Is Forage worth it?

What is Forage actually good at?

Give Forage real credit, because it earns it. It took a problem almost every student has, you have no idea what most jobs actually involve, and solved it with free simulations built by real companies. You pick a role at a firm you are curious about, work through tasks modeled on what that team really does, submit each one, and unlock a model answer showing how a professional would have approached it. A few hours later you know something you genuinely did not know before: whether that work is for you.

That kind of clarity is worth a lot when you are early and unsure. Most career advice at this stage is people telling you what a job is like. Forage lets you feel it instead, which is a far better way to decide what to chase. It is free, there is no application, and you can do three different simulations in a weekend and rule two of them out. When you mention it later, it signals you went and looked instead of guessing.

So if your question is "what is this job even like," Forage is one of the best free answers available. Try it. The honest part comes next, and it is not about whether Forage is good. It is about what you walk away holding.

Where does Forage run out?

The limit is not the quality of the simulations. It is the output. When you finish, Forage hands you a certificate of completion that you can post to LinkedIn. A certificate is a claim that you finished something. Like most claims on a resume, a recruiter has to take it on faith, and they have learned to discount things they cannot verify. The actual work you produced, the part that could prove you are good and not just diligent, generally stays inside the simulation.

Notice what that means. You did real, role-shaped work. You probably did some of it well. And the evidence of that quality is the one thing you do not get to keep. You leave with the badge and you leave the proof behind. That gap is real, and it is not a small one, because the hiring market has moved exactly toward the thing the certificate does not carry.

Look at the numbers. 41.5% of recent grads are underemployed, working jobs that never needed their degree (NY Fed). The grads who escape that trap are overwhelmingly the ones who did real, evaluated work first: an internship cuts the odds of being underemployed by 48.5% (Strada). And employers are explicit about what they want to see now: 85% are using skills-based hiring in 2025, up from 81% last year (TestGorilla). A completion certificate is not skill-based evidence. It is a credential about attendance, and attendance is the thing the market stopped paying for.

Forage is not your only option, so what is the real field?

Forage sits in a crowded landscape, and it helps to see the whole thing before deciding what is worth your time. Course platforms like Coursera, Udemy, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning teach you concepts and hand you a course certificate. Bootcamps go deeper and cost real money. Career accelerators like Pathrise coach you through the search for a fee or a cut of your salary. Job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed let you apply into the pile. And simulations like Forage let you explore the work itself for free.

Each one is genuinely good at its slice. The pattern worth noticing is what they all stop at. Whether it is a course, a bootcamp, or a simulation, the deliverable is the same: a certificate that says you finished, while an accelerator just polishes the resume that carries it. Every one of them ends with a document that asserts you did something, and none of them put the actual work you produced in front of a recruiter to be judged on its merits.

None of that is a knock on any single one of them. It is the shape of the whole category. They teach, explore, coach, and apply, and then they hand you a badge and wish you luck. The thing none of them does is the thing that the underemployment data says matters most: turn the real work you did into evidence a recruiter can actually open and evaluate.

What would actually move you toward a job?

Stop collecting certificates and start producing evidence. Pick the lane you would take an entry-level role in today, marketing, product, data, design, and do the real work of that role on one narrow problem. A positioning brief. A spec with trade-offs and a metric. A short analysis that ends in a recommendation. Then get it judged against the standard strong professionals are actually held to, so you know whether it is good and exactly what to fix, instead of guessing or taking your own word for it.

This is the idea zero is built on, and it is deliberately the step the rest of the field skips. You take on company-shaped tasks in the role you are targeting. Your work gets scored against a professional bar, not a completion checkbox. You get feedback specific enough to act on. And the scored result becomes proof a recruiter can open and judge before they ever ask for your transcript. Because recruiters pay for access to candidates who have already shown they can do the work, zero stays free for students, the same funding logic that keeps Forage free, pointed one step further down the funnel.

So, is Forage worth it or not?

Yes, with your eyes open. If you are still figuring out what you want to do, Forage is one of the best free tools for sampling roles, and there is genuinely no downside to trying a few. Use it to explore, to rule things out, to walk into a conversation able to talk about real tasks. It does that job well.

Just be honest with yourself about where it stops. The moment you know the direction you are committing to, the question changes from "what is this job like" to "how do I prove I can do it." A completion certificate does not answer the second question, and that is the one that gets you hired. Explore with Forage. Then build scored, recruiter-visible proof in the lane you chose, because that is the part that turns curiosity into an actual job offer.