Apprenticeship.gov

Overview

Ask

Promote apprenticeships within the Federal Government, drive interest in those roles, and improve the user journey of job seekers for those positions.

The Problem

Apprenticeship.gov struggles to promote apprenticeships in the Federal Government. In addition, the job search board on the site fails to show these federal apprenticeships.

How can we promote federal apprenticeships and fix the job search so users can find these roles?

My Role & The Team

I held the User Experience Designer role before being promoted to Lead User Experience Designer. At the inception of the project, there was a Design Team Lead, a Design Strategy Consultant, and a User Researcher. These roles dropped off as the product matured and I assumed the Design Team Lead's responsibilities.

Outside the design team, I primarily collaborated with agency partners, four developers, the Chief Architect, and our QA Lead.

Tools

Figma & Figjam, Microsoft Office, Drupal

Duration

Summer 2023

Impacting Over 2,000,000 Job Seekers

This work was presented at the Tech-to-Gov Conference as an example of excellent design work in the Government. It was also selected out of over 100 fellows to be presented at the Coding it Forward Public Demo Day.

What is Apprenticeship.gov?

A site run by the Office of Apprenticeship within the U.S. Department of Labor

Who do they serve?

Employers and other organizations to develop quality, accessible Registered Apprenticeships
Career Seekers looking for higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs
Educators providing structured training

Benefits of Registered Apprenticeships:

There are 115,000+ Registered Apprentices Across the Federal Government

User Research

Secondary Research

My time at the DOL started with reading through hundreds of pages of documents to understand the context of what problems I’m solving.

What previous research I had:

Listening sessions
A previous UX Research Fellow's documents
A previous "Excellence in Government" Team's findings
An "Apprenticeship Accelerator" session with senior leadership of agencies with Registered Apprenticeships
Dozens of internal documents

Usability Testing (Search Feature)

Career-seeking users in their early 20s familiar with job search boards were asked to use the apprenticeship job finder and complete two tasks while thinking out loud.

Tasks:

Find an apprenticeship relevant to your chosen position posted in the last month
Find a Federal Registered Apprenticeship

A Post-Usability-Test Survey was also collected for quantitative findings

❗️❌

100% of users failed to find an apprenticeship with a Federal Agency

❌

2.00/5 Ease of reading job descriptions

❌

2.33/5 Usability

❌

3.33/5 Recentness of Postings

In-Depth Interviews

Federal staff were accessed via In-Depth Interviews

✅

Retention was a key benefit to agencies

✅

In highly specialized technician roles within NASA apprenticeship is one of the only effective ways to train

✅

Showing examples at each step would be helpful

❌

Users found resources on apprenticeship.gov unhelpful for their specific usecase in the Federal Government

How I presented a heuristic evaluation to non-technical stakeholders

A definition of what a hueristic evaluation is in addition to a link to read more in the slides after the meeting

Clearly defining and linking to resources throughout the slides

Providing the current design for reference

Video walkthrough illustrating how we fail to meet the best practice and why that negatively impacts users

Highlighting problem areas clearly and providing explanation

Showing design solutions that clearly address issues

Personas

Career Seeker Pain Points

❌

There is no centralized resource to find what apprenticeships the federal government offers for interested career seekers

❌

It is difficult to use the Apprenticeship Job Finder to find Registered Apprenticeships in the Federal Government

❌

There is a lack of visibility into what positions are available as clear & up to date information is rare

❌

Some information like wording addressing upskilling the workforce is irrelevant and confusing

👷🏻

Federal Staff Pain Points

❌

Setting up a federal apprenticeship is a new and difficult process for this user set: familiarity is low

❌

When going to apprenticeship.gov, federal agency staff find many resources for employers but not Federal Government specific resources

This is important to note as the Federal hiring process is very different from private sector hiring

❌

The current site offers her little to take back to her leadership to convince them to buy-in to registered apprenticeships

👩🏽‍💻

What did we start with?