Helix user guide

How to build a profile, explore 734 UK life sciences and healthcare careers, compare your options and produce a plan. Nothing here requires an account, and your CV never leaves your device.

Helix Career Pathway Planner — https://tools.optymumss.com/helix-career-pathway-planner/

1. What Helix does

Helix answers four questions for somebody working in, or moving into, UK life sciences and healthcare:

1. Where am I now?
2. What career options are realistically open to me?
3. What am I missing for the route I choose?
4. What should I do next?

It turns a CV — or a profile you build by hand — into a structured career profile, compares that against 734 UK career destinations, and produces a pathway, a gap analysis and exactly three next actions.

What the catalogue covers

The 734 careers are grouped into sixteen families. Laboratory, diagnostic and clinical roles are the deepest, because that is where official UK sources publish the most — but the catalogue is wider than that, and the corners people most often assume are missing are worth naming:

• Innovation and enterprise — technology transfer, knowledge exchange, licensing, business development, patent attorney, investment analyst, and the founder and chief-scientific-officer routes.
• Teaching and academia — the lecturing ladder from lecturer to professor, further education lecturing, tutoring, education technician and vocational assessing, alongside the practice-educator roles in healthcare.
• Digital, data and informatics — bioinformatics, biostatistics, health informatics, clinical coding and health data governance.

If a role you know is genuinely missing, that is worth telling us. Every batch of additions so far has come from somebody pointing out a gap.

What it is not. Helix is not an AI career adviser. There is no language model anywhere in it, and matching is deterministic: the same profile always produces the same result. It does not predict whether you will get a job and never shows a percentage chance of anything. It does not determine professional eligibility — where a career is regulated it says so, links to the regulator, and asks you to confirm your own position.

2. Your data

Your CV is read inside your browser tab. It is not uploaded to Optymum SS, and Helix does not store the document or its text.

• Contact details are stripped out before the text is read.
• The structured profile has no fields for your name, email address, telephone number, postal address or employer — a field that does not exist cannot be filled in by accident later.
• The evidence Helix attaches to your profile is always wording from its own vocabulary, never a sentence copied out of your document.
• If you choose to save progress, only the structured profile, your saved career ids and your milestone progress go into this browser's local storage. There is no account and no server.

Opening a career page contacts nobody. Salary information is read from a single file published with the site, which is why the figures never change between page views and why nothing anywhere learns which careers you looked at.

Usage analytics

Helix sends limited, anonymous information about how the tool is used to Google Analytics, so we can see which parts help and which are ignored. This is on by default, and Google Analytics cookies are set on your device to do it. There is no banner asking first; the footer of every page says what is happening, and you can switch it off whenever you like.

If you do not agree to this, please do not use Helix.

What is sent is:

• Which screens you opened, as fixed names — “start”, “recommendations”, “compare”, “pathway”. A career page always reports as “career_detail”, never as the career. The identifiers in the address bar are removed before anything is sent, so which careers you look at stays between you and your browser.
• Whether a step worked — that a profile was built, that options were generated, that a comparison was viewed, that a plan was exported. These record that the thing happened and carry nothing else: there is no room in them for a career, a number or a piece of text.

What is not sent: your CV or anything read out of it, your career profile, your priorities, your saved careers, your comparisons, your baseline, your plan, your milestone notes, any salary figure, and any error message. Helix has no field for your name, email address, telephone number or postal address, so those cannot be sent even by mistake. Your CV is still read entirely inside your browser whatever you choose here.

Analytics run only on the live site at tools.optymumss.com. A local copy or a preview build sends nothing at all, whatever the setting says.

Switching it off. Go to My data and use Privacy and analytics. The panel says which state you are in and has a single button to turn analytics off — or back on again later. Turning them off stops Helix sending anything further; reloading the page after that leaves Google Analytics out of it altogether.

That choice is remembered in this browser only, in the same way as your saved profile. Another browser or another device starts from the default again.

You can export or import everything from My data. Reset Helix, which deletes it all, is on the start screen beside the upload button — that is where people decide to start again. It appears only when there is something to delete, and always asks first.

3. Quick start

1. Build your profile. Upload a CV, or build one by hand. You confirm everything before it is used. Scanned CVs are read in your browser.
2. See your career options. Every career in the UK database, scored against your profile and grouped by how big a move each would be — led by the areas you say interest you.
3. Narrow them down. Set your priorities and Helix sets aside the careers that do not fit them. Your answers decide this, and it says how many each choice would leave before you make it.
4. Compare your shortlist. Side by side, up to four careers at a time, with your current job pinned as a baseline if you want the differences.
5. Choose a destination. Select one career to plan against.
6. See your gaps and pathway. What you have, what you would need, and any bridge roles that would make the move smaller.
7. Take your next 3 actions. Prioritised, and small enough to start, with a plan across 90 days, 6 months and 12 months.

The step that did not exist before is the third one. Helix used to go straight from a list of several hundred matches to “compare your shortlist” without saying how one becomes the other. Narrowing is a real step in the product now, so it is a real step here.

Finishing the profile questions always takes you to My options — the careers matched to what you just entered. Helix used to divert people who said they had a target career in mind to the Career Explorer instead, which showed the same 734 careers it would have shown before the upload.

If you would rather look around first, the start screen offers four demonstration profiles. Everything in them is fictional.

Finding your way around

On a phone the navigation collapses behind the menu button in the top right, so the header takes a strip rather than a third of the screen. On a wider screen the links stay in the bar.

When a screen has finished with you it sends you somewhere useful rather than somewhere generic. Clearing a comparison, or backing out of a career page, returns you to My options once you have a profile, and to the Career Explorer before you have one — because until then the Explorer is the only list there is.

4. Building your profile

From a CV

Helix reads PDF, DOCX and TXT.

Scanned CVs

If a PDF turns out to be a scan — a photograph of a printed page, with no text in it — Helix offers to read it with text recognition. That runs in your browser. The scan is not uploaded, and no recognition service is sent your document. The engine is a few megabytes and is downloaded only if you press the button; you can cancel at any point.

Recognition is slower and less accurate than reading a text-based PDF. It misreads names, dates and abbreviations far more often than it misreads ordinary prose, so the review screen tells you how well the scan read and asks you to check every field. The scan and its recognised text are discarded once your structured profile exists.

Extraction is a draft. The review screen is not skippable, because the person the profile describes is the only authority on whether it is right. Correct anything wrong and add anything missed. Helix also lists what it could not establish, and guesses nothing to fill those gaps.

By hand

The manual builder produces exactly the same structured profile, and the matching engine cannot tell the difference. You record your current role, career family, approximate years of experience, education, professional registration, the sectors you have worked in, and the skills you have real evidence for.

Registration is recorded carefully. A professional-body membership is not the same thing as statutory registration, so they are stored separately, and Helix never treats either as established eligibility.

Qualifications

The education list covers the common UK routes from GCSE to PhD, and includes MBA and DBA. Because no list can name every award, it also offers Other Bachelors, Other Masters and Other Doctorate — so a BTech, an LLB, a DVM or a professional doctorate can be recorded at the right level rather than forced into a category that is not yours.

A few abbreviations are deliberately not auto-detected from a CV, because in this sector they usually mean something else: EdD against estimated due date, DHSc against the Department of Health and Social Care, LLM against large language model, and DBA against database administrator. Reading a job title as a doctorate is a worse mistake than missing one, so those are chosen from the dropdown instead.

5. Career priorities

My priorities asks twelve optional questions about what you want from working life: a salary target, how much hours and working pattern matter, remote working, travel, and how much patient contact, laboratory work, research, commercial work and leadership you want.

Every question defaults to No preference, and that is a real answer — an unanswered question is left out of the scoring entirely rather than counted as indifference.

Three rules keep the result honest:

• A question is scored only when you have answered it and Helix holds the matching fact about that career. Typical weekly hours, for example, exist for 156 of the 734 careers.
• The result is worked out across the questions that could actually be compared, not across all of them.
• A career is never marked down because something about it is unknown.

Answering these questions cannot change your background alignment. The two are computed separately and deliberately kept apart.

6. The three measures

Helix reports three separate things about a career and never combines them into one score. A career can do well on one and badly on another, and which trade-off matters is your decision.

None of them is a probability of getting a job. Transition effort in particular describes the distance to cover, not your chances of covering it — a high-effort route is a fact about the route, not a reason not to take it.

Mandatory and regulated requirements are computed separately from all three and shown on their own, so a strong alignment can never hide a registration requirement.

7. My options

My options is where a finished profile lands, and it groups careers rather than ranking them into one list.

If you told Helix which areas interest you, those careers come first, under In the direction you chose. Careers that sit most squarely in the areas you picked lead the group, and among equals the closest match to your background comes first — not the easiest move.

The remaining groups follow, ordered by how much of a transition each would be: closest to your current experience, adjacent careers, and bigger pivots. Those are useful, but they answer "what could I reach most easily", which is the wrong first question for somebody who has just said they want to move.

The middle band used to run from 40 to 59, which put roughly seventy per cent of the catalogue into one group called "strong adjacent careers" — a label that could not survive being counted. Narrowing it makes that group a genuine shortlist, and the boundary with the first group now matches the alignment labels shown on the cards.

Grouping is a cut of the ranking, not a reweighting of it. Saying you are interested in something changes which careers are shown first; it does not change any career's alignment score.

How many careers are in each group

At the top of the page Helix states how many careers it scored — all 734 — and how many landed in each group. Each group heading repeats its own count beside how many are currently on screen.

Those are the full counts, not the number of cards on screen. Each group shows six careers at a time, and Previous and Next move through the pages — the list stays the same size however deep into it you go, rather than growing into a wall of cards.

Narrowing the list down

Several hundred options is not an answer. Under the breakdown, Helix offers to cut the list down using your stated priorities — what you want from a job, in your own words.

Three levels are offered, and each one says how many careers it would leave before you choose it, so you can see the cost of narrowing before you narrow. For a typical profile, Very strong fit only takes 734 careers down to somewhere near a hundred.

Two things it does not do. It filters, never rescores — every alignment score is exactly what it was, and the three measures stay separate. And it is off until you ask for it: a screen that quietly hid two thirds of your options the moment you answered a preference question would be deciding for you.

A career set aside here is one you have ruled out, not one Helix has. Widen the level or use the Career Explorer to see everything again.

Which careers you see first

Within a group the closest match to your profile comes first — and in the group matching your chosen direction, the careers sitting most squarely in the areas you picked come first.

The order is then dealt out by career family, at most two from any one family before moving to the next. Without that, "Closest to your current experience" would open for a biomedical scientist with Biomedical Scientist, Senior Biomedical Scientist, Lead Biomedical Scientist and Specialist Biomedical Scientist — which looks like plenty of choice and offers one. The careers that step aside appear a little further down rather than being removed.

Where a group contains only one career family, you will simply see several from it in a row. That is not the limit failing; it is the honest answer when nothing else falls in that band.

The figures add up to every career scored, because a career sits in exactly one group. One that qualifies for the direction you chose is not counted a second time as an adjacent option.

A large number in Bigger pivots worth exploring is not a judgement. It counts careers whose subject matter your profile does not currently evidence, which is a fact about the distance rather than about you.

Every card explains why that career appeared, in terms of the overlap Helix actually found in your profile.

8. Career Explorer

Explore careers searches the whole catalogue.

Search and sort sit at the top; everything else is folded behind Filter these careers, so the results are the first thing you see. When any filter is on, the heading says how many and the block opens itself — a filtered list should never look like a broken one.

Filters:

• Typical salary reaches at least — describes the top of a career's published range. It does not imply you personally would be paid it.
• Career family and Regulation.
• Remote or hybrid potential, Working pattern (shifts, evenings and weekends, on-call), and the patient contact, laboratory, research and commercial intensity levels.
• Salary evidence, to see only careers grounded in a particular class of source.
• Preference fit, once you have stated priorities.

Sorting covers default order, highest typical salary, best background alignment, best preference fit, lowest transition effort, alphabetical, and most recently checked salary. Each names the field it sorts on — there is no hidden combined "best career" score.

Taxonomy controls sit under Advanced filters, including Helix content depth, which describes how much researched guidance has been written for a career and says nothing about the career itself.

Applying filters

The dropdowns collect your choices and apply them together when you press Apply filters. The button stays greyed out until something changes, and tells you how many changes are waiting. This means picking four filters is one pass over the catalogue rather than four, and the result count always describes what is actually on screen.

Search is the exception — it filters as you type, because having to press a button to see a search take effect helps nobody. Reset filters clears everything, including the search box.

9. Career pages

Each career page opens with the facts you weigh a career on: typical salary and its evidence class, typical hours, working pattern, main settings, and — when you have a profile — the three measures side by side.

Below that: what the career involves, salary and working life in full, how people enter it, why it may fit you, possible progression, similar careers and pivots, and the sources behind everything.

Every career has a description of its own, and the page always tells you where it came from. Where Helix has matched an official job profile it shows that profile's own wording and attributes it to the publisher. Where it has not, it composes a description from what Helix records about that career — its family and seniority, its subject areas, how much laboratory work, patient contact, research or commercial work it involves, whether statutory registration applies, and the typical background — and says plainly that it is composed rather than official.

A composed description will not tell you what a typical day looks like, who the main employers are, or where the job leads. That is deliberate: Helix has no source for any of it, and inventing plausible prose is the one thing that would make the rest of the page untrustworthy. Beneath the description you can open About this career family for the wider context.

Some careers also carry a Read more about this role link to a profile published elsewhere, most often NHS Health Careers. Those links open the publisher's own page in a new window. Helix links to them rather than copying them, so you read the organisation's current wording rather than a snapshot — and because that content belongs to them, not to Helix.

Career pages also carry Compare and Save alongside Build my pathway, so a career you have just read about can go straight into a comparison.

Careers with no verified data

Seven careers in Helix carry an amber No verified data marker: Founder, Scientific Co-founder, Chief Scientific Officer, Spin-out Company Scientist, Entrepreneur in Residence, Commercialisation Manager and Incubator Programme Manager. The marker appears on the career card as well as the career page, so you can see it in a list of results before opening anything.

These are real places life scientists go, and no UK government source publishes a pay range, an entry route or a requirement set for any of them. Rather than leave them out — or fill them in with an estimate — Helix lists them by name and shows nothing else. There is no salary, no typical hours, no working pattern and no description of the work, because inventing any of those would be worse than the gap.

The alignment score is still shown on these careers. It compares your profile against the job title and its recorded subject areas, and that is all it can do, so treat it as the roughest of signals.

10. Salary and evidence

Every salary carries a label saying how firmly it is grounded, shown next to the number rather than hidden in a footnote.

Use About this salary on any career page to see the source, method, geography, the date it was last checked and how a derived figure was produced.

What a range actually spans

Where the source gives both ends separately, a career page names them: £30k starting out → £53k when experienced.

This matters more than it looks. A published careers range runs from a starting salary to an experienced one across a whole career — it is not the span of a single pay grade. Biomedical Scientist is published as £30k to £53k, and a biomedical scientist entering the profession is on Agenda for Change Band 5, whose top is well below £53k. The two are not in conflict: the upper figure describes someone who has progressed into the specialist and senior grades above Band 5.

So a higher upper figure does not mean the private sector pays more. It usually means the range covers more of a career. Where a role sits on a public-sector pay framework, that framework's own bands are the right thing to compare a specific post against.

Seniority is priced as a ladder

Where a career is a more or less senior version of others, its estimate is adjusted to reflect that. Specialist, senior, lead and consultant grades are separate rungs, so the Biomedical Scientist ladder reads £30k–53k, £36k–64k, £40k–71k, £47k–84k and £51k–91k rather than reporting one salary for four progressive roles.

One word is treated with more caution than the rest. "Specialist" does not mean the same seniority in every sector — a Clinical Nurse Specialist is a senior grade, an Information Governance Specialist is a subject-matter role at no particular grade, and the title alone cannot separate them. A "Specialist" title is therefore never allowed to push an estimate above everything it was derived from.

Precision

Salary figures are estimates for comparing careers. They vary substantially by employer, sector, location, experience, hours and working pattern. Figures taken from a source are republished as issued; derived figures are rounded to the nearest thousand, because they are the output of an average and should not claim a precision the arithmetic cannot support.

Full detail is in the market data methodology.

11. Salary by region and sector

By region

Every career page carries a Salary by region block with a picker for the twelve UK regions and countries. Choosing one restates the salary for that area and tells you how far it sits from the UK figure.

The method matters, because it determines what the number means. The Office for National Statistics publishes median pay by region for each broad occupation group. Dividing a region's median by the UK median for the same group gives a regional index — health professionals in London are paid about 13% above health professionals nationally. Helix applies that index to the career's own UK range.

So the level comes from the career's own evidence, and only the regional shape comes from ONS. No source publishes a salary for one job in one region, which is why a regional figure is never labelled better than an indicative estimate, however well evidenced the UK figure is.

Two things Helix will not do. It does not produce city-level figures: nothing in the evidence distinguishes Manchester from Blackburn, and a number that looks local invites a decision the data cannot support. And where ONS suppressed a region for an occupation group — Northern Ireland, for several of them — that region is simply absent from the picker rather than filled in with the UK figure under a regional heading.

You can set a preferred region, and it is remembered on this device. It changes which salary figures you see and nothing else. A region is not a qualification, so it never touches alignment, eligibility, or what a regulator requires.

By sector

This section is mostly an admission, and deliberately so. The question people most want answered — does industry pay more than the NHS for this job? — has no honest answer from published data. ONS splits earnings by sector or by occupation, never both at once.

So Helix shows two things and nothing else. Where somebody has curated a public-sector pay framework for a career, it is shown as context beside the market estimate. And the whole-economy public/private difference is shown, labelled unmistakably as whole-economy — it covers every occupation in the country, including ones nothing like yours, and should not be applied to the range above it.

What Helix will not do is multiply a career's salary by the average pay of everyone working in pharmaceutical manufacturing — cleaners and directors included — and call the result a scientist's salary in pharma.

12. The current labour market

Career pages carry a Current labour market panel: the direction of travel for hiring in that kind of work, how strong the signal is, and where the figure came from.

Read the scope before the number. The published source measures advertising categories, not job titles, so a biomedical scientist's panel describes hiring across Healthcare and Social care — a category that also covers care work and consultant posts. It is the climate around a career family, not demand for one job.

Helix never tells you there are no jobs. If the data cannot be loaded, or no signal exists for a career family, the panel says Helix has no current signal — which is a statement about Helix's evidence, not about whether anybody is hiring.

The My data screen lists every labour market provider Helix knows about, what each one is capable of answering, which one supplied the current figures, and precisely what is missing from the others. Nothing in the browser holds an API key, and no page contacts a job board.

13. Comparing careers

Comparison is the heart of the middle step: once you have a few plausible options, the question stops being "could I do this" and becomes "which of these, and what am I trading away".

Picking careers to compare

Press Compare on any career card or career page. You never have to save a career first — saving is a bookmark, comparing is a working set, and they are deliberately separate. The button appears in every list: Career Explorer, My options, Saved, and the similar careers and progression sections of any career page.

You can hold two to four careers at once. Two is the minimum for a comparison to mean anything; four is the maximum because a fifth column stops being readable, and Helix tells you so rather than silently ignoring the click.

The tray

As soon as you pick one, a tray appears along the bottom of the screen showing what you have selected. It follows you around the application, so you can pick one career in the Explorer, read a second in full, and add a third from its own page without losing anything. Each career in the tray has its own remove button, there is a Clear for the lot, and Compare now appears once you have two.

What the comparison shows

It opens with What stands out — a few plain observations the loaded data supports, such as which option has the highest typical salary, which is the smaller move from where you are, or which are regulated when the others are not. It never names a best career. The whole point of comparing is that the trade-off belongs to you.

Then, in order:

The salary bars are decoration over numbers that are always readable on their own, so the comparison works in a screen reader and in greyscale.

Comparing without a profile

You can compare careers without building anything. You get the general facts — salary, working life, professional requirements and sources. The Fit for you section is the part that needs a profile, and Helix offers to build one rather than showing empty columns.

Sharing a comparison

The address bar carries the comparison, so a link like #/compare/CP-003,CP-019,CP-272 can be sent to a colleague or a supervisor. It carries career ids and nothing else — no profile, no priorities, nothing about you. Whoever opens it sees the general career facts and none of your personal columns, even if they have their own Helix profile.

On a phone

Below tablet width the comparison table becomes a stack of labelled sections rather than four squeezed columns, and every value names the career it belongs to. Nothing is dropped and no figure becomes unreadable.

14. Comparing against your current job

A comparison table answers "how do these four differ". Pinning a baseline answers a more useful question: "how would each of these differ from what I do now".

Use Pin as baseline on any career card, career page or graph node. If your profile names a current role, the comparison screen suggests the closest career in the catalogue by name — but it is a button, not a default, because a baseline silently reframes every number on the screen.

Once pinned, every other career in the comparison is restated as a difference from it. There is one rule worth knowing:

• Figures appear only where figures were measured. Salary and weekly hours are numbers, so their differences are numbers — +£8,500, +2 hrs.
• Everything else gets a direction and a word. Patient contact, travel, laboratory work and remote potential are recorded as low, medium or high — ordered words, not measured quantities. You will see much higher or slightly lower, never "+1 patient contact", because subtracting those words would invent a measurement nobody made.
• Regulation reports change, not direction. Regulated and not regulated are not more and less of the same thing.
• Missing data reads "Not comparable" rather than being computed against zero.

Salary differences are compared at the midpoint of each range and carry the weaker of the two evidence classes, which is stated beside the figure.

15. Why wasn't this recommended?

Open a career that did not appear among your strongest options and you will find this question, with the arithmetic behind the answer.

Helix tells you where the career ranked and what it scored, then breaks the score into three parts:

• What already fits — the components that scored well, and what was matched in your profile to produce them.
• What reduced the match — the components that scored badly, heaviest first, each stated as a fact about your profile rather than about you. "No exposure to this career's usual sectors is recorded in your profile" is checkable and fixable.
• What would strengthen it — only things the components and gaps already name.

Nothing here is generated. If a reason is not in the score, it does not appear in the text.

Professional eligibility is answered separately, in its own box. Whether you may practise a regulated profession is decided by the regulator, not by Helix, and it is a different question from how well your background aligns. A high alignment score is not evidence of eligibility, and a low one is not evidence that you are ineligible.

16. Pathway and next actions

Choosing a target career produces a pathway of milestones from where you are to where you want to be, and exactly three next actions — prioritised, and small enough to start. Verification of a regulated requirement always comes first.

Requirements are separated into four honest categories: verified, must be confirmed officially, usually expected, and career-enhancing or optional. Where Helix has not verified a role-specific requirements pack against a current official source, it says so and links to the source instead of asserting a rule.

Tick milestones off as you go; progress is saved on your device.

What each action tells you

An action is meant to be something you could start on Monday, so each one carries more than a title:

• Why it matters and the gap it addresses.
• Things you could do — small, concrete and proposable inside your own team, because the failure mode of career advice is suggesting a project nobody has the authority to start.
• Evidence you could collect, and a suggested timeframe.
• Complete when — how to know you have finished.
• A bridge role that covers this, where one does.

These are Helix's suggestions, not requirements. No employer or regulator has said this is what they screen on.

17. Bridge roles

Most substantial career changes do not happen in one step. The pathway screen shows the direct route and, where one exists, a bridge route through an intermediate job — side by side, as equals.

A career has to earn its place as a bridge on four counts: it aligns more closely with your profile than the destination does, it works in areas the destination needs, it sits next to the destination in the catalogue, and its grade makes sense. A career that is merely similar to your target is not a bridge — that is what "related careers" already shows.

Each bridge tells you why it helps, what transfers from where you are, what it can give you, which of the destination's gaps it closes, its typical salary, and what would still be left afterwards.

Two things worth knowing:

• A bridge is never required. Nothing here comes from an official entry route, so every bridge says so, every time. Where a regulator sets the route, that is stated separately, and no bridge role substitutes for registration.
• A step down is labelled as one. Moving sector sometimes means moving down a grade. That is a legitimate route and plenty of people take it deliberately, but Helix says which way it goes rather than letting a pay cut read as a promotion. A regulated profession is never offered as a bridge to somewhere else, because reaching it is harder than reaching your destination, not easier.

18. The career graph

See the career graph, on any career page, shows the neighbourhood around it: where it leads, what sits beside it, and — if you have pinned a baseline — what sits between the two.

It deliberately shows about fourteen careers rather than all 734. A graph of the whole catalogue is a hairball: technically complete, practically a decoration. Open any career in the picture to widen it, or centre the graph on it.

Connections are labelled by what kind of move they are — progression, specialisation, leadership, an industry, research, clinical or commercial transition, or a bridge route. Careers are marked by shape as well as position, and regulated professions carry a border and a marker, so nothing in the picture depends on colour.

The picture is never the only way in. Underneath it is the same model as a structured list, carrying the same careers and the same connections. That is not a simplified fallback: it is often the faster way to read it, every node in the picture is a real button you can reach with a keyboard, and the list is what a screen reader uses.

A connection means two careers share enough subject matter, family or seniority for a move between them to be worth considering. It is not a claim that anybody has made that move, and it is never a statement about eligibility.

19. 90 days, 6 months, 12 months

Below your next three actions, the pathway screen builds a development timeline across four windows: next 90 days, next 6 months, next 12 months and longer term.

It is built from the same actions, gaps and bridge roles as everything above it, so the plan and the screen cannot disagree. A window is a claim about dependency and duration, not a quarter of the items:

An empty window stays empty. Padding a timeline to look complete is how a plan becomes a horoscope.

Making it yours

Every milestone can be marked complete, given a target date and annotated with your own notes. Setting a date outside a window moves the milestone into the window it now belongs in, so the timeline keeps telling the truth about when things happen.

Helix suggests a date but never writes one for you: a stored date should mean somebody decided it. Your edits are kept separately from Helix's suggestions, so regenerating the plan — after you change your profile, say — cannot overwrite your own dates. Reset my edits puts a plan back to what Helix suggests, and affects nothing else.

20. Your career plan

From a pathway you can produce a printable plan covering your current position, the career you pinned as a baseline, the target career, typical salary and its evidence, working life, the three measures with the reasons behind each, strengths, gaps, requirements to confirm, your next three actions with their timeframes and completion criteria, any bridge roles, the labour market context with the date it was published, all four planning windows exactly as you left them — your dates, your notes, your completion marks — other options you were considering, and the sources.

Use your browser's print dialogue and choose Save as PDF. The document contains your structured profile only — never your CV, your name or any contact details, because Helix does not hold them.

21. Saved careers and My data

Saved is a shortlist — come back to this later. Compare is a working set — hold these side by side while I decide. They are deliberately separate, and you never have to save something in order to compare it.

My data shows exactly what is stored on your device, and lets you export it as a JSON file or import it on another device. It also reports salary coverage, how many careers have each class of evidence, which labour market providers were consulted and what each can answer, which sources are used, and what the three measures mean.

Reset Helix lives on the start screen rather than here. It deletes your profile, saved careers, comparisons, baseline and plans from this browser, asks before doing so, and cannot be undone — export first from this screen if you want to keep anything.

Helix is in beta, and every dataset version is labelled that way — you will see v1.0 Beta beside the Helix UK Life Sciences & Healthcare Career Dataset and beside the salary data. Figures and wording are still being refined, which is part of why the evidence label sits next to every salary.

22. Limitations

• UK only. Requirements differ substantially between countries.
• Salary figures are estimates. Most are derived rather than published for that exact job, and every one is labelled.
• Regional figures are derived, not published. They apply an official regional pattern for a broad occupation group to a career's UK range. No source publishes a salary for one job in one region, so they are never better evidenced than indicative, and there are no city-level figures at all.
• There are no sector-specific salaries. No official source publishes earnings by occupation and sector at the same time, so Helix cannot tell you what this job pays in pharma as opposed to the NHS. What it shows instead is labelled as whole-economy context.
• Labour market signals describe categories, not jobs. They measure advert volume across broad advertising categories, carry no vacancy counts and no regional breakdown, and the current source was last released in 2024 — so they are capped at a weak signal strength.
• Bridge roles are suggestions, not routes. They come from Helix's own reasoning about overlap and gaps. No official body says you must take one, and none of them substitutes for professional registration.
• The career graph shows relationships, not evidence of moves. A connection means two careers share enough for a move to be worth considering. Nobody has verified that anyone has made it.
• Text recognition is imperfect. A scanned CV reads less accurately than a text-based one, particularly for names, dates and abbreviations. Check every field.
• Hours and working patterns are not known for every career. Where they are unknown Helix shows "Not yet available" rather than estimating.
• Patient contact, laboratory, research and commercial intensity, remote potential and travel are inferred from each career's subject matter rather than measured in a survey, and are labelled that way.
• Requirements are not individually verified for every career. Always confirm current mandatory requirements with the relevant official organisation.
• Only 150 of the 734 descriptions come from an official job profile. A further 577 are composed by Helix from that career's recorded attributes — its family, seniority, subject areas, working conditions and registration status — and are labelled as composed wherever they appear. They state what Helix holds about the career and nothing more; they do not describe duties, employers or prospects, because Helix has no source for those and will not invent them. The remaining seven have no description at all, for the reason given in Career pages.
• No NHS pay bands yet. Helix is built to show an Agenda for Change band beside the market estimate, and refuses to guess one from a job title. That needs the official pay scale transcribed by a person with its source, which has not been done — so no bands are shown rather than an invented one.
• The catalogue is still growing. 734 careers today: the 677 supplied at launch plus 57 added since. If a role you know is missing, that is worth reporting — every addition so far came from exactly that, most recently innovation, enterprise and academic teaching.
• Some areas are still thinner than others. Coverage follows what official UK sources publish, and they publish far more about clinical and laboratory roles than about founding a company or teaching in a university. Where a role is real but undescribed, Helix now lists it with an explicit blank rather than leaving it out — but a blank is still a blank.

23. Saving this guide

Download as PDF, at the top and bottom of this page, opens your browser's print dialogue — choose Save as PDF. The result is a real, selectable, searchable document with the navigation stripped out.

It is generated from this page rather than being a separate file kept alongside it, so it cannot fall out of date with the guide you are reading.

Helix Career Pathway Planner provides career-development guidance and decision support. It does not determine professional eligibility, guarantee employment or replace advice from regulators, professional bodies, employers or training providers.