Dr. Omolara Fatiregun

What if every job seeker could see a path toward work that lasts?

Dr. Omolara is developing the research and pilot-readiness roadmap for Compass by THRIVE. A practical, AI-powered career coach designed to help people see more expansive, realistic pathways toward durable work and economic mobility.

About The Fellow

Founder & CEO, THRIVE Industries · Washington, D.C.

Dr. Omolara has spent her career helping public systems move from good intentions to measurable impact.

Her path to this work began with one institutional decision. Her mother, a newly immigrated Nigerian file clerk at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, was offered free college tuition as an employee benefit. That policy helped her become a pharmacist and changed the economic trajectory of her family.

Years later, as Acting Deputy Director for Strategic Planning and Performance Management at Washington, D.C.’s juvenile justice agency, Dr. Omolara found herself making life-altering decisions for vulnerable young people. There, she saw how well-intentioned systems could still narrow opportunity when they kept funding what they had always funded.

In 2021, she founded THRIVE Industries to help governments, schools, and philanthropic institutions make better decisions about programs, budgets, and implementation. THRIVE has served more than 120,000 students and families across California, Massachusetts, and Utah, including work that helped redirect $500,000 toward parent-focused workforce pathways requested by residents.

Dr. Fatiregun holds a doctorate from Harvard, a master’s in public policy from Georgetown, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College. Her work has been recognized by Fast Company, MIT Solve, the HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity, the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, and the Morgan Stanley Social Justice Innovation Award.

Why This Work Matters

Career guidance often shapes what people believe is possible. But too often, the pathways shown to students, workers, parents, and job seekers are too narrow, too generic, or disconnected from the realities of their lives.

A young person may be steered toward the same familiar options. A parent may not know which training program can realistically lead to better work. A job seeker may encounter fragmented advice across schools, job boards, community colleges, and workforce agencies without a clear way to understand which path is reachable, durable, and worth pursuing.

Compass by THRIVE is being designed around a different possibility: that AI could help people see broader and more practical pathways based on their goals, constraints, and circumstances.

The Bergel Institute is supporting this work because it asks exactly the kind of question the Institute was created to pursue: how can technology, grounded in real human experience, help people see and reach possibilities that existing systems too often leave out of view?

The Work

Compass by THRIVE is envisioned as an individual-facing AI career coach designed to help job seekers navigate toward work that is both reachable and durable.

Too often, career guidance narrows possibility. Students, parents, and job seekers are shown the same familiar options, even when those paths may not lead to durable work or long-term stability. Compass is designed around a different idea: that guidance should begin with a person’s goals, constraints, circumstances, and potential, not with the limited pathways a system already knows how to offer.

During the Fellowship year, Dr. Omolara will study where workforce guidance currently breaks down across K–12 career-readiness programs, municipal workforce access points, workforce boards, community colleges, and training providers. She will engage job seekers, advisors, frontline staff, and workforce leaders to understand what people need when making education and career decisions, and what kind of guidance could help them move forward with confidence.

By the end of the Fellowship year, Dr. Omolara aims to translate this research into a practical roadmap for early Compass pilots with trusted organizations, so the tool can move from idea to tested support for real people making real decisions about work.

The Fellowship will help ground Compass in the realities of the people it is meant to serve, clarifying what job seekers need, which institutions they trust, and how an AI-powered coach can open better pathways without becoming just another technology layer.