Fjord was asked by I can't tell you, sorry to investigate why staff at their agency felt that their career's were stuck; they felt like their progress was plateauing while others were leap frogging ahead. 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 a concept prototype that would allow users to piece together (and take action on) the necessary steps to advance their career.
The Problem: In some government agencies, advancement and recognition is based on who you know, not what you know
The Opportunity: Our client already had all the necessary trainings, certificates, and networking opportunities and each recorded in it's own database. We just needed an application that could connect the dots.
The Solution: We created a digital prototype that uses NLP to translate a user's goals and aspirations into existing. agency recognized certifications, contacts, and positions that will get them there.
For months we interviewed staff and hosted group activities at Fjord, trying 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 advancement.
In order to truly understand the career cycle within the agency, we took the feedback from our interviews and translated it into a massive 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.
Using the map, we identified specific issues in the agency. We then worked with the client to identify what are causing these issues and what values or requirements the solution must have.
This solution had to three requirements:
"Dude.. seriously??" already has hundreds of courses, job openings, and certifications that agents can take, apply, and be 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 (NLP), we designed a prototype that interprets an agent's goals and career aspirations into a cluster of tags. These tags then tie back to 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 save, share, and take action upon.
Using Axure and the well-maintained Google Material design system ,we built a interactive prototype of this application.
In the prototype we had the user walk through the basic steps of Career Action Portal:
Using Axure allowed us to create and adjust interactive features quickly and share with our clients and users immediately.
To bring the idea to life, I put together a logo and basic design guidelines for the Career Action Portal.
I wanted the logo to be simple, direct, and symbolize progress, so I included an upward arrow.
