With recent grads competing with young professionals for jobs, competition for entry-level positions is stiff. Especially with the COVID-19 slowdown, college grads are meant to have a hopeful time finding employment but are greeted with stress and fear. There is a myth that if you have a college degree, you have a job. The fact is, that approximately 53% of college graduates are unemployed or working in a job that doesn't require a bachelor's degree.* Networking before graduation is one vital way to help college grads reach better job opportunities.
Due to grads having a statistically harder time getting their first job, I wanted to create an application that would help them find a way to transition seamlessly from school to the workforce. With the help of the organization, FutureMap, I created a way to connect college students with professionals looking to mentor or recruit entry-level positions. The purpose of this was to help students gain their confidence, footing, and overall knowledge of their career field beyond the walls of their alma mater.
Below shows a brief overview of the process:
Identify an organization in need of focused attention. Find why the chosen organization needs assistance and in what ways you can be of service to them as a planner, conceptualizer, user centric designer, form maker, storyteller and inventor. Turn their existing situation into a preferred one by creating a meaningful, significant, adaptive and durable solution to the challenge you have pinpointed.
FutureMap is a nonprofit helping first generation college graduates navigate early career moves. Their volunteers are successful professionals who are passionate about leveling the playing field.
They work with professionals to help students and graduates prepare for the job hunt. They have a deep understanding of the challenges faced by first-generation and low-income students and work to support professional development and help reach student’s full potential.
College students who feel unprepared and reluctant towards joining the workforce after graduation need to be able to talk to others they feel comfortable with, to get ready for interviews, job fairs, etc., but are not sure where to begin their professional networking journey.
I believe creating a system specifically for college students that helps prepare them for networking, gaining connections and professional relationships before graduation, will help their job readiness and overall chances of getting their desired job.
To breakdown the wide variety of directions I could go with this, I wanted to make sure the data I received spoke for itself, and was justified in my design. I planned to survey college students in order to further understand their desires and fears when it came to networking.
My overall goal for this project was to be able to impact a student’s life by getting them motivated to begin building professional relationships. I also aimed to build a system for those who were unsure where to start networking, and give them a platform where they feel comfortable talking to professionals and mentors.
I measured the rate of success in this project using qualitative and quantitative KPI‘s (Key Performance Indicators) to gain insight into the overall satisfaction of the users in my final design.
For the scope of this project I wanted to be able to impact the lives of college students through a mobile networking application, but due to certain limitations and restrictions, I had to set realistic expectations.
I worked on this project for a total of 3.5 months, and during this time I had a very low to almost non-existing budget for this proposal. Due to this, I knew my ending result would be a series of screens prototyped, (not developed or animated) well evolved enough to be able to test and measure the impact it might have on college student, to determine if they would use this application in the future to begin their networking career.
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