Limerick entrepreneur Stephen McKeon built CourseCompass, a psychometric testing platform helping students choose courses and reduce college drop-out rates.
Stephen McKeon was still at school in Limerick when he noticed a gap that nobody around him seemed to be addressing.
Students were dropping out of college in large numbers, and many of those who stayed had no clear idea of what they wanted from their courses or their careers. Guidance counsellors, meanwhile, were dealing with a growing volume of CAO applications each year without the tools to manage them at scale.
“CourseCompass is well able to adapt to the changing times, we are constantly evolving and we have a great initiative to solve problems that guidance counsellors and students are facing.”
That gap became the basis for CourseCompass, a platform that combines psychometric testing with resources for students and guidance counsellors.
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McKeon, now a student entrepreneur at the University of Limerick, built the company around a simple premise: give students the tools to understand what they are suited for before they commit to a course, and give the counsellors who support them a way to track progress in real time.
Testing designed for schools as much as students
CourseCompass’s core offering is a suite of psychometric tests. Course Compass gives students college course recommendations, Apprenticeship Compass points towards apprenticeship options, PLC Compass covers post-Leaving Certificate courses, and a Subject Interest Test helps younger students choose Leaving Certificate subjects.
Around these sits a set of features McKeon describes as standout additions: accommodation guides for universities across Ireland, a series called Career Investigations covering more than 60 careers with salary information and the likelihood of automation affecting each role, anonymous eligibility guides for the SUSI, HEAR and DARE schemes, an AI-powered CV builder and a mock CAO tool.
With CourseCompass, guidance counsellors can allocate tests, resources and tools to students, check their progress and results in real time, and step in when a student flags difficulty or is unhappy with their results, scheduling a meeting to follow up.
The pricing model separates individual students from institutions. Resources and eligibility guides are free for students, who pay only if they want the psychometric testing or certain premium features. Schools access the full suite through a package that falls under the book grant scheme, meaning tests, resources and guides are already covered for pupils once a school signs up.
From McDonald’s training videos to a Limerick start-up
Stephen McKeon delivering a speech to school principals
McKeon’s route into entrepreneurship began long before CourseCompass. As a child he sold slime in primary school, and in secondary school he moved on to making protein ice popsicles. At 15 he took his first job at McDonald’s, and a year later, frustrated by what he saw as a poor training programme at his store, he created his own training videos. Corporate head office was impressed enough to commission more, and those videos have since been watched by around 190,000 employees across the UK and Ireland since January 2023.
At 17 he won the Digital Guru Employee of the Year award for McDonald’s Ireland, and at 18 he delivered a keynote speech at the company’s 50th anniversary conference for the UK and Ireland in Glasgow, addressing more than 3,500 employees.
McKeon says the experience of working inside a large corporate structure shaped his decision to build something of his own. “My drive to work for myself has pushed me equally as much as I have wanted to solve problems,” he says. “I know what it is like to work under other people, so I have found it a huge breath of fresh air working for myself.”
Grants over investors, for now
CourseCompass has not yet raised outside investment. McKeon has focused instead on grant funding, an approach that has produced one concrete result so far: a €5,000 award that came with winning the University of Limerick Student Entrepreneur of the Year title in 2026.
He describes the broader start-up environment in Ireland as strong, with plentiful opportunity for early-stage founders. The ecosystem in Limerick itself he rates as somewhat smaller than the national picture, though he points to the Local Enterprise Office as a source of real support and culture at a local level.
Learning to push rather than wait
McKeon is candid about the assumptions he had to unlearn early on. He believed that building something addressing a problem as significant as college drop-out rates would be enough on its own to bring people on board. Instead, he found resistance rooted in years of established practice, even where the statistics supporting the need for change were clear.
“Things will not just come around to me,” he says. “If I want something, I have to work hard to get it. I have had to fight twice as hard, because there has been such a one dimensional way to do things for years, and people do not think it is a problem, when the statistics clearly show it is.”
His advice to other founders follows the same logic. “If you have an idea to help your business, the first thing to do is just start,” he says.
He is a strong advocate for building a public presence early, arguing that founders who explain their product clearly and consistently on social media give themselves the best chance of being understood, and ultimately bought from.
“Just get in front of the camera and talk about what you are doing or are solving. If your product is difficult for people to understand its less likely they will purchase it, so just keep posting, show growth and everything will come along.”
Staying close to the problem
Asked how the company keeps pace with the needs of schools and students, McKeon points to a process built around listening rather than a particular piece of technology.
“Luckily CourseCompass is well able to adapt to the changing times, we are constantly evolving and we have a great initiative to solve problems that guidance counsellors and students are facing. So if problems arise that needs solving we can just add a fix, like we did with accommodation issues in colleges across Ireland, by bringing in guides on how to get accommodation for each university campus.
“We have a simple process of just asking and staying diligent when people are experiencing issues and then we can get right to work at thinking of a solution.”
For a company still finding its funding path, that instinct to solve problems as they appear may prove as valuable as any single product feature.
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