Career Days also gave us our first opportunity to put Ithaca, Odyssea's new AI career platform, in front of candidates in person rather than online.
Last weekend Odyssea’s employability counsellors spent the day at Career Days 2026 by kariera, talking to candidates about what they actually want from an employer, and introducing Ithaca, our new AI career platform.
Ask someone at a careers fair what they are looking for and they will usually name a job title. Ask a second question and something more interesting tends to emerge.
That was the pattern throughout the day. Our counsellors were in conversation with candidates at very different points in their working lives: graduates weighing up a first role, mid-career professionals considering a change, and experienced candidates who had decided the next move needed to be the right one rather than simply the next one.
They were there to represent Odyssea and to do what they do every week in our programmes — sit down with people, ask better questions, and help them think through the next step. A careers fair is a compressed version of that work. The conversations are shorter, but the substance is the same.
The job titles varied. The underlying questions did not.
Cultural fit came up again and again, not as an abstraction but in practical terms: how decisions get made, whether managers are approachable, what happens when something goes wrong. Work-life balance was raised almost as often, and rarely as a demand — more as a condition people had learned, sometimes the hard way, not to compromise on.
This is the part of employability that is easy to overlook. Matching a CV to a vacancy is the mechanical half of the work. The other half is slower, and it involves listening, understanding what someone actually wants from their career, and helping them recognise which opportunities align with it.
Career Days also gave us our first opportunity to put Ithaca, Odyssea’s new AI career platform, in front of candidates in person rather than online.
Ithaca is built to support people across the length of a career rather than at the single moment of applying for a job. It offers personalised guidance and recommendations, helping candidates get a clearer view of the options open to them and make better-informed decisions about which to pursue. Our counsellors walked candidates through its features at the stand and explained how it fits alongside the human side of the work rather than replacing it.
The response was encouraging. Candidates asked detailed questions about how the recommendations are generated and what the platform could tell them that they could not already work out themselves. Several were particularly interested in job matching, which is where we expect it to prove most immediately useful.
What stayed with us, though, was not the technology but the range of stories behind each conversation: the career changes, the reconsiderations, the people quietly working out what they want next.
Those conversations are the reason we do this work.
If you are thinking about your next step, or still working out what it should be, start today.
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