ADRIAN — As a member of a family with deep roots in Adrian manufacturing and community philanthropy, Stephanie Hickman Boyse has long been involved in the worlds of both higher education and the trades.

And after she retired as the CEO of Brazeway, the company her family built — although she still serves on its board — Boyse turned her focus to building Jebbee, a career networking platform aimed at helping young people decide what they want to do with their lives and find out how to make it happen. She is the platform’s CEO and co-founder.

Boyse’s history at her family’s company, which over the decades has employed scores of local workers — and as a member of the boards of both Adrian College and Siena Heights University —  “taught me a lot over the years,” she said.

But the “eye-opener,” she continued, was being the mom of a teen who didn’t know what she wanted to do for a living and thought Brazeway was in the toilet-manufacturing business.

The company is actually the world’s largest producer of aluminum thin-wall, refrigeration-grade round tube, and makes products used in the HVAC, automotive, appliance, and commercial refrigeration industries.

“We are not doing the job for our kids” when it comes to helping them learn about careers and become prepared for the world of work, Boyse said. She added that 50 to 60 percent of young people leave high school without knowing what they want to do for a living.

“It’s not that our schools haven’t tried,” she said. “They’ve tried very, very hard.”

But for students, it’s difficult to even know where to start in pulling together all the resources needed to learn about careers — from discovering what they’d be good at in the first place and getting the right skills to connecting with people working in those fields already.

That’s why she decided to launch Jebbee, a name that comes out of the platform’s scope being “all things jobs, education, and business,” Boyse said. “We wanted to come up with a name that was fun and playful,” and Jebbee was what stuck.

Unlike a traditional job board, Jebbee meets young people where they already are: on social media. The platform is interactive, using AI-driven matching capabilities to recommend careers, schools and opportunities based on a student’s personality, interests, and skills. It also includes features such as virtual career days and mentorship opportunities.

Students and educators at Adrian High School, Adrian College, Dexter Community Schools, Michigan State University, and the Char-Em School District in Charlevoix and Emmett have been testing the platform for about two months now. Boyse expects a full launch this fall.

Jebbee is geared toward high school and college students and recent graduates, but it will also serve educational institutions of all types and businesses who want to connect with young talent.

So how does it work?

The platform, which is free for students and for Michigan high schools, is available as a mobile app and at jebbee.com.

First, a user logs in and creates a profile that can be as limited or as extensive as desired. The answers help inform the user’s Jebbee feed, which Boyse described as “TikTok meets LinkedIn.”

Student answer questions about their interests and take a personality test, all of which are designed to help the platform make its recommendations. The more the user engages with Jebbee, the more Jebbee learns about what the student might like (or not) career-wise.

“It’s a really fun and interactive process,” Boyse said.

Among the platform’s many features is an ever-expanding library of videos from people already working in fields the student might be interested in, serving as an online version of Career Day and which pulls all that sort of content together into one place.

For example, Boyse herself interviewed her own HVAC technician, a woman who “tells a great and inspiring story,” she said. Another of her interviews was with Mike Rowe, the “Dirty Jobs” guy from TV.

Besides helping students figure out what sorts of jobs are out there for them — including ones they may otherwise never even realize exist — the content can steer them toward the classes they’ll need, even if those classes don’t seem obvious at first.

Boyse cited the example of asking a chef what class he wished he’d paid more attention to in school, and his answer was “math,” because a chef needs to know how to scale recipes depending on the number of people the food is being prepared for.

In time, Jebbee will also allow students to connect with mentors. For safety reasons, the mentoring will not be done directly with a student, but the student will be able to ask a mentor questions through the platform.

Boyse said that while leaving the day-to-day operation of Brazeway meant leaving behind a fulfilling career, working on Jebbee helps her continue to focus on “the greater good” by helping students connect with careers and get the skills they need to, in turn, be the talent employers need.

And besides that, “this has been a super-fun thing to do,” she said.