ABOUT

Overview

Career Connect, a large charity that helps young people and adults to achieve their potential by providing high quality, professional career, employment and training services. The foundation of its work with schools and colleges is its 'Get Connected' platform, a digital tool that engages young people in the careers process and provides support to teachers, alongside its in-person services. Originally created in 2015, Career Connect engaged us to review the current platform and create a technical roadmap for its evolution.

Concept & Opportunity

The platform was due a refresh, but the impact of the pandemic on how young people accessed education and careers guidance created a need for an even more radical overhaul. The solution needed the capacity to be delivered consistently and to a high quality, virtually as well as in person. We began the process with a technical scoping exercise to highlight gaps and opportunities, understand its users - from students to careers advisors - and identify the functionality they needed, as well as what best engaged them. The product also had to be fit-for-purpose in the post-pandemic world. However, the scoping process, which involved sessions with Career Connect staff, teachers and students, revealed an extensive list of ‘wants’, the development of which would have considerably exceeded budget and timescales for the project.

Execution

By reviewing information provided by stakeholders and analysing the project objectives, we were able to create a refined set of essential and desired features and technical spec that would act as a roadmap to create an effective and futureproof platform. At the heart of our recommendations were the needs of the young people who would be using the tool to help forge their way into higher/further education and the global workplace. We also looked at the existing framework to identify possible integrations with key systems. The resulting technical scope combined features like CV builders, educational slideshows and employability quizzes with the integration and streamlining of disparate systems used by schools. The roadmap created will deliver a product that can accommodate remote working and allow users to adapt to logistical changes, but will also provide teachers and Career Connect staff with the ability to react to significant societal events, easily tailoring and deploying content in response to local and global events in the news.

Results

The product is now live with +120 schools due to be on-boarded onto the system. Get Connected is an example of how forward-looking businesses are looking not to rehash existing solutions, but evolve them to meet new needs and expectations.

“The team at Mashbo helped us to see our project from a number of completely different perspectives. The scoping process explored how all of our users currently engage with the platform and really honed in on what we need our new tech to do and where it really has the power to make a difference.” - Chloe Elliott - Career Team Manager at Career Connect