Parent Career Coach is an incubated Tech Fleet project seeking to help stay-at-home parents reenter the workforce.
It was a great idea that needed to be fleshed-out.
This phase’s goal was to build a foundation of research and market analysis to give Tech Fleet a specific project direction moving forward based off of research findings.
Role: UX Full-Cycle Design Team Lead
Timeframe: June 2023 – July 2023
Major Deliverables: User interviews • Survey • “Jobs-to-be-done” statements • Hand-off recommendation document
Project: Parent Career Coach Phase 0 was a 4 week discovery sprint performed by our UXD Full-Cycle team and a Product Strategy team in an agile environment.
Teams: A 6-person UX full-cycle design team + a 6 person product strategy team.
The job search is difficult, but it’s even more challenging for stay-at-home parents reentering the workforce. What’s more, there’s a lack of quality and affordable solutions for parents in the market.
The job search is difficult, but it’s even more challenging for stay-at-home parents reentering the workforce. What’s more, there’s a lack of quality and affordable solutions for parents in the market.
A web app that would provide parents with learning materials to catch them up on general and industry-specific best practices to fill in the education gap resulting from their time away from the work force.
It could also include a self-sustained parent community to give parents emotional support and mentorship opportunities.
We limited our research participants in the US due to the short scope of the sprint. However, only talking to educated married moms wasn’t necessarily intentional. Rather, it was whom we were able to recruit in a short time span.
Some preliminary research showed that this is predominantly a female issue, but we still would have liked a larger diversity in our participants such as dads or disadvantaged parents.
7/7 participants were trying to catch up in regards to knowledge in their field or learned new skills as a part of a career change.
6/7 struggled with confidence while looking for jobs, feeling insufficient because of their time away.
6/7 of participants were struggling to catch up in regards to their professional network, some stating frustration that making connections felt less organic as a stay-at-home parent.
5/7 felt the job gap was a hindrance to their job search and many expressed frustration that employers don’t acknowledge the hard work involved with being a parent.
We also chose to create and send out a survey seeking to answer similar questions for two reasons:
1. We wanted more data to back up our interview findings.
2. We wanted a more representative sample (hopefully hearing from dads, less educated parents, and single parents)
And we certainly got more diversity…
Knowledge Gap
IMPLICATIONS:
It was clear to us that parents would value a centralized learning resource for job searching and industry knowledge. Maybe even help from a career coach.
Networking
IMPLICATIONS:
It would be an obvious value to parents if we could help them network more effectively even while balancing family responsibilities.
We also collaborated with the Product Strategy team to create Jobs-to-be-done statements in order to connect the research insights with the competitive analysis they had been conducting. Here is an important example:
I want to find courses that will help me up skill in areas that I have missed out on while being a stay-at-home parent so that I can feel confident going back to work without wasting my time and money.
I can participate in formal courses (university, vocational school) but that requires too much time and money.
I can do free informal online training (Youtube, Googling) but that requires more research to wade through available resources to determine the quality of the resource.
Equipped with all of these findings I wanted to give the next phase a head start. So I ran an ideation workshop.
Equipped with all of these findings I wanted to give the next phase a head start. So I ran an ideation workshop.
Here are some top-voted ideas below their respective How-Might-We statements:
Due to it’s relative ease we recommended future phases to focus on up-skilling courses as the primary MVP and then incorporating community and mentoring in the MVP 2.
These core features, we believe, would be effective in meeting parents’ main pain points:
We didn’t accurately gauge if career coaching is something parents would be interested in. We hypothesized that our audience could value some sort of tailored help whether it be professional career coaches, informal assistance, or even AI. But we don’t feel we got enough information to move forward with anything regarding this feature. This will be for future phases to determine.
We would also like to get information from parents outside of the United States as well. Product Strategy found that an app with an international reach could be a big competitive advantage, but we don’t know yet if parents’ needs, pain points, and motivations vary in other countries.
