interest Profiler, developed for the United States Department of Labor and published under an open licence. Personality describes how someone works. Interests describe what they’re drawn to. The report shows where the two agree and, just as usefully, where they don’t.
Where does it lead? Not to a list of degrees. A good fit can lead to university, but also to a TVET college, a learnership or a business of their own. The report maps every profile across those four pathways, because a teenager who only hears about university hears about a quarter of their options.
What are we promising? Not the final answer. The line we kept coming back to was the best first step: a clear, honest starting point built around who the teenager actually is.
Built on what we already had
Once those answers were settled, the build was quick, because most of the machinery already existed. Prime Career runs on LoopAssess, the assessment platform we built and run for other organisations. It handles the questionnaire and generates each report; card payments go through Yoco.
That meant the new version could go from its first line of code to taking real payments in a little over three weeks. The time went where it mattered: on the questions above, and on making the report worth reading.
Before you ask the oracle
The inscription at Delphi was placed where it was for a reason. You read it before you asked your question, not after.
That’s all Prime Career tries to do: put the first question first. Not what the neighbours’ children are studying, not which field sounds impressive, but who this young person is, and where that points. As Morné puts it:
“You don’t need to have all the answers — and Prime Career isn’t claiming to be the final one.”
Know yourself first. Then choose.