Sources and methods

• Pay comes from the two national wage surveys: Government of Canada Job Bank for Canada and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics survey (read through My Next Move and O*NET) for the United States. Every career page links the exact wage page it used.
• Training, licensing and costs come from the body that sets them: the regulator, the apprenticeship authority, the school or the government program, never a site summarizing them.
• Universities and colleges are described from their own published pages (program requirements, admission ranges, fee schedules, residence) and from government tables (graduate pay, graduation and employment rates, rent, the US College Scorecard).
• Nothing is invented. Where a figure is a rough sum or an estimate, such as the whole cost of a degree, the page says so and shows what went into it. Where a source does not publish a figure, the page says "not published" or leaves the row out. The quiz, the lists, the comparers and the PDFs are all built from the same figures: they add no numbers of their own.

Careerhelp is built by Vedant Singh, a 17-year-old Grade 12 student in Ontario graduating in 2027 (about him), and everything about it is his decision: the idea, what gets built and in what order, how each product is formed, the business strategy, the standards for sources and accuracy, and every rule below. He designed the whole working method, from the written instructions and source rules to the checks that fail a build and the record that carries his decisions from one session to the next, and he controls every outcome: he reviews what is produced, answers every message and publishes the site. Claude, the AI model made by Anthropic, works under his direction as his research, programming and personal assistant: it reads the source pages, writes the cards, program pages and code, runs the checks described on this page and organizes the work he assigns.

Why he built it, in his own words:

The idea for Careerhelp came in Grade 11. I was fast-tracking, so I sat in Grade 12 classes: Advanced Functions, English, Chemistry, Calculus and Vectors, and Business Leadership. Everyone around me was in Grade 12, and every one of them was stressed. They were comparing universities, weighing the programs they had been admitted to, still unsure which career to aim for, and searching for answers across a dozen sites because no single place had them. I was calm, because I had a year to go.

Everyone knows application season is coming, and almost no one starts until the last few months of Grade 12. Then all the stress arrives at once. I started building Careerhelp in September of my own Grade 12 year, so students can settle on a career before Grade 12, and so the ones already in Grade 12 can see a career, its programs, the marks they take, what they cost and what the job pays in one place.

The rules Claude works under, which are enforced by the code and not just by intention:

• Every number is copied from a page that was actually opened, and the page it appears on lists that source. A number with no source is not published.
• Source pages are read the way a polite visitor would: one request at a time, honouring each site's robots.txt, identified as "ClaudeBot (research for career.help)". A site that refuses is left alone; its figures are then taken from a government table or not shown at all. No blocks are worked around and no cached copies of refusing sites are used.
• A validation program runs before every deployment. It fails the build if a card uses an abbreviation without spelling it out, cites a career that does not exist, has chapters out of order, or has a pay figure outside its own range.
• Every career carries the date its figures were last checked (currently October 16, 2026 to October 30, 2026); every school and program file carries a checked date.
• Every source link is re-checked by a script and the result is published below, including the links that could not be checked.

The limits are stated as plainly: a text written by an AI from a source page can misread that page, and the owner's review is one person's review. That is why every page shows its sources, why the "Spot a mistake" box sits on every page, and why corrections are answered and the figure fixed in the data file rather than patched on one page.

The lists, the career quiz, the two comparers, the program finders, the pages for US colleges by SAT or ACT score and by state, and the printable one-page PDFs are all built from the figures above by code, not written separately. A list such as "highest paying trades" is a filter and a sort over the career pay figures; the quiz scores careers on the same quick facts every career page shows; the finder compares your marks with the admission figures on the program pages. If a figure is corrected in its data file, every one of these updates with it.

• Government statistics (Job Bank, the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, Statistics Canada, the College Scorecard, Ontario's college survey, the ministry performance tables): the most dependable figures on the site. Their limits are the surveys' own: they are medians or averages for a whole occupation or field, usually one to three years old (Job Bank's current wages describe 2023 to 2024), and they say nothing about one employer or one graduate.
• An institution's own publication (a university's program page, fee schedule or residence page; a regulator's licensing rules; a college's program page): accurate for the year it was published and copied as written. Admission ranges in particular are what the school chooses to publish, which is often the minimum to be considered rather than the average of who got in; the pages say so.
• Written explanation (what a typical day is like, the hard parts, the path from high school): drafted by Claude from the cited pages and from the regulators' and schools' own descriptions. It is the part most open to a wrong emphasis, and the part a correction most often improves.
• Archived pages: where a school's own page was moved or taken down after it was read, where the school's site blocks automated reading (a handful of Laurentian, Nipissing, Algoma, Brock and Ottawa pages), or for tuition history, the Internet Archive's copy of the school's own page is cited, labelled "from an archived copy" with the date of the copy and linked, so it is in the link check and on these pages. Reading the archive never touches the site that refused us. Changing how our reader identifies itself would, and that is never done.

On October 31, 2026 a script opened every one of the 16,805 distinct source links behind the 38,222 citations on the site, one request each, honouring robots.txt, waiting between requests to the same site and never retrying a refusal. Results by link:

On October 22, 2026 the pay figure on every career was also re-read from its wage page and compared with the card; the result is on the two career pages. The full check, one line per link, can be downloaded as a spreadsheet from each part's page.

If a figure is wrong, the fastest route is the "Spot a mistake" box at the bottom of the page it is on; it says which page you were reading. A report is answered within one school day and, where it is right, fixed within three. Corrections are made in the data file, so the career page, its lists, its PDF and the comparer all change together, and the career's checked date moves. Every correction is listed, with the date and what changed, on the corrections page.

Whether the site is up is checked every five minutes by an independent monitor, and the record is public: the status page.

This page and the pages under it are the complete account of the site's sources and methods. Their counts and link results are generated from the same data files as the site, so those cannot drift from it; the written methods are updated by hand when a method changes. What a school or school board can hold the site to, from the refresh calendar for every kind of figure to the correction and uptime promises, is published on the commitments page, and the offer to schools and boards at /schools.