Understanding the Journey Towards Employment

The New Jersey Office of Innovation in partnership with the Heldrich Center at Rutgers University committed to addressing NJ’s unemployment. This began with a series of research efforts and the emergence of services of services to thoughtfully guide New Jerseyans as they aspire to catapult their professional lives.

This focused attention brought forth the New Jersey Career Network (NJCN) – one of the nation’s first digital coaching and support platforms to helo residents find meaningful, gainful employment. This innovative digital tool aims to help job seekers navigate the contemporary job search process by incorporating best and promising practices from research on career coaching and high impact, action-oriented job search techniques. In order to thoughtfully identify next steps for NJCN, the NJ Office of Innovation determined a need to gain a holistic understanding of the journey towards employment from the perspective of active job seekers. This launched a two month discovery sprint with two streams of research taking place – the Human-centered Design and the Rapid Evidence Review teams.

I was brought in as a part of the Human-centered design team, providing primary research practices to the discovery sprint. The team aimed to qualitatively understand experiences and choice points from the perspective of job seekers.

LOCATION

New Jersey, USA

PARTNERS

New Jersey Office of Innovation

Esther Y. Kang

YEAR

2020

ROLE

Design Researcher