OneDegree Careers

  • Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering, Spring 2021
OneDegree Careers is a startup company whose goal is to empower young adults to make informed career decisions by providing them with the tools and resources to explore, discover, and secure their dream career. OneDegree’s service promotes what is called a skilled career, any professional career requiring training or certification that can be completed in under 4 years. Our team's Senior Project focused on designing and developing a prototype mobile interface for users to explore and select a skilled career.

Meet Our Team

Kayla Tsang

Industrial Engineering

Kayla is a senior Industrial from Mercer Island, WA. Her career interests are in project management, lean operations, and healthcare process improvement.

Quinn Vu

Industrial Engineering

Quinn is an Industrial Engineer from Santa Maria, California. His career interests include technical sales, project management, and product management.

Sean Love

Industrial Engineering

Sean is an Industrial Engineer from Ventura, California. His main roles were data analysis and design of experiments. He also worked to analyze the project’s real world impact.

Sean Clark

MANUFACTURING ENGINEERING

Sean is a Manufacturing Engineer from Redwood City, California. His career interests are technical sales, product marketing, and start-up company development.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the people whose assistance greatly aided in the completion of a major milestone in our final senior project. Special regards to our project sponsors, Gabe Bensimon and Tim Brophy, and our project advisor, Karen Bangs.

PROJECT PRESENTATION

ONEDEGREE CAREERS PITCH DECK

OneDegree Senior Project Presentation
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OUr project's digital poster

Problem Statement

OneDegree currently lacks a functioning interface on their website to guide users through their proposed career service and ultimately help high school students choose a fulfilling career path. 

Focus Areas:

  • • The level of mentorship high school students want throughout the process of exploring career paths
  • • What career information high schools students want to know about career paths
  • • What features high schoolers find beneficial in exploring career paths

Project Objectives

• Design a fully functional user interface for OneDegree to utilize to eventually launch their career service focusing on:

  1. • Benchmarking and process design of career mentoring practices
  2. • Data analytics of survey to determine top UX features 
  3. • UX Interface design in reference to human factors

Solution Alternative Wireframes

Verification

For Verification, 33 participants ranked aspects including font, color, layout, and level of engagement.

  1. • Participants completed rankings on a scale from 1 to 10 for each feature as well as short answer feedback.
  2. • Home page’s font and career catalogue level of engagement were shown to be focus areas for improvement.

Validation

For Validation of our final interface design, we came up with a 17-step process that 30 participants completed.

  1. • These steps would force the participants to utilize and test all pages and features of our interface.
  2. • With no guidance besides written directions, the 30 participants were able to successfully navigate through all the pages and aspects of our interface.

 

OneDegree Careers

This project is sponsored by OneDegree Careers

User Survey Data Analysis

OneDegree sponsors released a survey to 901 high school students within the Tulare School District to better understand their target market. 

Survey analysis yielded findings on the mindset and career exploration preferences of high school students. A question on Career Exploration features was used to determine what information is available for preview on the Career Cards.

Final Design

Current State

Potential User Survey Results 

  • 901 high school students 
  • 84%  plan to attend college
    • 44% not sure they picked the right major
  • 40% did not know what career they wanted
  • 56% have considered pursuing a skilled career
  • Students concerned with Career Exploration

Literature Review Topics

  • • Lack of Knowledge on Skilled Careers
  • • User Limitations and Obstacles
  • • Interface Layout
  • • Career Mentoring 
  • • Human Factors
  • • Website Usability and Performance Metrics
  • • Mobile Application Design & Development

Career Cards

The career catalogue in our solution prototype contains 33 careers for users to explore and select a career. Each career card  contains information on 18 attributes pertaining to each career as shown below.

Impact Analysis

OneDegree Careers has the opportunity to impact so many people in a positive way. Some of the  potential impacts include:

  1. • Preventing more student debt – Class of 2010 had an average debt of approximately $20,631 per  student
  2. • High schools can now assist in career exploration besides college advising
  3. • Reduce stress for high school students by providing centralized information on possible careers
  4. • Environmentally friendly career services that are paperless and fully virtual

Conclusions and Future Recommendations

Our Bubble.io user guide will assist in the interface handoff to OneDegree and future collaborators who will work on the user interface. Our team entered career card data manually due to limitations with our Bubble.io subscription

Next steps are to:

  • •  Improve would be scalability and automation by utilizing the bubble plugin for external APIs
  • • Develop infrastructure to import the BLS API data for career information

Prototype

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