About Us

Our Story

Finding a career that you love and that you are great at often takes longer than you think it will. It can be hard to connect your interests and strengths with professional pursuits. Or maybe you haven’t had the opportunities—or encouragement—to discover what those interests are in the first place.

At Hats & Ladders, our own career paths have been full of twists and unexpected turns. Lucky for us, it’s worked out: our early interests in music, history, and games gradually led to rewarding careers in technology and education. But it wasn’t always easy, and more support along the way would have helped a lot.

We started Hats & Ladders in 2015 to help reimagine career education. Building off twenty years of developing award-winning educational games and interactive experiences, we created a mobile platform designed to motivate youth to explore, experiment with, and prepare for a wide range of career pathways.

Instead of trying to “match” individuals to a single career or cluster, we want to empower youth as career thinkers, capable of making their own connections between who they are, who they want to be, and how to get there.

Our Mission

Finding your life’s work is a lot like finding a life partner. For a lucky few, the stars magically align. For most of us, it feels more like staring at a far-away galaxy. Figuring it out doesn’t have to be rocket science (unless that’s what you’re into), but it does take vision, self-awareness, opportunities, connections, and trial and error.

Hats & Ladders uses up-to-date occupational data, game mechanics, and youth-driven design thinking to motivate the next generation of career thinkers and doers. Our mission is simple: empower teens and young adults with career-building experiences, skills, and opportunities so they can take small steps now that lead to big leaps later.

Our Team

Our team has years of experience developing transformative, award-winning interactive training and learning games and software for youth and adults. Our work is rooted in foundational and ongoing user research to gather insights into learners goals and challenges.

We are a diverse group of people who are passionate about making learning fun and reimagining career education. We believe that good youth tech gets great when subject matter experts, researchers, engineers, and designers listen to and learn from one another.