From Questions to Compass: How Design Thinking Helped Girls Chart Their Paths After Graduation
For many young women finishing high school, the future can feel like an open sea—filled with opportunity, but also uncertainty. What should I do? Who do I want to be? How do I make decisions when everything feels overwhelming?

In response to this reality, a team of educators and youth workers developed a powerful Design Thinking-based workshop called “Map Yourself.” Designed specifically for young women on the brink of transition, the workshop blended creative exercises, metaphor, and real-life experimentation to help participants imagine and prototype their futures.

The Challenge
Teen girls often face complex decisions about education, career, and identity—without sufficient tools or space to explore them freely. Guidance programs are often too generic or career-oriented, failing to support the emotional and exploratory aspects of growing up.

"What if we gave girls not just answers, but better questions—and the tools to explore them?"
That was the guiding question behind the Map Yourself initiative.

The Process: Design Thinking Meets Life Design

💬 Phase 1: Empathize

The program began with listening—really listening. Facilitators held informal talks with students, asking about their thoughts on the future, their fears, and what they needed. The girls expressed common struggles:

• "I don’t know what I want, and I feel pressure to decide now."

• "I’m afraid of making the wrong choice."

• "I feel like there’s a path I’m supposed to follow, not one I want."

This phase revealed the need for an emotional, non-linear approach to decision-making.

📌 Phase 2: Define

The challenge was framed as:
"How might we help young women make life decisions with more clarity, confidence, and self-awareness—without prescribing the outcome?"

The facilitators wanted to avoid creating a traditional career counseling tool. Instead, they envisioned a journey mapping experience, rooted in Design Thinking but centered on personal meaning.

💡 Phase 3: Ideate

Drawing inspiration from life design, storytelling, and even cartography, the team created the concept of a metaphorical map that each girl would create for herself.

Key elements included:

• A Backpack of Experiences (skills, memories, and values)

• Life Experiments (small steps to test ideas about the future)

• Crossroads and Detours (visual tools to navigate uncertainty)

• A “Compass” exercise to define core values and decision-making anchors

✍️ Phase 4: Prototype

Each workshop participant built her own personal map on paper, including illustrated symbols, words, and color-coded paths. They weren’t filling out forms—they were designing their lives in visual, playful, and intuitive ways.

Participants also created “experiments” to test their paths: visiting a university, shadowing someone at work, starting a small project at home, or taking on a leadership role in their school.

🧪 Phase 5: Test

Testing wasn’t just about feedback—it was lived. Girls carried their maps into real life, used their compasses to navigate choices, and returned with reflections.

One participant said:
"This helped me realize I don’t need to have everything figured out. I just need to try something and learn."

Another noted:
"Now I understand that my decisions don’t define me. I define the path."

Impact and Takeaways
The Map Yourself workshops empowered girls to shift from passive recipients of advice to active designers of their lives. Many participants gained clarity and confidence, while educators saw new dimensions of growth and leadership emerge.

The process became a blueprint for developing self-awareness and resilience—not just career orientation.

Why It Worked

• Metaphor made abstract concepts tangible

• Creativity unlocked deeper self-expression

• Prototyping real choices reduced fear of failure

Why It Matters for VET and Youth Education
Map Yourself is an innovative model for vocational and personal development programs. It proves that career guidance doesn’t have to be rigid or intimidating. Instead, it can be joyful, exploratory, and profoundly empowering.

What’s Next?
The team is now digitizing the methodology and exploring partnerships to scale the workshop across schools, youth centres, and NGOs. The vision? A generation of young women equipped not only with skills—but with their own map, compass, and the confidence to use both.