My name is Matt Hyre. I am the CEO and co-founder of ImagineMyFuture. More to the point of this article, I’m a dad.
It started at the dinner table
My son was seven when he told us his plan. He was going to be a professional baseball player, and once that career wound down, he’d become an engineer (in space). He wasn’t wishing out loud. As far as he was concerned, this was the plan, and it was already settled.
I sat there listening, and somewhere in the middle a question started nagging at me. How could I introduce him to a day-in-the-life experience of an engineer? Not a video or a worksheet, but a real person who does this job and could tell him what the day looks like.
That night, I searched online for anything built for early career exploration. What I found fell into two buckets: dry statistics written for adults, or platforms that only exist behind a school license, inaccessible to parents. Nothing was built for a parent sitting at a kitchen table with a curious seven-year-old.
Over the next month the idea took hold of me and, if I’m honest, consumed me. What I wanted was pretty simple. I wanted a place where my kid could explore the full range of careers out there, explained in a way he’d understand, with something we could actually go and do about it as a family.
Spread your arms wide
Spread your arms as wide as they go, like you are about to give the biggest hug of your life. That span is every door open to you when you are young. Every career, every path, every version of who you might become.
Then life happens. You make choices. Things happen to you. Each one is reasonable on its own, and each one pulls your arms a little closer together. By the time most of us are adults, the span has narrowed to a handful of doors, and we rarely remember how wide it once was.
That narrowing is just what a life looks like. What bothers me is that most kids never see the full span before it starts closing, so they choose from the few careers they happen to know. I wanted my son, and every kid, to stand there with their arms out and see everything first.
"You can be anything" is where the conversation starts, not where it ends
I grew up hearing the same things most of us did. You can be anything if you put your mind to it. Study hard, work hard, and you could even become President. These are wonderful things to say to a child, and I say them to mine.
But the conversation can’t stop there. Telling a kid they can be anything is encouragement, and encouragement is great, but it isn’t direction. You can’t give someone directions until you know where they’re headed, and they can’t pick a destination without knowing what’s out there. So, we’re back to the same problem. It isn’t enough to tell kids they can be anything. Somebody has to help them find out what “anything” actually includes.
Which brings me back to the oldest question we ask children: what do you want to be when you grow up? We ask it on autopilot. We smile at the answer and move on. I think that moment deserves far more weight than we give it. When a child blurts out “When I grow up I want to be a …!” they’re telling you something true about themselves, even if they don’t know it yet. And most of the time, the moment just passes. We say “That’s great!” and go back to dinner. Not because the interest wasn’t real, but because we didn’t know where to take it from there.
That’s the moment ImagineMyFuture was built for. It’s what you reach for after your kid tells you what they want to be, so the answer becomes a conversation, and the conversation becomes an experience.
The other side of the coin
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a baseball player or a pilot. I was very good at baseball. Life had other plans. The pilot dream lingered much longer, until I finally took a discovery flight as an adult and learned something important about myself up there. I am afraid of heights.
I share that because it points out the half of this problem nobody talks about. Parents are not short on encouragement. We lack information, and that shortage cuts both ways. Without it, we cannot help a kid go deeper into something they love, and we cannot help them discover, early and cheaply, that something they thought they loved isn't for them.
Most of what young people think they want to be is built on limited understanding of the career itself. Take marine biologist, one of the careers kids pick again and again. In a child's mind, and in plenty of adults' minds, a marine biologist swims with dolphins. The real job is mostly fieldwork, lab work, analyzing data, and writing. Some kids will hear that and love it even more. Others will realize they actually loved the ocean, animals, or being outdoors, and that dozens of careers built around that love exist, even if they've never heard of them. Both outcomes are wins. Both come from knowing more, earlier.
From what I have seen, children in the elementary years can name a handful of careers, and almost all of them belong to the adults closest to them or are things they see on TV or online. Even then, they know the job title and very little about the work behind it. Finding out at nine that a career is not for you costs nothing. Finding out at twenty-two, after four years of tuition, costs a whole lot more.
That is why ImagineMyFuture is just as interested in the "no" as the "yes." Which careers are interesting, which are not, and why. The "why" is where a child starts to understand themselves.
What we built
ImagineMyFuture is a career exploration platform built by parents, for parents and their kids. Today it holds more than 200 careers across 8 kid-friendly clusters, from the trades to the sciences to the arts. Every career is written three times, once for elementary readers, once for middle schoolers, and once for high schoolers, because a seven-year-old and a sixteen-year-old asking about the same job need very different answers.
Each career follows the same three-part path. Explore introduces the work in plain language. Discover goes deeper into what a day really looks like, what the job pays, and where it is headed, with salary and outlook data drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Experience is the part I care about most: real, low-cost or no-cost activities a family can do this weekend to try their career on.
Welcome
My son still wants to be an engineer. Over the last year, he's also wondered aloud about a half dozen other things I never would have guessed. Each one of those moments is a door, and each one is a chance for us to walk through it together for an afternoon and see what is on the other side.
That’s what I wanted for my own family. It turned out a lot of other parents wanted it too, so we built it for yours.
So, the next time your kid says "When I grow up I want to be...", do not let the sentence end there. Come find that career on ImagineMyFuture, read about it together, and go try it this weekend. Then tell us what you learned. Which careers surprised you. Which ones your child crossed off, and why. We are parents building this alongside you, and what you tell us is what shapes it next.
Welcome to ImagineMyFuture. Spread your arms wide.
Matt Hyre
CEO and co-founder, ImagineMyFuture