Finding Your Ideal Careers
An online career guidance course for high schoolers
My roles: Product Designer, Curriculum Writer, Content Researcher
Tools: Sketch, Protopie
Project Overview
After talking with hundreds of high schoolers at career fairs, it was obvious that many feel "career lost" and do not have much confidence in their career future. I was the same way for many years and I had to figure it out myself despite career counselors not being able to help because I didn't really know what I liked and was good at. Unfortunately, the usual expectation is for students to come up to the counselor's level of knowledge when in fact it needs to be the opposite. The student must be met at the root of their problem: not knowing what they like and are good at.
PROJECT VISION: To see more 18-24 year olds spending their education and training funds in fields that they are confident they want to pursue.
Objectives:
1) Increase students' confidence towards their career future to "very confident (3)" by the end of the course. Confidence scale is 0-4
2) Increase the user's confidence level on average towards their career path by at least 1 point on the confidence scale.
3) Spark curiosity in the student's mind during each class through mysterious, yet comical imagery
Problem validation research
1) I experienced it first hand. It took me years after college to figure out what I wanted to do professionally!
2) I met many people in their mid twenties who had masters and still didn’t know what they were passionate about.
3) I researched and learned that only a quarter of college graduates are working in a field that is directly related to their college major. According to Complete College America, most high schoolers do not really know what they want to do, due too many choices and not enough career counselors/mentors.
4) Lastly, I conducted street interviews in San Francisco and found that only 24% of non-STEM and Law graduates field of study matches the field of their current jobI collected data from 49 street interviews with men and women with an avg. age of 28 which confirmed my hypothesis that only college STEM-Law majors likely use what they learned directly in their job.
Additional research includes peer review articles that indicated that only (27%) of young people show consistency between their majors and their jobs. Other online research concludes that the major causes are that young people in america have "too many options" and "too few counselors and mentors" to help them find what they want.
Course development
Combining course ideas from the book Design Your Life, online interest inventory assessments, online personality assessments, & introspection articles, I formed the foundation for a 5 stage self-discovery journey intended to increase self-awareness. Course work includes introspection worksheets and assessments students can take online or fill out themselves in a google doc.
Usability testing
Through a high school career counselor at a private school in SF I was able to recruit 10 high schoolers to test the course, and give me valuable feedback to iterate. It was all conducted remotely from their computers and received a $20 amazon gift card upon completion of the first two stages of the course. The most critical feedback was making sure to learn about and apply myers/briggs personality types in order to understand the fundamental spectrums of how humans think and behave.
UX design & Animation
I hired an illustrator to create the islands and characters that would appear throughout the user journey. I illustrated and animated all the scenes and interactions to produce maximum engagement before students have to do the hard work of completing an assessment or worksheet.
Problem Validation Research
I had enough. If I ran into another 25 year old with a masters degree who still was unhappy with their career path, I was gonna lose it. Not only had I noticed a lack of direction amongst my own friend group, but numerous people I had met around the world who all seemed to be in their mid 20s. Something had to be done and it was not going to be any career guidance counselor to do it. I was tired of hearing, "go out and try stuff" which is very vague and not actionable. It is akin to a professional basketball player telling a younger athlete they need to practice more instead of teaching them a learning process and philosophy of how to become a great basketball player.
Targeting the most expensive and time consuming learning investment , college, I uncoverd some startling job outcome statistics. Mainly, student's majors usually were not consistent with their post grad jobs.
Below is the research I uncovered.
I also conducted my own research in downtown San Francisco to try and replicate the results.
Do very few non [STEM & Law] graduates end up working in the same field?
Results: 24% of non[STEM & Law] students' university field of study matches the field of their current job.
This seems very low, given the amount of money and time they spent on those degrees.
So do most high schoolers actually know what they want to do?
According to Complete College America, no, most high schoolers do not really know what they want to due too many choices and not enough career counselors/mentors.
Below is a short presentation of my core findings that are shown in the course.
Target audience identified: High schoolers between the age of 13-18 who feel "career lost" and undecided about what they want to do. Especially, liberal arts minded students~
Course Development
The goal was to help students find a career path that they really liked. How is this done? I had heard about a book called Design Your Life written by a professor at Stanford University, so I read up and took notes. A portion of the book outlined designing one's career role through introspective worksheets, mind mapping and sketching. I was intrigued. I took these activities and put them as the core components of my course with a few personal twists I would be adding to make the process feel more modern. For example, instead of sketching students would use google drawings, and the introspective worksheets would use more up-to-date questions that were written specifically for teenagers. The one major shortcoming of the book is that it did not explain how to uncover interests and strengths to incorporate into the career design process. So, I looked elsewhere.
An online search soon brought me across the centerpiece of my course, the Ikigai diagram. It brought needed structure and clarity to my mission that gave me a solid foundation upon which I could assemble the rest of the course.
During class an Ikigai item is opened and the Ikigai diagram pops out
I found several websites that required payment to take an online interest assessment that would prioritize your interests automatically. However, I realized that the scoring calculations were so simple that I could make the assessment myself on Google Forms and students could take it for free. The only difference was that students would have to prioritize the the top rated interests themselves, which only takes a minute by writing them down in a Google Doc.
With the 'Top Interests' stage taken care of, I moved my focus to a 'Top Abilities.' Given that I could never easily remember the difference between soft skills and hard skills, I wanted to recategorize the type of skills people usually have to be competent at their work. Looking at the story of humanity, there are many skills that have been widely necessary and now almost obsolete, for example, sword combat, sewing, and plowing fields. I called these learned skills because their usefulness may change drastically throughout time. They will then make a top 5 list of learned abilities that relate to the interests they already prioritized.
All of these prioritized lists are to prevent the student from having any kind of excuse for not starting or know what areas he/she should pursue.
Innate abilities, however, have always been necessary and always will, for example, communication, reading body language, detail oriented, creative, logical, etc. These are abilities every human shares, but each one of us obviously differs in expertise. In order for students to prioritize their top innate abilities they would need to learn quite a bit about themselves. One of the most reliable ways of doing this is taking a Myers-Briggs personality test on 16personalities.com. The test results match the student with a personality type that carries its own innate abilities and weaknesses. Once they learn a bit about their tendencies and corresponding innate abilities and weaknesses they will make two lists prioritizing their top 5 abilities and weaknesses. From this list of innate abilities students can choose their top 5 strengths and weaknesses and then learn how to improve each of their naturally occurring strengths.
The video below is how I explain the strengths and weaknesses of each personality trait micro via animations.
Usability Testing & Feedback
In March 2018 I cold emailed a career guidance counselor at a high school in San Francisco and was lucky enough to get a warm response. He really liked the idea of giving the students a chance at testing my course in exchange for a $10 Amazon gift card upon completion. At that time the content was purely the core components which were comprised of introspective worksheets, and assessments assembled on Google Forms and Docs. Though not very exciting the students were able to complete it from their own laptops going at their own pace, and they would email me if they had any questions. The feedback was very encouraging because most indicated that this was a useful activity for high schoolers. Fast forward to March 2021 where the learning journey has been much improved to create excitement before and after the rigorous tasks of self-exploration and documentation on Google Forms and Docs. The reason for keeping all the work components on Google drive is because the course will be taught online, and all the information they collect and archive about themselves will be automatically saved and easily accessible for future reference.
To continually collect data to measure my courses performance students will take a short 5 question survey at the beginning and ending of the course. Additionally, I have them take a short 2 question feedback survey near the end of each class to inform my adjustment decisions.
UX Design/Animation
Since this project has morphed from a mobile app to an online course it has experienced a number of iterations. The island theme has mostly remained unchanged because thinking about one's career future can be pretty stressful, no? The island journey's purpose is to bring a warm and friendly approach to self-exploration and identity development during an unpredictable time period in every person's life. There are five different islands or 'learning stages' each with a mini-story that serves as an engaging introduction to that day's introspective activities and class discussion. My overall design strategy going into this was to merge the real world with video game elements and story book fantasy. This decision was made to try and reach the largest audience by being both a realistic feeling journey (with the boat & animals) paired with magical, mysterious effects seen on each island.
Each character encountered in the story is actually a depiction of one of the Myers-Briggs' personality types. What they say and the type of advice they give is similar to what a real person with that personality type would say and do. Experiencing different types of people throughout our lives reinforces the sage advice that there truly is strength in diversity of perspective. My hope is that this message gets received clearly by the end of this course.
Some Things That Did Not Go As Expected
1) I had a few classes with low student engagement in the form of no questions, low-effort answers and absent students.
I realized some students may be more shy and introverted, or may not thrive in a virtual classroom with new classmates.
2) The aesthetics and animations could have been less sophisticated. I discovered that updating the course took longer than I expected, and it felt like I was relearning techniques. As the sole maintainer this was very draining.
Impact and Key Learnings
After the course, 23 students improved on average about 1.2 points of confidence on a 5 point scale. In other words, many improved from “very little confidence” to “some confidence.” Or from “some confidence” to a lot of confidence.”
Additionally, 71% of students who completed the course felt “a lot of confidence” towards their career future. Though I wish this number were higher I recognize that it takes time to gain self-awareness by trying different things.
My key learnings:
1) Some students may be more engaged and learn better in a self-paced, and self-guided course. So I think the next step I would like to do is create a self-guided course that doesn’t require my presence. It will lack the brain storming and learning opportunities from interacting with other students, but they can complete the course at their own pace and not miss a class.
2) Asking students about how prepared they feel to explore and learn about their interests and skills on their own, might be helpful to understand the value being delivered by the course.
3)I need to more thoroughly consider the maintenance time and effort for each design decision. Could this element have been a recurring component, or does it really need to be unique?
4) Regarding personality types, instead of categorizing people and labeling them, make sure students learn about and apply myers/briggs traits in order to understand the fundamental spectrums of how humans can think and behave.
