UK

Career path tool

What could you become?

Pick the role you're in now. We'll show you where it leads: the steps up from here, how long each typically takes, and the skills each one starts asking for. It comes from the same national-standards catalogue that powers everything else on this site.

The data

Where the next steps come from, and how much of the catalogue they cover

Pick the role you are in now and this tool shows you what our record for that role names as the step up from it: how long it typically takes and the skills it starts asking for. There is no questionnaire and no score.

The useful thing to show you here is coverage. How much of the catalogue can actually answer, measured rather than asserted.

What sits behind the ladder

  1. The progression statement Our graph

    Each job description names where the role leads, in its own words. That prose is the source for every rung.

    Built by Zavmo, read verbatim. We do not infer a step that the record does not name.

  2. Title resolution The catalogue

    A rung becomes a clickable role page only where the catalogue publishes a role with that exact title. Otherwise it stays as text.

    A deliberate constraint. Fuzzy-matching a rung to a nearby role would produce links that quietly go to the wrong place.

  3. The skills spine National Occupational Standards

    The skills a rung starts asking for are these published standards.

    External and public.

  4. The qualification spine The Ofqual register

    Where a route names a qualification, it is a real regulated one.

    External and public.

The coverage, measured

These are our own measurements of our own catalogue, taken against the exact sample of 2,000 roles this picker serves, and we would rather publish them than leave you guessing.

1,974 of those 2,000 roles (98.7 per cent) carry at least one named next step. Of the 2,061 distinct rung names those records produce, 1,188 resolve to a role page we publish, which is 57.6 per cent. And 1,524 of the 1,974 roles with a named step get at least one rung you can click through to, which is 77.2 per cent.

So: almost every role can tell you where it leads, and a little over half of the destinations are places you can go and read about on this site. The rest are named in text, honestly, rather than linked to something approximate.

What this tool used to do, and why it stopped

An earlier version read a progression relationship in the graph. That relationship type does not exist in production, so the query bound nothing and every visitor since launch had been told that no next step was mapped for their role. The tool had never once produced an answer.

It now reads the record’s own account of where the role leads. The trade is stated plainly above: prose names a rung without an identifier, so linkage is lower than graph edges promised, and infinitely higher than what they delivered.

What this is not

  • The picker covers a sample of the catalogue, not all of it.
  • A next step is what the role record names. It is not a prediction about you, not a vacancy, and not the only route.
  • Where a record names no next step, we say the record has a gap. That is a gap in our data, not a ceiling on your career.
  • Typical timings come from the role record and describe a common path, not your path.

References

Every reference below was checked against the publisher record for its identifier before it was written here, and every one links out so you can read it yourself. Where a paper is used as a frame rather than as data, the note under it says so.

  1. UK Standards (2026). National Occupational Standards . The UK National Occupational Standards repository, accessed August 2026.

    The skills spine under every role in the catalogue. National Occupational Standards are the published statements of what competent performance in an occupation looks like.

  2. Ofqual (2026). Find a regulated qualification (the register of regulated qualifications) . Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation. Live register, accessed August 2026.

    Every qualification named anywhere on this site is a real, regulated one read from this register. Zavmo is not an awarding body and does not invent qualifications.

  3. Office for National Statistics (2020). Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2020 . Office for National Statistics. Published 2020, accessed August 2026.

    The official occupation spine the catalogue is organised against: 9 major groups and roughly 412 unit groups.

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