ExploreCareers
Team Lead (Sep 2023 - Apr 2024)
1. Introduction
Young people often struggle with choosing a career path and finding comprehensive information to help them decide. Even those who have already chosen a path often find it challenging to access relevant resources. Unfortunately, many tools and resources designed to support career exploration often fall short.
Online career databases provide useful statistics and data, but lack firsthand accounts and experiences.
While social media career content, such day-in-the-life videos, offers entertaining firsthand perspectives, it often lacks key data and structured guidance.
Traditional career fairs, workshops, and school counseling sessions can feel broad and generic, often failing to resonate with a student's interests and needs.
Goals
Growing up, I struggled to navigate the career paths available to me. Although I ultimately found my passion for design, I often wished for more guidance along the way. That's why I was so excited to join the Tech4Good Lab in researching the challenges youth face in career exploration. Our goals were to:
Bring different types of informational career resources together into one place. Career information is spread across various media formats, as well as numerous platforms, making it difficult to locate accurate and up-to-date information.
Offer personalized career exploration support. Every journey is unique because each student has their own interests, motivations, struggles, and needs. Career guidance can feel less relevant when it's not tailored to a student's individual situation.
Help students self-reflect on their career journey. Self-reflection is an important aspect of personal development and should always be encouraged.
Role
I joined the team during its early stages of scoping out challenges related to youth career exploration. Over time, I deepened my understanding of design, played a key role in conducting research, and helped transform research insights into an innovative career exploration resource. After observing my team lead for a while, I felt ready to take on the role myself. As a lead, I was responsible for planning out quarterly goals, ensuring weekly deliverables were met, facilitating work sessions, and onboarding new team members each quarter.
ExploreCareers: A Holistic Approach to Career Exploration
ExploreCareers provides a holistic perspective of various career paths by combining the strengths of firsthand narratives and data-oriented information in a way that is personally relevant to each student. Specifically, it pairs day-in-the-life TikToks with government-provided occupational data and personalized guidance to help young people develop a comprehensive understanding of their career options. Many students who tested our product reported that it helped them discover new careers, access relevant information, and reflect on their goals.
2. Choosing Sources of Information
Throughout the design process, I helped conduct research to understand what types of informational resources students find most valuable for career exploration. Our interviews with high school participants revealed a strong preference for both firsthand perspectives and data-oriented information. While each type offers unique insights, combining them provides a more complete understanding of potential career paths. To achieve this, we explored ways to integrate both into our design.
- Typically provide insight into daily responsibilities, work environment, and personal experiences
- Our research pointed to TikTok day-in-the-life videos as an engaging and accessible way for students to get a glimpse into different careers
Firsthand Narratives
- Typically provide insight into income, education, and skills
- We needed a reliable and standardized source, so we decided to use information from a government database called O*NET
Data-oriented Information
"They definitely gave different kinds of information. So I think having both is really helpful because they're kind of so different."
3. Navigating Unforeseen Challenges
Initially, we envisioned a process where students would watch a day-in-the-life career TikTok, reflect on their thoughts with a TikTok chatbot, and then explore career data via the ExploreCareers platform. We validated this by conducting pilot studies with students, where I prepared survey and interview materials and documented their responses. However, after speaking with developers, we realized TikTok's API wouldn't support the chatbot integration. Since reflection is a crucial part of the process, we adapted by integrating the reflection questions directly into the ExploreCareers platform instead.
4. Organizing the Information onto ExploreCareers
I then turned my focus towards designing the ExploreCareers interface. Throughout multiple iterations, I experimented with different ways to present the information while prioritizing simplicity and ease of navigation. To avoid overwhelming students with large amounts of information, we decided the dashboard would only show a curated selection of occupations, tailored to each student's individual interests.
- Distinguishing the career sectors: I used a grid layout, along with different colors and icons for each career sector, to help students understand the hierarchy and relationship between each sector and the occupations within them.
- Playful and colorful design: Aimed at reducing feelings of intimidation often associated with career exploration.
- Simplified presentation of details: When an occupation card is clicked, it expands to present key details from O*NET in a format that is more intuitive and easier to navigate than the O*NET website.
- Corresponding TikToks: We include day-in-the-life videos alongside recommended occupations so that students can easily access firsthand perspectives as well.
5. Information Needs to Be Supplemented with Reflection
Our next step was to add more opportunities for reflection. After all, information alone holds little value without the process of self-reflection to give it personal meaning and relevance.
Self-Reflection is Important For...
Choosing a Career You Love
Reflecting on your passions, values, and interests will aid in discovering the career you want to pursue.
And Navigating the Challenges Along the Way
Understanding your needs and frustrations will help you seek out the appropriate resources for help.
Helping Students Reflect on Their Career Identity Status
Throughout our research, we commonly referenced the Meeus-Crocetti Model, which outlines five career identity statuses, each characterized by distinct needs, motivations, and behaviors.
I implemented a questionnaire based on the Meeus-Crocetti Model to help identify each student's identity status. Upon logging into ExploreCareers for the first time, students complete the questionnaire and are prompted to reflect on whether they resonate with their assigned status. This not only allows us to provide relevant guidance, but also helps students gain introspection into their career journeys.
"I like it. I've never really thought about this being like different stages in figuring out what job I want. So, I think this really helps me think through it."
"I feel like it's pretty accurate. I think it's really helpful because they're really detailed. It wasn't just 'oh, I know what I'm gonna go into' and 'I don't know yet.'"
Helping Students Reflect on Career Anxiety
Additionally, we hoped to design distinct sets of reflection activities that are tailored for each career identity status. However, due to time constraints and limited capacity, we decided to prioritize creating activities that are beneficial for students across multiple identity statuses.
I took the lead in creating our career anxiety activity, understanding that career anxiety can impact students at any stage of their career journey. I curated a set of resources that together address various manifestations of career anxiety, but found that they only offered generic advice. To make them more relevant and meaningful, I created reflection questions to prompt students to think about their own experiences and how the advice could apply to their specific situations. About half the students found the activity helpful, while others did not feel like it resonated with them, which we'll have to explore further in our next iteration!
"I think it definitely helped me get it all out. And like kind of reflect on it. And like think more deeply into it and understand my feelings more."
"The imposter syndrome [article] was interesting, but I've never really felt it or had any experiences with it, so it's more interesting to look at it with a third-person perspective on it, like outside on it."
6. What Key Lessons Did I Learn?
My time at Tech4Good has been incredibly enriching, and I'd like to share some of the most significant lessons I've taken away from the experience!
Perfection is Not Always the Answer
As a perfectionist, the thought of an “imperfect design” used to frustrate me. I had spent countless hours trying to make things pixel perfect before learning how to prioritize design tasks and and focus on what matters more. While I still occasionally struggle with perfectionist tendencies, I've become more aware of when they arise and know how to manage them effectively.
Design is a Continuous Process
While designers are often taught a simplified, linear design process, it is important to remember that in reality, it is not so simple. What works for one project might not work for others. In designing ExploreCareers and BridgeUs, we continuously circled back to research and ideation — it wasn’t a “one and done” deal.
Healthy Team Dynamics Boost Engagement
As a lead, I was responsible for facilitating discussions and keeping the team engaged. This was sometimes challenging, especially during remote work sessions. I found that incorporating bonding activities helped build stronger relationships within the team. Trust among teammates plays a significant role in fostering openness and encouraging members to share their thoughts and be vulnerable.
Remember to Update Design Systems
It can feel easy to ignore an outdated design system, but the design debt quickly racks up. This was especially apparent when we were personalizing the ExploreCareers prototypes to each student. As a result, I've learned that it is important to conduct regular audits of the design system to ensure it is up to date.