Workforce Atlas

Helping Job Seekers Find Their Way

Creating harmony between job seekers’ prospective career opportunities and their skillset.

Challenge

In 2017, Pearson joined forces with ProLiteracy to develop an online career pathways platform to assess adults’ literacy, numeracy, workplace skills, and interests. With that data, they recommended occupations, online resources, and local providers to help respondents achieve their professional, academic, and personal aspirations. We helped bring their idea to life.

Approach

To bring their concept to life, our team collaborated with ProLiteracy to identify the target users and map out the experience, technical requirements, and the platform’s architecture. Because of the need to account for considerable technical requirements, our approach needed to find a balance so the ideal user experience was not sacrificed.

Discovering a Career Path

To help promote the initiative and orient users, a public facing Workforce Atlas promotional site accompanies the platform. While sometimes viewing as a nice-to-have, this was critical in the product’s success as we know how the Halo Effect can impact users quality perception of the product.

Self Assessment

Extensive on-boarding forms result in high drop-off rates. We reimagined the on-boarding assessment in a user-centric and fun way.

During registration, users are asked to complete assessments pertaining to their job interests, skills, and reading and relevant math skills.

With the Framing Effect in mind, questions are interactive with the use of sliders, smiley faces, sad faces, and iconography to create an engaging and enjoyable process.

We show users their progress through the assessment using Goal Gradient Theory where every question answered brings users one step closer to realizing their ideal career path.

Personalized Recommendations

After assessment completion, prospective career-seekers are provided with personalized recommendations including career pathways, pertinent occupations, online tools, and local providers.

These recommendations are based on hundreds of unique occupations informed by the open-source data from O*Net, a constantly updated source of occupations from the Department of Labor.

Resources & Jobs Hub

The site also provides publicly available hubs – with sophisticated search and filter functionalities – full of online resources and jobs where prospective career seekers can browse without registering.

Vue.js & Laravel

Building a platform capable of processing massive amounts of data while rendering instantaneous results to users in a seamless way is no easy task.

Our solution needed to be fast and flexible, and data driven with a lot of pre-processing power. With this in mind, we selected Laravel, a PHP framework, coupled with Vue.js, an advanced Javascript framework.

Laravel’s data processing power combined with Vue.js’s focus on declarative rendering and component composition was a winning team. This combination gave us power, versatility, and flexibility to ensure Workforce Atlas delivers the best possible user experience every time.