Building a Career Development Tool for Gen Z- A Case Study

Creating a useful application for recent college grads to match with a mentor, develop short and long-term goals, and effectively e-learn to build a meaningful career.

4 min readMar 25, 2020

**Note: all research findings were prior to the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.

I’ve always had a passion towards career development- it’s a wonderful feeling to empower others by helping them discover what they want to do in their professional career. While working in recruiting at ChowNow, a mature SaaS startup that focuses on delivering custom solutions to small businesses, I spent lots of time at career fairs at university campuses, discussing career opportunities with many college students.

I was finding that current students and recent college graduates were experiencing challenges navigating what they wanted as their next career step after receiving their degree. Reasons behind it included job market uncertainty, combined with a lack of understanding around what they wanted to pursue. Several students couldn’t decide between pursuing a position based on their personal interests, understood strengths and skillset, short-term and long-term goals, and what’s defined as a highly valued job/ career in a given industry.

In our society, these are the problems I suspect:

Entry-level professionals want to expedite their understanding of their career path, and need a way to a) up level their skills and b) define short-term and long-term goals.
College-grad interns need a way to effectively take the proper steps to define their career, because they are unsure of what they want to accomplish professionally.

After open-ended questioning, paired with pre-typed statements ranked on a 1–7 Likert-Scale, here were the most noteworthy findings:

Gender — Women stated they prefer and/or have considered professional support outside of their immediate network, while those who identified as men have stated indifference (their network, meaning “one’s current manager, previous and current work collegues, and personal network within the same industry”). This 62% have researched a career counselor/ professional lifecoach in the past.
Mentoring & E-Learning — 68% of all participants stated blended learning has helped them retain more information, gain more knowledge, and kept them stimulated to learn different subjects.
Upleveling Soft Skills — All participants stated it is important to uplevel their soft skills (leadership, communication, team-building, etc).
Linkedin Premium — Participants do not take advantage of these services because:
a) It’s perceived as too expensive.
b) There isn’t enough perceived value for the monthly investment.

Competitive Analysis:

After comparing direct and indirect competitors in the mentorship, e-learning, and career development spaces, here’s what stood out the most:

Linkedin excels at providing information via their newsfeed, but for the average user, e-learning is not invested in as much. Users tend to utilize LinkedIn to find the next job opportunity versus towards online courses.
Coachmarket missed the mark in terms of responsive design- their desktop adaptation of their website was nonexistent, based on lack of axial relationships, items being off-centered, and text overlapping with images in what appears to be unintentional formatting.
Medium can be a fantastic tool for gaining industry insight. A user can customize their reading options by selecting topics they’re interested in, and add articles to a “reading list.”
Sokanu provides career assessments based on the person’s preferences for their career- further education in the field, work environments, work cultures and role situations/ responsibilities, while gathering a user’s strengths and personal interests.

Feature Prioritization:

Due to time constraints and feasibility, scheduling and the 1:1 chat feature with a user’s mentor were going to be key to design after the login and onboarding processes.

First Wireframes:

The mint color in the login process could cause difficulty for those visually impaired.

Usability Testing Results

After conducting usability testing with the same 18 participants, this was the collected qualitative feedback:

Considering the rushed/ excited user: Participants noted that while they enjoyed the branded visuals, they would love options to view the dashboard tutorial, or jump straight into the app.
Considering the curious user: Oppositely, participants were looking to explore certain features before taking the career assessment/ building their profile and landing on the main dashboard for the first time.
Profile Importing: Users appreciated the option to upload information from another site!
Color Tweaking: While the mint felt very “on-brand,” one of the users was colorblind, and mentioned having issues identifying color during the initial login process.