ETIH Innovation Awards Winners: Find Your Grind receives Editor's Choice Award

Find Your Grind was recognized for its lifestyle-first career exploration platform, ESSA Tier 2 validated outcomes, mentor-led content, and work supporting future readiness across K-12 education.

Find Your Grind received an Editor’s Choice Award at the inaugural ETIH Innovation Awards 2026

Find Your Grind has received an Editor's Choice Award at the inaugural ETIH Innovation Awards 2026, with the ETIH editorial team and judges recognizing a K-12 career exploration platform that starts with student identity rather than traditional job matching.

The platform is built around a lifestyle-first model, helping students explore careers through their interests, values, strengths, and the kind of future they want to build. Its Future Ready Students platform includes a multi-year, standards-aligned curriculum, more than 400 career paths, mentor stories, an AI-powered Reflective Coach, and professional development for educators.

Find Your Grind says it has reached more than 500,000 students, with 100,000-plus active licensed users across more than 250 school districts in all 50 U.S. states. Its entry also included ESSA Tier 2 validation through an independent WestEd study, which found improvements in student engagement, career awareness, and confidence.

For Nick Gross, CEO of Find Your Grind, the company’s starting point was a rejection of the standard career guidance question many students are still asked too early: “The old way doesn't work. For decades, career guidance has started with the same question: "What do you want to do when you grow up?" It assumes a 14-year-old should be able to pick a destination when they haven't even figured out who they are yet. We wanted to flip that entirely.”

That identity-first approach was central to the editorial decision. Find Your Grind was not selected for presenting career exploration as a one-time matching exercise, but for building a broader model around self-awareness, student agency, and future readiness.

ETIH Innovation Awards judge Neil Almond highlighted the potential of the platform to help students connect their interests with future opportunities, describing it as “an innovative space to focus on emerging technology.” He also noted that helping children see what their futures could involve may “spark their imagination and make them realise that their hobbies have earning potential.”

Career exploration beyond job matching

Find Your Grind’s approach moves away from salary tables, aptitude tests, and narrow career lists. Students begin with a Lifestyle Assessment that connects their interests and preferences to career paths across areas including gaming, content creation, social impact, trades, entrepreneurship, STEM, and creative industries.

Gross describes this as “flipping the funnel”: “Instead of narrowing students down to a job title based on a personality quiz, we help them build self-awareness first, then explore careers that fit the lifestyle they're designing for themselves.”

That model reflects a labor market where students may move between roles, sectors, and industries several times. Find Your Grind’s entry positioned career readiness as something broader than preparing students for a single job title.

As Gross frames it, a student’s sense of identity needs to be more durable than any one role: “The students we serve will hold multiple roles across multiple industries, many of which don't exist yet. If we anchor their exploration in who they are, their strengths, their curiosities, what brings them energy, that foundation travels with them no matter where work takes them.”

ETIH Innovation Awards judge Richard Govada Joshua described Find Your Grind as “an exceptionally strong and innovative K-12 learning solution” focused on future readiness, career exploration, and social-emotional development. He also pointed to its focus on “preparing students for life beyond academics.”

Emma Thompson, Director of Content and Editor at ETIH, says: “Find Your Grind approached career readiness as a question of identity, confidence, and exposure, not just destination planning. The editorial team was interested in how the platform helps students understand themselves before asking them to make decisions about work, especially in a job market where linear pathways are becoming less common.”

The platform’s curriculum is structured around four competencies: self-awareness, social awareness, career awareness, and action awareness. It also includes Future Ready Educators, a professional development platform for teachers, and Future Pro, which offers micro-credentialing courses in high-demand industries.

For schools, the model is designed to fit into existing advisory periods, career and technical education pathways, and homeroom time. That structure is important because school counselors are already carrying multiple responsibilities, from academic advising and college applications to mental health support and crisis response.

Gross links that implementation challenge directly to what districts need from career readiness tools: “What schools need is a solution that meets students where they are, delivers meaningful career exposure without adding to educator workload, and produces outcomes they can actually measure.”

Mentor stories and measurable outcomes

One of Find Your Grind’s most distinctive features is its mentor library, which includes more than 200 stories from figures across sport, entertainment, gaming, creative industries, STEM, trades, and entrepreneurship. The wider platform includes mentor content from names such as Tony Hawk, Will.I.AM, Rob Dyrdek, Ruth Carter, and DrLupo.

For Gross, those stories create a different form of career exposure than a static profile or database: “When a student hears Tony Hawk talk about turning a hobby into a global brand, or Ruth E. Carter describe the winding path from growing up in Massachusetts to winning an Oscar for costume design, it does something that a career database never will,” he says. “It makes the future feel possible for someone who doesn't see themselves in a straight-line trajectory.”

The point is not celebrity for its own sake. Find Your Grind uses mentor content to show students that careers can include pivots, failures, unexpected turns, and non-linear routes.

Gross puts the difference plainly: “A career profile tells you what a job is. A mentor story shows you what a career feels like.”

The evidence behind the model was also central to the recognition. Find Your Grind’s WestEd study found a 19 percentile point improvement in self-confidence and decision-making, a 20-point gain in student engagement, and a 22-point increase in interest in future careers. The overall effect size was 0.50.

ETIH Innovation Awards judge Richard Govada Joshua also highlighted the scale and adoption of the platform, noting its reach across more than 250 districts and all 50 U.S. states.

For Find Your Grind, the research gave the team validation that its identity-based model was changing more than career awareness.

“When you invest in self-awareness and identity-based exploration, students don't just learn about careers, they develop the confidence and agency to actually pursue them,” Gross says.

One finding was particularly important for the team: students starting with lower baseline scores showed the strongest gains.

Gross describes that as a meaningful validation of the platform’s equity potential: “That wasn't something we designed for explicitly, but it validated our approach in a way that was genuinely moving for the team. It told us that a lifestyle-first, identity-centered model doesn't just work for high-performing students. It actually closes gaps.”

Jack Dowling, ETIH Innovation Awards judge, also pointed to the strength of Find Your Grind’s outcomes, noting the independently validated improvements in engagement and career awareness. He described the platform’s scale as “impressive” and highlighted the use of mentor stories “from people that generation would actually recognise and respect.”

Scaling future readiness

Find Your Grind has also built its platform around educator support and district-level implementation. Its professional development tools are intended to help teachers deliver career exploration confidently, while district administrators can access analytics showing student progress in career exploration.

Evidence has become part of how Find Your Grind works with schools and districts, particularly in a funding climate where leaders need more than usage data.

“When we achieved ESSA Tier 2 validation through an independent WestEd study, it gave district leaders something concrete to point to,” Gross says. “Not just engagement metrics, but statistically significant improvements in student outcomes.”

Scott Thompson, Director at Paxton Media, whose brands include ETIH and RTIH, says: “Career readiness is often discussed in quite narrow terms, but Find Your Grind takes a wider view of what students need before they can make confident decisions about their future. The use of recognizable mentor stories, lifestyle-led exploration, and validated outcomes gave the entry a clear point of difference. It felt relevant to how young people actually discover ideas, identity, and ambition today.”

Following its Editor's Choice recognition, Find Your Grind plans to expand its ESSA-validated model into new states and districts, deepen its AI capabilities to personalize student journeys, and grow its mentor network to reflect the industries and career paths relevant to the next generation.

For Gross, the award also carries weight because of the way it was selected. “It means a great deal, particularly because it comes from an editorial team that evaluates these platforms critically, not commercially,” he says.

He connects that recognition back to the company’s central mission: “Ultimately, our mission hasn't changed: help every student figure out who they are so they can build a future that actually fits. This award is a milestone on that road, and we're grateful for the recognition.”

To find out more about Find Your Grind and its Future Ready Students platform, more information is available via the company’s website.