I went on iRadio's Groupchat this week for their Business Spotlight, and I will be honest, it is a strange feeling sitting in front of a microphone talking about something you built in a bedroom in Limerick. I grew up listening to that station. Getting the chance to talk on it about career guidance, and about the students we work with, was one of the better days I have had since starting CourseCompass.
What struck me most was not the interview itself. It was the messages afterwards. Parents, students, a few guidance counsellors, all asking versions of the same question: what do we do now, with results coming? So here is what I said on air, and a bit more of what I did not have time to say.
What I said to sixth years waiting on results
Your results are one data point. They are not a verdict on how clever you are, how hard you worked, or what your life is going to look like at 30. I know that sounds like the kind of thing an adult says to make you feel better. It is also just true, and every guidance counsellor in the country will tell you the same.
If the number is lower than you hoped, do not make any big decision in the first 24 hours. You will not be thinking straight, and you do not have to be. There are more routes than most students realise:
- Change of Mind. Your order of preference is not set in stone. Plenty of students end up in a course they moved up the list at the last minute and never regret it.
- PLC routes. A one year PLC is one of the most underrated pathways in Ireland. It can bring you into a level 8 course through links and progression schemes, and you arrive far more sure of yourself than you would have been straight out of sixth year.
- Apprenticeships. You earn while you qualify, you finish with no debt, and there are far more apprenticeships now than the trades people picture, including in tech, finance and engineering.
- Repeating. A real option, but only if you genuinely want the same course. Repeating because you are not sure what else to do is a hard year for no reason.
And if the number is higher than you expected, the same advice applies in reverse. Do not chase a course purely because you have the points for it. Points measure what you did in an exam hall in June. They do not measure whether you will enjoy four years of it, and they certainly do not measure whether you will want to do that work for the next forty years. That gap between what you can get into and what suits you is the exact gap we built CourseCompass to close.
Over 1,000 students in 2026 alone
I mentioned on air that we have now worked with over 1,000 students in 2026 alone. That number matters to me for one reason: it is not a marketing figure, it is a thousand individual sets of answers from real teenagers who sat down and told us what they are actually interested in, how they learn, what they value in work, and what they are afraid of getting wrong.
Some of them used us to confirm what they already suspected. Some found a course they had never heard of and put it first. A good number discovered that a PLC or an apprenticeship fitted them better than the level 8 everyone around them assumed they would do. Schools use it with whole year groups, and the guidance counsellor gets the results back in one dashboard so they can spend their limited one to one time on the students who need it most. That is the part I am proudest of. We are not replacing counsellors, we are handing them time.
The goal: the best career guidance in Ireland
I will say this plainly, because it is what I actually want. The goal is for CourseCompass to offer the best career guidance across the whole of Ireland. Not the biggest, not the loudest. The best.
But "Ireland" is an abstraction, and guidance is not. It happens in one school, in one town, with one student who has a specific set of subjects and a specific bus route. So the way we get there is locally, one place at a time. I want to be the best guidance counselling support in Limerick, where we started. Then Dublin. Then Cork. Then Galway. Then everywhere else on this list, and every town in between:
If you are a student in any of those places, or a parent, or a guidance counsellor with 500 students and not enough hours, that is who this is being built for. We are Irish, we only do Irish courses, and every CAO code, PLC and apprenticeship in the system is one you can actually apply to from here.
What comes next
More schools, more counties, and more of the boring work that makes guidance good: keeping course data accurate, keeping the assessments honest about what they can and cannot tell you, and keeping the price low enough that a family is not choosing between guidance and something else. If you heard the interview and want to see what we actually do, start with the free sample results. Read one, then decide.
Students and parents: read a free sample report or try the CAO points guide and calculator.
Schools and guidance counsellors: see what the school package includes and request a free trial.
Media: all CourseCompass press coverage is on our press page, or email info@coursecompass.ie.