Founder Stories: Heather Jackson of iXplore

When a five-year-old Heather Jackson belted out the hymn ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ in her rural Indiana church, she misheard the lyric and went all-in on cheese instead of sheaves.

“I’m five, but it sounds like cheese, and I liked cheese. So I’m at the top of my lungs singing ‘bringing in the cheese.’”

Unfortunately, she was mocked by some of the congregation, and by the sixth grade, she suffered from full-blown stage fright. This isn’t a story about how she overcame that fear, but it does help explain how she ended up where she is: since then, she has carried an iron-clad conviction that young people’s voices matter.

“Kids really have a voice that needs to be out there… what I’ve become in iXplore is trying to be a translator for that voice to industry.”

That childhood sting - and the determination that followed it - powers iXplore, the company Jackson and her husband co-founded to bring students face-to-face with careers they may never have imagined.

The Problem: Talent Needs vs. Classroom Reality

Indiana effectively requires students to choose a career pathway as early as eighth grade. Yet, in Jackson’s view, the people asked to guide those choices are outgunned.

“These are the career counselors… they have two days of training, likely on top of their other jobs as full-time teachers, and then we turn them loose and say, ‘Go connect with the businesses in your area and see if you can arrange job shadows for all your students.’”

They set up obligatory, even state-mandated career fairs: pamphlets, poster boards, maybe even the odd Virtual Reality (VR) headset running a complicated training module that can make them queasy. Despite the hard work put in by counselors and companies alike, kids can leave no wiser about what people in careers like an orthopedic machinist, elevator mechanic or medtech entrepreneur actually do.

On the employer side, “everything’s ROI-driven,” Jackson notes. Early-talent engagement looks like a cost center, and most companies don’t see ROI until the pipeline has already broken. The result? Industries from orthopedics to advanced manufacturing and law scream for workers, while all counselors really have the option to do is hand teenagers personality quizzes.

Jackson didn’t set out to disrupt career counseling; she was consulting for a VR training firm and noticed customers cared less about up-skilling than recruiting. Her early prototypes were glorified video players, but using VR. But the response from students wasn’t what she’d hoped. So they rebooted. “We re-tooled everything… So, our content is interactive, immersive, and, most importantly, fun” she says.

Instead of a passive film about welding, students don a headset, stand on a virtual factory floor, and polish a titanium femoral cap with guidance from a skilled, virtual polisher based on real-world people in that career. The job shadow lasts 12-15 minutes, but it’s enough for a teenager to realize, I could do that… or that’s not for me.

Why the Midwest?

Jackson grew up baling straw, driving tractors and smashing glass ceilings just outside of Rochester, Indiana. Where, she says, “women are usually only regarded as valuable with a ‘MRS degree’… I was never going to have the opportunity to take over the family farm because I was a woman.” 

That background gives iXplore’s recent work a double advantage:

Proximity to heavy-industry storytellers. Northern Indiana alone houses the world’s orthopedic capital (Warsaw) and an epicenter of RV manufacturing. Those plants provide visceral, high-stakes scenes that beg for VR translation.

Access to pragmatic, non-dilutive capital. Last year iXplore partnered with OrthoWorx, a northeastern Indiana organization dedicated to preserving Warsaw’s status as that orthopedic  capital, and together they landed a $386k grant from the Don Wood Foundation to build out an initial orthopedic job shadow experience and take it on the road. 

And just last week, the same foundation approved a $1m expansion grant to add more career pathways in the VR experience, to help ensure that every 8th grader in Kosciusko County has the chance to try it at school, and build a fully interactive and immersive experience for 5th and 6th graders in Fort Wayne.

Jackson argues that grants beat venture money in her case, because public-mission funders embrace collaboration. “The more we tap into grant funds… the more we can build small regional ecosystems telling that region’s story to that region’s kids.”

iXplore is still lean and a quick look at some of their clients reveals their model:

Orthopedics (Indiana). Funded by the Don Wood Foundation, iXplore built a one hour experience where students can choose between polishing, CNC machining, or entrepreneurship.

National Elevator Industry Education Program (NEIEP) and the International Union of Elevator Constructors (IUEC). With 240 outposts, the NEIEP and IUEC use iXplore’s VR experience to showcase elevator mechanics at recruiting events.

Erskine Green Training Institute (EGTI) and Arc of Indiana. EGTI helps young adults with disabilities get into meaningful and productive careers throughout Indiana. The individuals and their families often think there are no opportunities, or even that they can’t work. iXplore created a way to bring the job shadow to these young adults and their parents.

By letting associations, foundations and economic development groups co-fund bespoke content, iXplore sidesteps the competition fears that plague single-company deals.

Swiss Lessons with a Hoosier Remix

In March 2025 Jackson joined an Indiana delegation to Zurich to study Switzerland’s apprenticeship pipeline. One concept stuck: Schnupperlehre. Literally, it means ‘trial apprenticeship’ but is colloquially referred to as ‘job-sniffing’. Eighth-graders in Switzerland handle real tools before choosing a track, guided by career advisers who stick with them for life.

“They have these completely separate career advising centers that stay with you from the first time you’re entering the job market… all the way till you retire.”

Jackson left inspired, convinced that immersive previewing can fill the same gap before apprenticeships begin, without needing to bus kids 60 miles to a plant or waiting until high school. 

Her vision now sprawls beyond hardware. iXplore operates three arms:

iXplore Studios – produces the interactive content.

iXplore Road Show – the event team that wheels headsets and kiosks into gymnasiums, community rooms, and career fairs.

iXplore Foundation – launching this year to build and bring even more experiences to schools at no cost thanks to grant funding.

Next targets include rural Florida and more pockets of northern Indiana, places where career counselors are clamoring, “can you bring this to my school?” she tells us they excitedly exclaim, after seeing the demo. 

The Founder as a Stage Director

If her product could be considered a form of immersive theater, Jackson is both playwright and show-runner in that world. It’s an appropriate analogy. Since that experience singing about cheese in between the pews of her rural church, she tackled her stage fright head-on: years of choir solos, voice training, and even a professional singing career that took her across the world.

Today, instead of coaxing teens to project from a stage, she casts professional actors to portray machinists, flight dispatchers and even entrepreneurs - turning VR headsets into a new kind of stage where kids are the stars in their own future.

Every industry in this country risks stalling without talent. Jackson sees iXplore as a part of the connective tissue. Part Hollywood set, part county fair ride, wholly rooted in Midwestern pragmatism.

“If you actually want to shorten the cycle of getting meaningful people into your workforce, we need to start by telling them things we wish somebody had told us when we were that age.”

With a fresh million-dollar boost, a Swiss playbook in her pocket and a habit of turning accidental detours into center-stage moments, Jackson is betting that the next generation will walk into high-demand careers not by chance but by choice, having tried it first in ‘virtual’ reality.

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