Community Guidelines

Our mission is to democratize access to the career advice underserved youth need to create professional goals and understand their personal paths to those goals. CareerVillage.org enables young people to get that advice by giving them access to professionals from whom to seek guidance. Together they make up our community.

We want people to get the most out of CareerVillage, so we created guidelines to help community members understand how best to contribute. To ensure what's posted on CareerVillage meets these guidelines, every piece of content is looked at and moderated for appropriateness. We also offer coaching to our community members to make their advice the best available anywhere.

What you can expect to see in our guidelines:

CareerVillage.org Community Members

You can see the full description of each user type in our Terms of Service.

Students
Students are advice seekers, typically between the age of 13-24, and have not yet entered the workforce.

Professionals
Professionals give Students advice. They are most typically out of school and in the workforce. Sometimes professionals are employees of companies who have formed a partnership with us (click here to read more about our corporate partnerships).

Educators
Educators are our career readiness champions, who incorporate CareerVillage into their curriculums to get Students on to the platform.

CareerVillage.org Community Team

Our community team enforces our guidelines.

Moderators (a.k.a “Mods”)
Mods are CareerVillage users-turned-volunteers who commit to (collectively) looking at every piece of content that's posted on CareerVillage.org. Their role is to ensure the community is following our guidelines. Typically mods do not take direct corrective action.

Administrators (a.k.a “Admins”)
Admins are CareerVillage.org staff members, contractors, or other team members who support Mods in ensuring content on CareerVillage meets our Community Guidelines, and take action on the actual moderation and coaching of content on the site.

Coaches
Coaches are people who contact other members of the community to proactively provide coaching or suggestions to make sure advice on CareerVillage is the best you can find on the internet. They know all the content Do's and Don'ts, outlined below, and coach community members on how to post great content.

You
If you want, you can also be a member of our community team. We enable, encourage, and expect community members to get involved with the moderation of content on CareerVillage. When you see something that doesn't meet our guidelines, please flag it using the buttons on the site or email us at hello@careervillage.org if you see something that doesn't look right.

What is not allowed

We do not tolerate any form of disrespectful or degrading behavior on CareerVillage, and moderate for content that distracts the community from what they're there to do. Subjects and behavior we never allow on CareerVillage are outlined below:

  • Bullying
  • Hate speech
    • Race
    • Ethnicity
    • National origin
    • Religious affiliation
    • Sexual orientation
    • Sex, gender, or gender identity
    • Serious disabilities or diseases
  • Illegal activity
  • Sexually explicit content (e.g. pornography)
  • Trolling
  • Profanity
  • Personal contact information
    To respect the safety and privacy of our community members, we do not allow community members to post their phone number, email address, or home address. Students are also only able to publicize their first name and the first initial of their last name.
  • Spam
  • Recruiting or evangelizing for one cause over another
  • Profile photo(s) that are off topic
    We define “off topic” in this context as any image that does not have you in it and/or is not relevant to your profession.
  • Attempts to organize communications outside of our community
    For safety reasons, this includes directly inviting people to contact you, follow you, or connect with you outside of CareerVillage.org. (*If Professional shares their Twitter or LinkedIn on their About Me section of their CV profile, that is OK)

Do's and Don'ts

For Students
Do's
  • Use proper grammar and spelling.
  • Give your question context that clearly states why an answer to that question will help you be better prepared for your future. Any question can be a career question with the right context! We have found that questions with longer context messages tend to get answered with longer pieces of advice, from more people, and more quickly than questions with very short context messages.
  • Ask one question at a time. Questions are free - you can have as many as you want!
  • Post original questions. ProTip: Search first, ask second. The fastest way to get an answer is to read it on another question that is the same as yours!
  • Ask direct follow up questions you have about the advice that was given as a comment on that piece of advice.
  • Show your appreciation and express your thanks to Professionals for answering a question you found helpful as a comment to that advice.
Don'ts
  • Post off topic content. We define “off topic” as any content that isn't relevant to your education, career, professional development, or planning for your future professional success.
  • Ask for a job, internship, donation, or other form of gift or opportunity.
  • Post a brand new question (not a follow up to a specific piece of advice) you have as a comment. A brand new question should be posted as a new question, not as a comment!
  • Ask about your homework if you're only asking to get the assignment done or if your questions about your homework don't actually pertain to your career or future.

For professionals
Do's Don'ts
  • Post off topic content. We define “off topic” as any content that doesn't directly answer or isn't apparently relevant to the request for advice or topic being discussed.
  • Be discouraging of Students' aspirations or plan.
  • Provide misleading information about yourself or purposely about the subject matter you're discussing.
  • Post ONLY a link and say “go find the answer over [there]”.
  • Self-promote.
  • Post content in a language other than English (for the time being until CareerVillage.org has the capacity of moderators to support languages aside from English; we encourage names to be in English for Students to read).
  • Directly offer employment or money to Students. You can, however, direct Students to an employment page (if you work for the company you're referring the Student to you need to explicitly say that).
  • Answer a question if you don't have an answer or anything of value to contribute. You don't have to answer every question that gets sent to you!
  • Use our referral feature to harass people.
  • Refer a question to someone you don't know.
  • Refer a question to someone who is not able to answer that question.
  • Post a comment on another piece of advice that you want to add to. Post what you have to say as a separate answer instead!
  • Include your personal mantra or philosophy (e.g., “Try harder every day!”) in your Headline.
  • Leave your Headline or “About me” section in your profile blank!
  • Upload a profile photo where we can't see your face clearly (e.g. photos taken from too far away, blurry image, or a photo of a big group of people where we can't see your face).
  • Plagiarize. Remember to cite the sources you reference in your advice!

What we do when content doesn't meet our guidelines

Much of the content that violates the guidelines outlined above gets blocked by default before it even gets posted. On the rare occasion inappropriate content doesn't automatically get caught, we take immediate action to rectify the situation. When our Community team believes content can be improved, or it doesn't meet the guidelines outlined here, they'll take action to coaching them to make it better.

Depending on the content and its intent, we will do one or more of the following things:
  • Remove it from the platform.
  • Contact community member(s) involved by email to request they take action or notify them of an action that was taken (e.g. “we'd likeyou to make a change to your content..”).
  • Edit or make a change to the content. If we directly edit or change the content in any way we will always note clearly that an admin made a change and explain why.
  • Comment on it (the rest of the community can see this!) to inform the community members involved of an action that was taken or to request they take an action.
  • Suspend community member(s).

Exceptions: If there is a reason to make an exception to the guideline, or if something is flagged as inappropriate but does not meet any guideline outlined here, then Admins will discuss and come to a decision on how to address the issue.

Changes to our guidelines

You can see when our guidelines were last updated at the bottom of this post. Updates to our guidelines willinevitably be made as our community grows. When a change is made we will update the guidelines immediately and summarize that update at the bottom of this page in the changelog. We will not notify the community of every change, but do encourage you to check back here to see the changelog as often as you like.

Changelog:
  • Updated 4/22/2019 J.Rivera - Fixed name of section for consistency [Lines 15 & 147] + Added in rule allowing Pros to post LinkedIn & Twitter on About Me
  • Updated 12/19/2017 J.Rivera - Added language rules.
  • Updated 6/9/2017 L.Manning