Forage Job Simulations
Forage job simulations let you try the work before you apply for it. Hundreds of employers build them, walking you through the tasks their interns and new hires get and then showing you how someone who does the job would have handled it. Some of those employers recruit directly from the students who finish.
The Gordon Career Center partners with Forage, and simulations are free to Wesleyan students and alumni. There’s no application and no interview, and you can be finished with one in under an hour or spend an afternoon on it.
Already finished one? Skip to putting it on your resume.
What is a Forage Job Simulation?
Each simulation covers one function at one company. You get video instructions from people who work there, the tasks themselves, and a certificate with a verification code when you finish.
Forage groups simulations by career interest. The categories include banking and financial services, software engineering, law, data and analytics, security, and AI, with more across marketing, consulting, and consumer brands. Companies range from large multinationals to smaller firms. If you have a field in mind, check whether a simulation exists before assuming Forage is only for business students.
Forage also offers Shorts, which are courses under fifteen minutes that introduce the different roles inside a company. These are a good way to orient yourself before committing to a full simulation, and a reasonable thing to do on a bus.
One thing to be clear about, a Forage simulation is not a job. You’re not employed by the company, you’re not supervised by anyone there, and finishing one doesn’t make you an alum of their internship. Forage says the same thing, describing the certificate as something to list as an extracurricular activity. That distinction matters when you write about it, and the sections below cover how to handle it accurately. It also means these are open to every student regardless of work authorization, since no employment is involved.
Why Do One?
To find out what the work involves. Job descriptions tell you what an employer wants. They don’t tell you what you’d spend Tuesday afternoon doing. A few hours on a simulation in investment banking or strategy consulting or product marketing gives you a concrete sense of the daily texture of a role, which is hard to get any other way before you’ve got the job.
To rule things out. This is underrated. Discovering that a certain kind of analysis bores you is worth knowing in October of your junior year, not in July of your internship. Ruling out a path is progress.
To have something specific to say. Applications and interviews reward specifics. A student who has completed a Forage simulation in a field can describe what the work involved and why it interested them, instead of asserting interest in the abstract. That’s a real advantage in a cover letter and a bigger one in an interview.
To build a skill you can name. The simulations teach discrete things: reading a financial statement, structuring a client recommendation, writing a project brief. Those are additions to what you can do, and they give you vocabulary for talking about a field you haven’t worked in yet.
Choosing a Simulation
Start with a field you’re considering, not a company you’ve heard of. Brand recognition matters less than whether the function is one you might want to do, and a simulation at a smaller firm in the right area teaches you more than a prestigious one in a field you don’t care about.
The catalog runs to several hundred simulations, so filter by career interest before you start scrolling. From there, filter by duration, and use the Hiring Now filter if you’re weighing two that interest you equally, since it shows you which companies are recruiting at the moment.
Read the description and the estimated time before you commit, because knowing whether you’re giving up forty minutes or six hours is what determines whether you finish.
Take notes as you go, not on the content but on your own reaction: which tasks you found absorbing, which you found tedious, what you had to look up, what you’d want to know more about. This is the most valuable thing you get out of it, and it disappears if you don’t write it down. It’s also the material you’ll draw on for the resume and interview sections below.
After you finish a Forage job simulation:
Putting It on Your Resume
A Forage simulation belongs on your resume, however it doesn’t belong in the work experience section.
List it under a heading like Projects, Professional Development, or Additional Experience, depending on how your resume is organized. Never under Employment, Work Experience, or Internships, and never with the company’s name in the position where an employer would read it as a job title. Recruiters know what Forage is, and a simulation listed as employment reads as either a misunderstanding or an attempt to inflate, neither of which helps you.
Format it with the simulation name, Forage as the provider, and the completion date, then two or three lines describing what you did:
BCG Strategy Consulting Job Simulation, Forage March 2027
-Analyzed client operational data to identify inefficiencies and growth opportunities
-Built a structured set of recommendations using standard consulting frameworks
-Presented findings in a written brief and a slide deck
Write the bullets around what you did and what you produced, the same way you’d handle any other entry. The Resume Toolkit covers how to write bullets that work, and a Peer Career Advisor or an advisor can look at the phrasing with you.
One judgment call worth making deliberately: a completed simulation is a modest line on a resume, and three of them are not three times as good as one. If you have substantial work experience, one or two relevant simulations add something. If Forage simulations are the bulk of your resume, the better use of your time is finding actual experience, and an advisor can help with that.
Adding It to LinkedIn
Use the Licenses & Certifications section, which is what the certificate is.
- Name: the company and the simulation title, for example “JPMorgan Chase – Investment Banking Job Simulation”
- Issuing organization: Forage
- Credential URL: the certificate link
- Credential ID: the verification code
Both the certificate link and the verification code appear at the bottom of the certificate Forage gives you when you finish. Save them somewhere when you download it, since digging them up later is a nuisance.
Don’t add a Forage simulation to the Experience section of your LinkedIn profile. That section is for employment, and listing one there misrepresents your history to anyone reading it, including recruiters who will recognize the simulation name.
Talking About It in Interviews
An interview is where a simulation becomes most useful to you, and where the notes you took while doing it come in.
Use it the way you would use any other experience: as a specific example that answers a specific question. If an interviewer asks what draws you to a field, you can describe a task you worked through and what it told you. If they ask about a skill, you can point to where you practiced it.
Be accurate about what it was. Say you completed a job simulation, or use the simulation’s own name. An interviewer who thinks you’re describing an internship and then works out that you aren’t has learned something about you that has nothing to do with the work.
The honest framing is also the better one. Choosing to spend six hours learning what a job involves before applying to it says something about how you make decisions. It says more than a padded credential would.
The Interviewing page covers how to structure these answers, and an advisor can run a mock interview with you.
Talk It Through With an Advisor
If you’re not sure which simulation fits what you’re exploring, or you’ve finished one and want help putting it on a resume in a way that lands, book an appointment. An advisor in your area of interest will know how Forage simulations are received in that field, which varies more than you might expect.
