How to Keep Your Head while Going Headless with WordPress

The challenge of career guidance

Career guidance is complex, not just for young people, but also for everyone supporting them. The platform’s target audience is equally diverse: students, parents, teachers, career advisors, and training companies.

The goal: a platform that motivates and guides young people — while respecting their autonomy and avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach.

At the heart of it all lies a simple conviction: No one should have to shape their professional future alone.

That’s why we don’t see the platform as just an information source, but as a companion on the path to decision-making.
It’s designed to motivate, empower, and offer the right impulses at the right time.

Motivation Instead of Overwhelm: UX for Career Choices

The sheer variety of options is both a blessing and a challenge.
In Switzerland, there are over 300 recognized professions, more than 6000 apprenticeships, and tens of thousands of potential training companies.
For many young people, this abundance leads to one thing above all: a lack of orientation.

Our goal was to design the platform in a way that sparks curiosity in a playful, intuitive way, without overwhelming users.

School or Work? A Tool for Self-Reflection

One of the key decisions in the career orientation process is:
Should I continue with school — or would I rather learn a profession?

The platform supports this reflection with a dedicated tool we developed: the Maturitätsschul-Check — a short self-assessment that helps students explore whether a more academic path might suit them, or whether vocational training is the better fit.

Students click through a series of simple, relatable questions and receive an initial indication of whether a school-based path could be right for them. such as:

• Academic high school (Gymnasium)
• Business school (Handelsmittelschule)
• IT-focused middle school (Informatikmittelschule)
• Specialised middle school (Fachmittelschule)
• or the Vocational Baccalaureate School (Berufsmaturitätsschule)

It helps them consider whether one of these paths might make sense for them, or whether a direct entry into an apprenticeship would be a better fit.

The Check isn’t a decision-making tool in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s designed as a prompt for self-reflection: it encourages students to think about their goals, interests, and learning motivation — and to make more conscious choices about their next steps.

Career Exploration Through Intuition

A central feature of the platform is the Profession Explorer.
Instead of scrolling through a long, alphabetical list of job titles, students are shown photos of real professional activities, without labels or bias. With a simple click, they can say whether something looks interesting to them or not — entirely based on instinct.

Only in the second step do they discover which occupational fields their interests align with. This intuitive approach allows for a first, unbiased exploration of career options, free from external expectations or stereotypes.

The Interest Test in Career Choice Lessons

To support more structured guidance, the platform offers a comprehensive interest test.
Teachers use it in career choice lessons to introduce students to both the platform and the broader process of career exploration.

With 9 steps and 10 questions each, the test is intentionally in-depth — and therefore time-consuming. To keep students engaged, we’ve embedded key UX principles:

• Progress is visible at all times.
• Current progress is saved automatically, even without logging in
• The experience is structured, mobile-optimised, and accessible

This transforms a potentially overwhelming questionnaire into a supportive reflection tool, turning the test into an entry point for self-discovery, not judgment.

The results are visualised in a spider chart and directly connected to occupational fields, creating a seamless link between self-perception and tangible career options.

Personalisation Without the Filter Bubble

The more young people engage with the platform, the more personalised the experience becomes — for example, through tailored recommendations on their personal dashboard, such as matching professions or open trial placements.

But the important thing is:

The platform is designed to be a compass — not a tunnel.

It also shows professions outside a user’s usual interests, to open up new perspectives and encourage unexpected discoveries. Sometimes the right path is where you least expect it.

Editor-friendly, without compromising on structure

A special focus was placed on the balance between structure and editorial freedom:

• The job pages are connected via the API and their basic structure is fixed. This ensures that central information always remains up-to-date and consistent.
• At the same time, content managers can add their own content via custom fields in the WordPress sidebar, e.g. videos, podcasts, images, further links or educational requirements.
• Editing takes place in the Block Editor, whereby API data is displayed as read-only content – to ensure data consistency.

The result is a system that is technically stable and editorially flexible.

User roles, rights & editorial freedom in the headless setup

Not all content on the platform is visible to everyone, and that’s how it should be. That’s why we control access and visibility via clearly defined roles and authorizations, which are checked on the server side via the WordPress REST API.

Role-based access to content

When logging in, the API sends back the user role, the front end therefore knows exactly what content may be displayed:

• Young people see their own profile, activities and personal recommendations.
• Teachers have access to their class overview.
• Companies only manage their own apprenticeships and trial offers.

The result is a relevant, secure and personalized user experience.

Why we rely on our own endpoints

Although WordPress provides a standardized REST API, this was not enough for our setup. To achieve more control, flexibility and performance, we developed over 40 of our own custom endpoints.

Among other things, these enable us to

• Preview function for content in the decoupled setup
  (e.g. preview of a blog post before it is published)
• Maintenance of the navigation by editors
  (e.g. main menu or footer structure, without agency support)
• Use of native WordPress functions, e.g. for image optimization for professional thumbnails

In short, we wanted editors to be able to maintain their content independently without having to rely on us as an agency for every menu item.
Because that is the real purpose of a good CMS:

Empower editors – don’t bind developers.

Technical effort vs. user experience

Of course, a headless setup places higher demands on design, implementation and maintenance. There is no preview function “out of the box”, no native menu integration, and many standard functions have to be custom developed.

But: the effort is worth it – and pays off in terms of user experience.

Advantages that only headless offers

• The interest test works offline thanks to Service Worker, ideal for schools with an unstable internet connection.
• The platform remembers the test progress automatically, even without a login.
• The live filtering of all professions works at lightning speed and without page reload, a performance that would be almost impossible to achieve with a classic WordPress theme.

These are just a few examples of how we were able to fully exploit the possibilities of a modern PWA – for the benefit of the target group.