Original Prompt

As Western Pennsylvania rapidly advances in fields such as technology, healthcare, and finance, and a significant proportion of the workforce retires, there lies an impending deficit of workers in the region. Allegheny Conference aims to secure the economic future of the 10-county Pittsburgh region through multiple initiatives. In this effort, the Conference partnered with numo and CMU MHCI, to target pre-college students, bridging skill development and planning with the future workforce. In short, our challenge was to prepare this emergent workforce for the in-demand skills and jobs of the future.

Our Narrowed Focus

However, we found that emergent workers are less interested in data regarding workforce outlook, and more interested in mapping current interests to potential careers. This affinity towards personal over professional success shifted our focus to providing an engaging way of assessing the interests of early high school students and exposing them to possible careers. This will result in exposure to relevant careers while naturally illuminating current and future job market opportunities.

Our narrowed opportunity involved targeting high schoolers, career exposure, and motivation. The following explain the findings and reasoning that shaped these parts of our opportunity and ultimately led to shaping our design decisions down the line.

Why early high schoolers?

However, we found that emergent workers are less interested in data regarding workforce outlook, and more interested in mapping current interests to potential careers. This affinity towards personal over professional success shifted our focus to providing an engaging way of assessing the interests of early high school students and exposing them to possible careers. This will result in exposure to relevant careers while naturally illuminating current and future job market opportunities.

Why career exposure?

We identified an iterative career discovery loop that one goes through to determine their career path. Once identifying a job of interest, one explores that interest, then evaluates whether or not it is something they want to pursue further. However, to effectively complete this loop, one must be exposed to jobs of interest in the first place. Therefore, career exposure was a ripe opportunity area to share with students the jobs that relate to their interests.

Why is motivation important?

For any tool we introduced to help students plan for future careers, they first had to be motivated to actually use it. We found that students — regardless of access to career preparation resources or internal drives to search for information - were extremely busy with other things such as schoolwork, extracurriculars, hanging out with friends, etc. They simply didn’t have time or motivation to dedicate toward learning about careers. Therefore, any opportunity explored had to address this critical friction point that are so ingrained into high schoolers’ lives.

There were other, larger insights we derived from our generative research regarding the overall career education space. We kept these in mind as we moved forward with the design process. Some of these insights are summarized below.

Students Have Narrow Job Knowledge

Most students aren’t equipped with the resources and tools needed to prepare for future careers. The limited, semi-random information students rely on often come from parents who are in specific career fields, and teachers and guidance counselors who’s insufficient resources and time cause a struggle to connect students to clear and personalizable information to make informed decisions. Limited job knowledge sets students up for future career risks, financing costly education only to find a job not well suited for their actual skills and goals. These lead to risks in overeducation, low-income, and eventual drop-out as young professionals struggle to make data-informed decisions on future career paths.

Guidance is Fragmented

Although both primary and secondary research indicated that parents are the most significant influencer in a students education and career decisions, parents have limited career knowledge and access to career-related resources. They oftentimes only know information about their own careers or the careers of those in their networks. Their resources are limited by this network as well. Therefore, teachers oftentimes rely on educators and counselors to provide career exploration and guidance for their student. Yet parents are often distanced from the education system and the stakeholders there, making it difficult for a joint effort to take place.

A College Over Career Mindset Exists

Students and parents focus on college (especially 4-year) as the finish line for a successful high school experience. Careers are seen as the step after college, instead of in tandem with educational goals. College prep becomes a more concrete deadline to work towards than career thinking.

In looking at other products and services on the market that tackle a similar opportunity, we discovered that existing products range between broad exploration of many jobs and detailed job information to narrow exploration of few jobs and condensed information is. In addition, these systems vary in terms of involving high effort or low effort in terms of time required or amount of interactions involved.

We identified an opportunity for a design that is low effort and involves broad exploration. This would target the busy schedules of high school students and the need to assist students who are unsure of what they want to do.