A Career Tracker Nobody Else Can Read

Most people exploring a career change hold the state in their head: the three options still live, the one they ruled out and cannot remember why, and the thing they meant to look into. Six weeks later the ruled-out option comes back round and gets ruled out again, slowly.

The saved tracker is a place to write that down. A saved family carries a status, a target role, a target country and your own notes, and it stays in this browser.

The value is almost entirely in the reasons rather than in the list. A shortlist of five families is easy to reconstruct from memory; the sentence explaining why the second one is out, written on the day you worked it out, is not, and it is the sentence that stops you spending another evening on it three months later.

• Exploring: you are still reading and have committed to nothing.
• Shortlisted: worth real time, not yet worth preparation.
• Preparing: you are working on the skills or qualifications it needs.
• Applying: you are actually sending things.
• Paused: deliberately set aside, with your note about why.

Nothing you write in the tracker is used to change a matcher result. That is a deliberate separation rather than an omission. A tracker that quietly reweighted your matches based on what you had shortlisted would produce agreement rather than information, and would feel uncannily insightful while telling you only what you had already told it.

So the match engine reads your questionnaire answers and nothing else. The tracker is your record of what you did with the result.

The same separation is why the tracker does not nudge. There is no prompt telling you that you have not looked at something in a fortnight, and no badge for moving a family along a stage. A pipeline you maintain because it is useful behaves differently from one you maintain because it is asking you to, and only the first kind tells you anything when you read it back.

Every completed questionnaire is kept as a dated run labelled with the instrument version and the scoring version that produced it. Those labels look like clutter until the first time you rerun a profile months later and want to know whether the two results are comparable.

If the versions differ, they are not directly comparable, and the label is the only thing that would ever tell you. Any run can be deleted individually, and deleting one removes its questionnaire session too.

The roadmap turns intentions into dated milestones, each attached to a career family. Planning at the family level rather than the job-title level survives changing your mind about the specific role, which almost everybody does at least once.

Three real milestones you can name a first step for beat a list of thirty written in one enthusiastic sitting. The roadmap exports as a calendar file, which is the version that will still exist after this browser is cleared.

Most of what a learning site knows about you is unremarkable. Career exploration is not. A note saying you are quietly looking to leave your current field, a target country that implies a relocation, a status of applying against something your employer has not been told about: that is material that causes real harm if it surfaces in the wrong place.

Which is why the tracker is the one feature where the local-first constraint stops being an architectural preference and becomes the point. There is no server copy to leak, no export of user records to be subpoenaed or bought, and no analytics event carrying a career family with it. The honest version of that promise is structural rather than stated: the data is never sent, so there is nothing to govern.

The practical consequence is that you can be honest in the notes field, which is the only condition under which the notes field is worth anything. A tracker people write carefully worded entries into, because they are not sure who can see them, is a tracker that has already failed at its job.

The career privacy page has a single control that deletes every matcher session, result, saved family, comparison and roadmap milestone from this browser. There is nothing on a server to request afterwards, because nothing was sent, and there is nobody to ask because there is no account.

That is the same trade the rest of the product makes. The upside is that a career exploration containing genuinely private material about your current job leaves no trace anywhere you cannot reach.