This walks you from an empty workspace to a real first outcome: somebody has taken your assessment, you have approved them, and you are looking at their results.
It takes about twenty minutes of your time, plus however long you wait for somebody to answer.
Before you start
You need an account in an organisation. If a colleague invited you, the welcome email contains no password — that is expected, because staff accounts do not have passwords. Go to the sign-in page, enter the address you were invited on, and a six-digit code is emailed to you. Enter the code and you are in.
If no code arrives, check the address your colleague actually invited: the code can only go where the account says. See Your account and sign-in.
1. Look around without breaking anything
Open the demo organisation from the organisation switcher. It has a full year of results in it, so every screen is populated and you can see what a finished participant looks like before you have one.
One thing to know: the demo is shared, and actions in it are real. Approving or archiving somebody there changes what the next counselor sees. See The demo school.
Come back to your own organisation when you are done.
2. Create an assessment
Assessments → create one. Choose a questionnaire, give it a name you will recognise in six months, and create it.
Two decisions worth making now rather than later:
- The name. "Spring 2026 Year 11" beats "Career Assessment".
- One assessment per group. The assessment is what groups people, and nobody can be moved between groups afterwards. If you are working with two classes, make two.
3. Share it
Open the assessment and find Invite people. You have four ways in: a link, an access code to read aloud, a QR code for a screen, and a printable sheet.
Use the link where you can — codes get mistyped.
Anyone with the link can take it. That is deliberate, and it is how people join at all: there is no "add participant" button anywhere in Counselor OS. See Sharing an assessment.
4. Wait, then look at your roster
Everybody who takes your assessment appears under Pending Approvals. People who are not your clients will appear there too — anyone with the link can take it — and that is fine.
Leaving somebody pending costs nothing, forever.
5. Approve your first participant
This is the step that spends money, so read Approving people before you click it. In short: approving puts the person in one of your plan's places, and in a practice that place is committed for twelve months whether or not you archive them later.
Approve one person you are genuinely working with.
6. Read their profile
Open them. Their Counseling Desk opens on their NexProfile — their interests, work values, strengths, and the career fields that fit them. It opens there because there is no plan yet; once one is underway the desk opens on the Planning Board instead.
Read Reading a NexProfile alongside it the first time. It is the article that explains what the numbers do not mean, which matters more than what they do.
If it says "No profile shared with you yet", nobody has asked them yet — use the request control beside the provenance line. If it says "This participant has not shared their profile with you", they were asked and declined, which is a conversation rather than a second click. See Reading a NexProfile.
You have arrived
That is the loop: share an assessment, approve who is yours, read the profile, work from it. Everything else builds on this.
Where to go next
- The NexPlanner wizards — turning a profile into occupations worth discussing
- Working on the Planning Board — agreeing goals together
- Sending a plan for signing — the outcome
- What you cannot do — the deliberate limits, worth five minutes early on
- Your account settings — your own profile and sign-in, and why there is no password
Related
- Your Counseling Desk — what you are looking at once a participant is open
- The demo school — practise on seeded data first