Need Help Finding a New Career? Take a Closer Look at Local Resources From Goodwill.
No-cost job assistance, career coaching, and a skills assessment that shows you what you’re already good at. Since April, 1,829 people across the Fredericksburg region have come through Rappahannock Goodwill’s CareerPath Accelerator. Program manager Mayra Martinez explains how it works, and why it starts with skills instead of job titles.
The woman sitting across from Mayra Martinez had been out of the workforce for eight years. She was a single mother of three, recently relocated, and starting over. On paper, those eight years read as a gap.
Then she finished the skills try-out, and the results came back in seconds.
“Her whole demeanor lifted,” Martinez said. “She lit up with new interest in the roles available in her industry once she could see, clearly and for herself, that she is qualified.”
By the end of the session she was asking about training programs. Growth mattered to her.
“Moments like that are exactly why we do this work,” Martinez said.
The problem with asking people to describe themselves
Most hiring starts with a résumé, which is really a request that someone summarize their own worth in one page and hope an employer believes them. For people with gaps, career changes, or experience that doesn’t map neatly onto a job title, that’s a hard ask.
Rappahannock Goodwill built the CareerPath Accelerator on a different premise.
“CPA is built on a simple but deeply held belief: every job seeker deserves the chance to see, and prove, just how much they’re truly capable of,” Martinez said. “Instead of asking people to describe their skills on a résumé and hope an employer takes their word for it, we let candidates actually demonstrate those skills through realistic, industry-specific simulations.”
Think of it less as a test and more as a matchmaker for the regional workforce: understanding the person, understanding the opportunity, and understanding what makes the fit actually work.
Getting started only takes a few minutes
The process was designed to remove barriers, not add them.
Participants answer a few introductory questions online and receive their skills assessment by email. It works on a phone or a desktop, though the team recommends setting aside about 15 focused minutes to get through it properly.
It isn’t a static questionnaire. The AI-powered experience adapts as it goes, shaping questions around each participant’s responses, so two people who start in the same industry won’t necessarily see the same scenarios. The situations come from real conditions in the field they’ve chosen. Results arrive within seconds of finishing.
What you actually walk away with
The output is a tailored snapshot: strongest skills, areas for development, and how those skills translate into specific career paths, training needs, and job opportunities.
It’s a document participants can carry into applications and interviews as evidence, which is the point.
There’s a second benefit that participants tend to discover on their own.
“So many candidates discover that the skills try-out gives them real scenarios they can lean on as examples during interviews,” Martinez said, “concrete, personal stories that let them showcase their skills and how they’d handle situations specific to that industry.”
Anyone who has frozen on “tell me about a time when” understands why that matters.
The coach reads the job market for you
The assessment is where the process starts, not where it ends. Every participant sits down with a local career coach, in person or virtually, who walks through the results with them.
The coach celebrates strengths, works through areas for growth, and breaks down scores across the top three skills for the participant’s chosen industry.
“Candidates are so often genuinely surprised and moved by their own skill level in those top three areas,” Martinez said. “It’s a joy to watch their confidence grow as they learn to pair their skills profile with their résumé, using it to show employers real, tangible proof of what they can do, which opens doors that once felt closed.”
But encouragement is only half the job. The coach is also an interpreter of the local labor market.
Career decisions often get made on incomplete information: what someone assumes is out there, what they’ve done before, or what a job title happens to sound like. A local expert can connect a participant’s actual skills to current labor market data, employer demand, established career pathways, training requirements, and openings that genuinely exist right now.
That combination is the model. AI identifies and demonstrates the skills. Labor market data shows where those skills are needed. A local expert helps the participant understand both and decide what to do next.
“What has surprised and moved me most is just how much job seekers benefit from the comprehensiveness of our model,” Martinez said, “from the skills try-out and our 1:1 in-person and virtual coaching sessions, to résumé support and career mapping and career exploration, to real-time labor market information and resources.”
Together, she said, they give people “a real, meaningful edge as they work so hard to get employed in a difficult, highly competitive market.”
Who’s using the CareerPath Accelerator?
“At this point, everyone is walking through our doors, and we’re so glad to welcome them,” she said.
Career changers are a large share, including people in their forties, fifties, and sixties navigating layoffs or a thin job market. Recent college graduates are coming in, competing hard for a first opportunity. So are people stepping out of retirement and back into work, looking for something new.
The program is open to anyone. Alongside that, the team has identified particular demand in service, logistics, and military-connected industries and communities, and those areas will be a major focus of outreach and partnership work because of the career pathways opening up there.
Since April, 1,829 people have come through. Of those who complete the assessment, 93% go on to employment.
Why there’s no cost to job seekers
CareerPath Accelerator is offered at no cost to participants because expanding access to meaningful employment, and helping people build career pathways they can sustain, is the point of the organization.
That’s funded the way Goodwill has always funded its mission. Donating and shopping at Rappahannock Goodwill is what pays for the coaching, the assessments, and the career centers. A bag dropped at a donation center in Stafford or a purchase at a store in Spotsylvania turns into a coaching session for someone across town. Rappahannock Goodwill operates 21 donation centers, 15 stores, and 3 career centers, and assists more than 800 people a month with finding work. Find your nearest location.
Employers invest from the other direction. Through Business Services, employer partners work with CareerPath Accelerator to identify, develop, and retain talent that genuinely fits their culture, growth strategy, and future leadership needs, which strengthens both their organizations and the region’s workforce.
The pathway, start to finish
Someone can move from “what am I even qualified to do?” to a clear picture of their skills, a view of where those skills are needed in the local economy, and a real person helping them navigate what comes next.
Start your skills try-out or learn more about the program. A member of the team follows up within 24 hours.
About Rappahannock Goodwill Industries
Rappahannock Goodwill Industries has served the Fredericksburg region since 1966, creating jobs locally, preparing people to succeed at work, and helping them overcome barriers to employment across a 16-county area. Learn more at fredgoodwill.org.
