Youth employability platform

Understanding the challenge

The youth unemployment situation is influenced by three actors who fail to work accordingly. Although there is a lot of published information about this challenge, most are quantitative and purely descriptive. Before addressing this challenge, these data must be supplemented with qualitative research.

The main learnings and findings of this research were the following:

1. Despite growing with technology, young people's familiarity with technology is limited to the use of consumer applications.
2. They are not facilitated the development of digital skills related to productivity but they are expected to master them, which exerts a pressure that is difficult to manage.
3. The needs of companies and the training offer are totally dissociated, and hinder the renewal of the labor market.
4. The teaching methodology does not fit with the consumption habits of the young population and hinders the development of new skills.

Charting the journeys

Based on the learnings of research with the different actors, I facilitated workshops to explore ways to match the capacities and needs of each of them in a unified flow that allows to identify how the process should be and the role that each actor must fulfill. Throughout several iterations that revealed a good number of less obvious factors, I defined both the student's stages of evolution and the interrelated user jouneys of all the main and secondary actors:

Defining the platform

To allow the degree of interconnection between the journeys of the different actors in this ecosystem, I facilitated the identification and clustering of the tasks associated with each type of user, from which I proposed a series of applications with a focus on the tasks that would include, their target user and the specific value proposition.

Finding synergies

During the desk research stage I found multiple initiatives that address part of the challenges we identified in this project. After the proposal of the application ecosystem that would constitute the platform, I made an additional mapping of these initiatives to identify how to build on them and speed up the progress of the project.

Of course, after this exercise the previous exercises were affected by the new learning, and I iterated the proposals and deliverables to reflect this fact.

Proof of concept

After the refinement of the proposal, I realized that it was possible to create a proof of concept to measure the usefulness and interest of the proposal. Relying on some active initiatives, the development could be quite fast and affordable.

To do this, I focused on the definition and construction of user onboarding and a first diagnostic functionality of employability based on current digital and professional skills. In addition, we could simulate the recommendation of a suggested training itinerary. Before building it, I designed this flow with a simple visual that would not delay the process. After validating the effectiveness in a usability test, a development team programmed an app that could be distributed to users to measure the impact and viability of the proposal directly with the young people towards whom the project is oriented. Some results are included later.

Briefing for other lines of work

To facilitate the circulation of information with other lines of work, I prepared a series of briefings for each of them in which I presented the learnings of the analysis, expanded the value proposition in the necessary context, and detailed the reflections and analysis of the design process. I also included an executive summary of the other lines of work in an annex so that all those involved had a global vision and could collaborate transparently.

Some of these lines of work of other teams but for which I found out briefings were:

• Complete design of each digital product described in the employability platform.
• Definition of the format and content of the formations, as well as the production of it.
• Elaboration of framework agreements between universities, vocational training centers and companies.
• Homogenization of training catalogs between Europe and Latin America.
• Contribution to the catalog of skills, competences and occupations of the European Union.
• Contributions to the Secretariat of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation).
• Drafting of the technical project based on the functional and non-functional requirements that emerge from the design proposal.
• Development of a specific agenda of the International Youth Organization (of the Council of Ibero-American Organizations) for the economic development of youth through digitization.

Results