Grades 9–12 · Pilot in development
Your team gets a client brief, a job role and a deadline. Halfway through, the plan changes. You deliver anyway, and you leave with evidence an employer can read.
How it works
Each project follows the same 9-part cycle, from the first brief to the final sign-off. Every team gets roles, a deadline and a client who changes their mind.
Who you work for, who the client is, what counts as done.
Read the brief. Send clarifying questions like a pro.
Take a real job role and sign for its responsibilities.
Schedule, task list, milestones, risks. Approved before you build.
Build it, with stand-ups and status updates every session.
Halfway through, the plan changes. Respond like a professional.
Check it against the client’s standards. Fix what fails.
Present, answer questions, get it signed off.
Show what you did, with evidence, and what you’d do next time.
Behind the 9 parts is a 15-step student cycle, from “receive the brief” to “reflect.” Teachers get it mapped step by step.
8 pathways
Every project is tagged with one of 8 pathways and a 2024 Career Cluster. Two concepts per pathway in the first-release draft.
Concept titles come from the project briefs. Four more pathways are written and marked Coming next in the catalog.
Featured pilot projects
Full teacher-ready briefs, written for the first pilot. Every client is fictional. The roles are based on real entry-level jobs.
Media & Communications
Make six 30–45 second captioned videos for a community center’s campaign, on a fixed deadline.
The twist: The client swaps a topic, a file is lost, or the deadline moves up.
Pilot brief, draft · Read the brief
Business & Entrepreneurship
Work the support desk for an outdoor-gear store: a queue of 12 customer messages, some of them angry.
The twist: Halfway through, the refund policy changes and a customer writes back upset.
Pilot brief, draft · Read the brief
Technology, AI & Cybersecurity
Run the help desk for a 15-person accounting office: passwords, printer jams, slow laptops.
The twist: The same suspicious “reset your password” email hits several inboxes.
Pilot brief, draft · Read the brief
Engineering & Production
Time a hardware-kit assembly line, find the bottleneck, and prove in numbers that it got faster.
The twist: On trial two, a worker is out and the new labels are the wrong size.
Pilot brief, draft · Read the brief
What you leave with
Every project ends with evidence you can use: in a portfolio, on a résumé, in an interview.
Your role, the work you were responsible for, the feedback you got and what you changed. It stays in your school’s system, with no photos and no personal information.
One line, written like a professional, about what you actually did.
“Edited three of six 30–45 second campaign videos to client specifications; restored a lost project file from backup without missing the delivery deadline.”Example line from the SVD pilot brief
One for the work your team delivered, one for how you performed as a professional: reliability, communication, problem-solving and more.
For schools
Written for high school classrooms. Each brief has what a teacher needs to run it.
Creative Dad On the Job is in-class client project work. It is not a paid, off-campus On-the-Job Training (OJT) placement.
For funders: results will come from the first pilots. No outcome data exists yet.