Subscribe
Community
Local women create site that gives careers a boost
Friday, March 12, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
Gwen Schiada, left, and Stephanie Cosby of North Beach started careerpuppy.com in 2008. The site aims to help people choose a career path or make the transition to a new career.
|
E-Mail This Article
Now is not an ideal time to begin a career but two friends, a nurse and a psychologist, are betting that this is the time to start a Web site about them.
In fall 2009, Stephanie Cosby and Gwen Schiada, both of North Beach, created Career Puppy, an Internet service intended to help those embarking on their careers — or trying to start new ones — figure out what they might enjoy doing.
The site offers basic information about a host of careers, videotaped interviews with professionals and "big dog forums" where seekers can solicit information from those established in the field. Some of the services are free but most require a subscription. The site's "flea market" also offers career DVDs, workshops and other training.
At this point the site itself is perhaps still a "puppy." About 3,000 individuals currently have full access to the site, mainly through institutional subscriptions which cost $750 apiece, the founders said. The forums, part of the paid service, offer message boards on a host of career fields, but at the moment no one is posting.
Given the theme, it is appropriate enough that Cosby and Schiada's story begins with a dog. In September 2007, Schiada, the psychologist, and her husband were going to leave for vacation when their dog-sitting arrangement fell through. Cosby, a neighbor but at that time a stranger to Schiada, heard about the situation and stepped up to take care of Bailey, an English mastiff, until her owners came home.
"The morning they got home, we walked Bailey over. We'd never met. We left three hours later and we had the idea for the Web site," Cosby said. But Bailey is not the only inspiration. The company's name refers both to the idea of a young career and to Cosby's idea that "everyone should have that puppy feeling about their job: excited, curious, happy to greet every day."
The site takes a realistic approach by following job categories created by the U.S. Department of Labor, presenting options in all kinds of career fields, not just those requiring college degrees. Not everyone is cut out for college and the site recognizes that and aims to encourage all types of people, the founders said.
The site also lets those with impossible schedules share their expertise whenever they have the time by interacting virtually with seekers.
"This is a way people can mentor at 2 a.m. in the comfort of their pajamas," Cosby said.
Schiada handles marketing and interviews while Cosby maintains the Web site. The neighbors talk almost every day, usually by visiting one another's homes.
Access to Career Puppy can be a lifeline for the state's at-risk youth, according to Donna Millar, county supervisor for the Calvert County office of the Department of Juvenile Services. With the help of a sponsorship from the Rotary Club of Northern Calvert, the service will be accessible to a small number of Maryland juveniles in institutions or foster care, although exactly how it will be deployed remains to be determined. The site is valuable because it gives deprived young people an idea of their options and even a glimpse of a different kind of life.
"To me, the real advantage of a site like Career Puppy is so many of our kids and their families are unemployed and have no idea — the question I always ask is, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?' They have no idea what they want to do with their lives. They don't know what their skills or talents are. In some cases they don't really know what they're interested in because they haven't had an opportunity to explore not just occupations but different environments and skills," Millar said.
"They don't have the same opportunities, often, as kids that are not in the system, to learn how to do things, basic day to day stuff that we take for granted. Many of our families don't sit down to dinner together. In my life as a probation officer I discovered many kids I work with don't understand very simple things like how to use utensils, a knife, fork, spoon. They are fast food kids; they are finger food kids. They don't know how to cook things; they don't know how to shop; they don't know how to budget and often their parents don't either."
Using the Internet for information comes naturally to children and the site showcases not just professions requiring advanced degrees but also blue-collar jobs like plumbing and truck driving that would give young people self-sufficiency as adults, Millar added.
Rotarians are footing part of the bill because the service is a natural extension of the club's work with the Bayside Boys and Girls Club in North Beach. It lets the kids explore their options and gives them a realistic idea of what they can accomplish, said Phil Pfanschmidt, Rotary club president.
Despite being "really troubled kids, they really had great ambitions. No one could give them any idea what it was like, what it would take. Many of them had goals they really weren't able to achieve [because] they didn't know what kind of background experience they needed to do it. This thing could give that to them. It gives them some hope, a little bit of hope, for the future," Pfanschmidt.
The club is also recruiting "big dog" online mentors for the site despite its for-profit status; the charity is helping out because the site offers a straightforward presentation of career options, Pfanschmidt said.
The founders' own winding personal journeys inform the site's content.
Schiada was uninterested in school as a youngster, but returned to earn her GED.
"It's so weird, it's another dog-related story," Schiada said, explaining she financed a trip to Europe with money from a legal settlement after being bitten by a dog at age 19. "I met some very interesting people. Again, it comes back to the people part that inspired me. The world became a much bigger place than the small town I grew up in. I came back, found my way back to college and I just couldn't stop."
She eventually earned a doctorate in psychology, she said, but help early on might have kept her on a straighter path.
"Not that I wasn't smart and capable. I just didn't have those mentors and I was not connected to school. I didn't see that bigger picture. Our own personal stories are very intertwined with this business," Schiada said.
Cosby has done nursing jobs all over the country. Her experience led her to pursue a "public health" model in helping people find careers, meaning she hopes to help many people at once, not just a few at a time.
