For students who don't want debt.
For career changers who
don't want to start over.

Yes — all 349 career guides are completely free to read, no account required. Salary data, step-by-step roadmaps, Day in the Life schedules, certification guides, and VS College comparisons are all ungated. Paid tiers (Student Plus, LaunchPad Pro) add organizational tools and personalized support on top of the free content — they are never required to access career information.

All salary data is sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook — the same source used by universities, career counselors, and federal workforce programs. Each career page links directly to the BLS source data. We update our salary figures annually and note the BLS citation on every page. We never invent or estimate salary data.

Most online career information is either surface-level ("electricians make good money") or buried across dozens of sources. LaunchPad consolidates everything a person actually needs into one place: verified salary data, the specific credentials required, a step-by-step roadmap, an honest Day in the Life, a direct comparison with going to a 4-year college, and real success stories from people who took the path. The goal is that after reading a LaunchPad career guide, you know exactly what to do next — not just that the career exists.

Yes — and this is one of the most common use cases. Many of the people who find LaunchPad most useful are working adults who are stuck in careers that don't pay enough, don't have a future, or just aren't fulfilling. Every career guide includes an honest assessment of what it takes to transition into that career from an unrelated background — including realistic timelines, the specific credentials to pursue first, and how long it realistically takes to reach the median salary. The career changer section of the homepage is specifically built for you.

The LaunchPad Counselor Portal gives school counselors a dashboard to manage their student caseload — invite students, assign specific career guides, track which careers each student is exploring, and add counselor notes to each student profile. It's designed to serve the students that Naviance and Xello underserve: the 40–60% of students who aren't headed to a four-year college. Starting at $449/year per school — less than one substitute teacher day.

LaunchPad Careers is built by 3 Kings IT Services, LLC — a Georgia-based technology company. We built LaunchPad because we believed the career exploration tools available to students and working adults who aren't pursuing four-year degrees were genuinely inadequate. The tools that exist are either built for college admissions or are so generic they provide no real guidance. We built the product we wish had existed.