Our Mission

Our mission is to help high school and college-aged students to maximize the level of happiness in their lives, increase their graduation rates, and decrease the cost and time they spend in post-secondary school all by pairing them with the profession they are most likely to enjoy. We will accomplish this by educating our students in the vast number of career opportunities available and by supporting their decision-making process by providing them with the real-world experience necessary to make a more informed decision.

Our Why

We’ve all heard people say they are unhappy with their jobs. Even worse, many of us have heard that no matter what career you choose, work is not meant to be enjoyed. Many of us at OmniLYF spent 4-6 years in college only to find out we chose a path we didn’t enjoy. While we believed we could do any type of work as long as it paid well, we quickly found out we weren’t exceptions to the studies that show that happiness doesn’t increase beyond a certain level of income. Because we now believe finding your one true passion will ultimately lead to you leading a happier life, we wanted to do something to ensure others didn’t follow down our same path.

A Shift in Thinking

Work isn’t meant to be fun

Or have the majority of people have been in jobs that don’t suite them? When you consider there are over 12,000 career options for 18-year-olds to decide between, it makes sense that we don’t often pick the job that would make us the happiest. In fact, you would be 4 times more likely to be struck by lightning than picking that number one job. So instead of fixing the system that requires students to guess which career to select, we normalize our past experiences concluding that the intent of the career selection process is to help you find something that you’re not going to like but you can live with.

Ramifications

The problem is, the ramifications are extensive. Not knowing what you want to do, or selecting the wrong career, leads to more high school and college dropouts, extra time and money spent on post-secondary completion, the continuation of poverty cycles, a reduction in STEM workers, and a dissatisfaction in the American workforce that costs companies hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Solution

In order to combat this, we need to be getting students in high school and early in college the real-world experience necessary to determine which career path they want to follow. Researching, talking to professionals, doing job shadows, and getting internships should all be employed to ensure students know what they are getting themselves into. Currently, far too many students are stopping after online research (typically searching salaries and job availability) which oftentimes gives zero indication if the job will make them happy. First-hand experience in the career is the only way to guarantee the student knows what they are getting into so they can decide if that career is something they want to pursue.

OmniLYF’s Solution

At OmniLYF, our approach is to provide rotating, multi-week micro-internships that allow students to work on real-world projects developed by industry professionals that allow them to see what the career would be like between 0-5 years beyond post-secondary completion. This way, students can make a more informed decision about which career path they want to follow.