Fjord was asked by I can't tell you, sorry to investigate why staff at their agency felt that their career trajectories were plateauing and they had no support from HR. What followed was a year-long journey into the hiring, mentoring, and promoting process at I can't tell you. Stop looking..
From our research, we developed an experimental prototype that would put staff in the driver seat of their career, allowing them to piece together the necessary building blocks to get to their goal.
The Problem:Many government agencies, this one included, suffer from "good ol' boy" syndrome, where recognition and advancement is often times based on who you know and not what you know.
The Opportunity: This agency is huge. It already has all the necessary trainings, certifications, and networking opportunities for advancement. It just needs something that can help employee's connect the dots.
The Solution: Create a digital roadmap that leverages your input and AI to understand what an employee wants and connect that to the existing opportunities that will get them there.
We spent months hosting group activities and individual interviews with the client to better understand the career culture at Not tellin' yah sry.
What we learned is that employees felt that the jobs they wanted were going to less-qualified individuals and they desired a clear direction on how to advance within the agency.
To better illustrate the career cycle within the agency, we created a detailed user journey map.
In the map we marked the stages of an employee's career, identified specific pain-points and blockers, communicated their emotional toll on the staff, and identified specific areas for improvement.
Once we had identified the specific issues within the agency and what is causing those issues, it was time to build a solution.
This solution had to three requirements:
"Dude.. seriously??" already has hundreds of courses, job openings, and certifications that agents can take, apply, and best tested on. What they didn't have was a way to handpick what opportunities align with an employee's individual career goals.
Leveraging Natural Language Processing, we designed a prototype that interprets an agent's goals and career aspirations into a cluster of tags. These tags then identify specific career opportunities within the agency that an agent can browse, select and schedule.
This allows each user to create a tangible road map that they can then share with their career counselor and take action on
We built the prototype of this application, which we call the Career Advancement Portal, using Axure and leveraging the Google Mineral design sytem.
In the prototype we had the user walk through the basic steps of Career Action Portal:
We created the prototype in Axure which allowed us to create a interactive features that we could test with users, share with our clients, and make adjustments instantly.
To make this prototype really come to life, I put together a quick logo and creative guideline for the Career Action Portal. I snagged the font from our client's site and put together a few colors that complimented theirs.
I wanted the logo to be simple, direct, and symbolize progress, so I included an arrow pointing upward.
