How can student creators, educators, and industry professionals collaborate to make immersive career exploration scalable and affordable? This paper introduces Career XRcade (CXR)—a design framework and toolkit that lets college teams build VR “Career Lands” for high-school learners. Guided by Design Science Research Methodology, two proof-of-concept worlds—Cybersecurity Land and Esports Land—translate real job roles into gamified exhibits, interactive puzzles, and narrative NPCs. The framework combines project road-mapping, curriculum integration, agile XR prototyping, and iterative feedback loops, all supported by templated assets in Unity, Miro, and Figma. Qualitative data from student developers, instructional designers, and industry mentors show early gains in career identity, self-efficacy, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. By lowering technical complexity and cost, CXR points toward a scalable model for immersive learning that bridges the imagination gap between classroom and workplace. This short paper was presented at the iLRN 2024 conference.
