Bloomberg Work Wise puts big-picture insights from today’s professionals to work
BHIVE Case Study: Designing a news product experience that responds to the needs and ambitions of those navigating their way to career success
When it comes to matters of career there’s no shortage of advice out there. From free salary estimates to pricey courses and coaching, it seems there’s plenty of information to help us do well in work.
But blind spots abound in the commonly available career resources: What could I be earning if I went back to school? Where should I live to maximize earning potential in my field? Is it worth changing careers altogether? For career questions that are circumstantial, qualitative, or intrinsic — like planning a big pivot, learning soft skills, attaining work-life balance — no simple tool exists.
For BHIVE, Bloomberg Media’s human-centered research and prototyping team, this was a real opportunity to better understand how people make modern career decisions, and to apply those insights to product development to help address those needs.
When we saw that 18–35 year-olds were over-indexing on Bloomberg’s company and people pages, we hypothesized that this cohort was seeking information related to their job search.
Like I always say, the numbers provide insight, but to understand the rationale behind the trends — the Why behind the What — we sought to learn directly from people in the midst of making career decisions. Through a series of qualitative studies, in-person and remote video interviews from across the country, we sharpened our perspective on how we could serve people’s unmet professional needs.
To demonstrate the value of these insights, we launched Bloomberg Work Wise, an interactive career calculator and limited-run newsletter experiment designed to both inspire and inform career decision-making. With a few quick inputs, users see a set of personalized options: whether it’s moving to more in-demand regions where pay for a specific industry is higher, potential salary advantages of pursuing advanced degrees or job satisfaction associated with specific career shifts.
Keep reading for more on how research informed the Bloomberg Work Wise experience.
Discovering our audience
Non-linear career paths are the new normal. While their Boomer parents stayed in their jobs for a long time, Millennials are thinking of not only switching jobs but entire career paths. “Starting out” can happen several times in the career of a today’s professionals, requiring constant level setting of goals and expectations around what’s realistic. In a world where pivoting is always an option, choosing “what’s next” can feel overwhelming. With Bloomberg Work Wise, we aimed to ease some of those anxieties and help people to make smarter, more inspired career decisions. Some high-level insights that informed Work Wise:
It takes courage to make that next move. While people are broadly exploring new or different career directions all the time, it’s hard facts and relevant knowledge of today’s job market that make it easier to make bold career decisions.
People are leveraging online tools to assess the jobs market but they lack the macro view of the kinds of opportunities that are available in their field. We talked to numerous people leveraging jobs search boards and browsing professional profiles for inspiration for the next role, but who struggled to understand the broader trends and opportunities in their industry/field. As one early career professional put it: “I want to better understand the competition for jobs. What are the insights on how to stay competitive?”
Career motivation also comes from more granular starting points. Irina, 29, a digital marketing manager, says she draws career inspiration from the profiles of people she comes across on LinkedIn, “I like to find people who are doing interesting things and companies that I like.” For another interviewee, it was seeing the jobs themselves that helped unlock his ambition: “I don’t know what my dream role is,” said Neil, 32, a fund manager thinking of pivoting into corporate strategy. “It’s helpful for me to see the actual opportunities that are out there.”
Our takeaway: People need a balanced mix of trusted insights to make informed career decisions — but they want clarification, not to be told what to do. From knowledge of the job market to getting into the brass tacks of the types of jobs available in their field (and city, and skill level) — there’s an opportunity to make people feel more informed as they weigh their professional options.
What we did about it: We pursued a two-part user experience that incorporated both data-driven insights (a.k.a. a quiz) leveraging data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census (along with job happiness indicators from MyPlan.com and Glassdoor) and a bespoke editorial newsletter experience that includes research-backed perspective on navigating work and career.
Work Wise results: There was a clear interest in the Work Wise tool; traffic in the first month outpaced our goal by 5 times. It also resonated with the “early career” professionals who overwhelmingly visited our company and people profiles — more than half of Work Wise users fit the 18- to 35-year-old cohort we sought to reach.
People value trusted insights. In a professional world where “connections” can feel commoditized, authentic mentorship and perspectives are worth their weight in gold — especially when you’re starting out or making a big career decision.
Professional guidance can mean a lot of different things today. From niche industry meetups to coffees with hiring execs, our interviews revealed a wealth of high-touch approaches that people use to garner perspective on career paths, dream industries and future jobs. What these disparate approaches have in common is that they’re a meaningful way to unlock distilled insights from people with knowledge of a particular field or career path. For one interviewee interested in breaking into cryptocurrency, simply finding a community to connect with on Twitter has helped sharpen his perspective on trends and opportunities in the space — in his own words: “I’ve been to a lot of crypto conferences and met a bunch of people from different industries that I now talk to Twitter which helps feel informed and connected.”
For Hilary, 29, a digital advertising manager looking to pivot, the desire for authentic mentorship is the driving force behind why she’s ready to move on: “I’m pretty open to where I land but one thing I want is a great manager. I’ve never had a lady boss — in my next job I want to work for a female leader who will mentor me.”
Our takeaway: People want professional guidance that’s informed, distilled and relatable. While nothing can substitute those real-world interactions with smart, trusted sources, there’s an opportunity to make “insider” perspectives more accessible to anyone seeking such advice.
What we did about it: We partnered with Bloomberg editorial to identify key areas (The Balance, The Money, The Career, The Pivot) that are commonly on the minds of people making their way through their early-career journeys. Our four-part newsletter series showcases special reporting on each topic, plus the sage advice and curation of Bloomberg stories in those topic areas from editor Dave Rovella.
Work Wise results: Editorial content piqued the interest of Work Wise users: newsletter engagement was 4 times higher than our average and Work Wise feature stories outperformed the site average by 14 times.
Investing in new skills is work. People often seek advice and exposure to an industry to determine if it’s worth their effort and time to — and if they’ll be happy once they do.
Being able to contribute meaningful skills (both hard and soft) are the foundation of any job. For some, those skills are best learned by pursuing an MBA or advanced degree, for others, it might be as simple as taking a specific online course or working toward interpersonal goals like executive presence, collaboration, and time management. Understanding what’s really needed to get the job can dramatically influence how much time and money people are willing to invest.
Take it from the perspective of one interviewee looking to pivot into a role that required only some knowledge of data management: “No one has the patience to sit down and go through a 40 hour course on SQL. You just need enough to kind of talk about it in an interview.”
For others, it’s the less obvious skills they’re looking to tackle: Negotiation, working with cross-disciplinary teams, communication. John, 23, a data science master’s student, opened our eyes with the story of why he pursued a different program after a successful internship at a hedge fund: “I faced a big entry barrier in investment banking due to my cultural background. The rules are different in China, things are much more structured.”
For John, interacting with and learning through real-world experience gave him the intel he needed to move in a direction that he felt more aligned to his long-term workplace happiness.
Our takeaway: People want mental shortcuts when it comes to evaluating what it takes to reach their goals, especially when it comes to investing time and resources to learn new hard and soft skills.
What we did about it: We designed Work Wise to give people a leg-up in that process by giving them direction, thanks to research-backed insights and practical tips, designed to help them reach their career goals. The job happiness indicators from MyPlan.com and Glassdoor also offered a more holistic look at potential effects on well-being of certain career shifts.
Work Wise results: Work Wise proved to be a welcomed channel of trusted advice for a broader Bloomberg audience, as 65% of newsletter subscribers were net new users for Bloomberg Media.
Acting on Insights: From paper prototype to MVP
Work Wise was developed in a series of design sprints framed by what we learned from our research. We brought our ideas into a prototype design quickly, put the prototypes in front of users and refined it based on feedback. Next, we worked closely with our editorial partners in a couple of cool ways:
- We mapped out, on paper, an end-to-end user experience of the social tool with users to understand the context, value and weak points in the early Work Wise experience;
- We prototyped a live quiz to help understand the mechanics and UI of our Work Wise data-driven user experience Take the Work Wise quiz here!
- We aligned on editorial coverage on areas that spoke to the needs we heard from users, with expert perspective from the Bloomberg editors who work on these beats;
- We designed an MVP engaging experience optimized for social- and mobile-first audiences.
The success of Work Wise has blown us away. In addition to traffic and engagement metrics, feedback from a small panel of Work Wise subscribers also adds to our team’s confidence that there’s a huge opportunity to engage meaningfully with this audience: overwhelmingly (88%), respondents said they’d subscribe again.
As a researcher, this experiment’s been a particularly exciting one because it builds upon insights we’ve been hearing from our early- and mid-career audiences since BHIVE started its work more than two years ago. The success of Bloomberg Work Wise is a signal from users that an empathetic exploration of their needs — built into useful products — can yield considerable engagement results.
This year, Bloomberg’s product team is exploring ways to harness the success of Bloomberg Work Wise by exploring new ways to push beyond MVP and looking at Work Wise as a platform that could potentially be used for other interactive content experiences.
Work Wise was researched, designed, prototyped and validated by the BHIVE team: Amanda Lansman (product), Dylan Greif (experience design), Simon Ayzman (engineering) and myself (design research). Our partners were many — special thanks to a few:
- Katie Boyce, Martin Keohan, Alex McIntyre and the Bloomberg Graphics team behind the data experience that powered our quiz;
- Dave Rovella who edited the Work Wise newsletters and oversaw editorial direction of related features; plus Steph Davidson for her creative guidance;
- Slav Alayev, Brian Ward and Dmitry Tokmakov for partnering on engineering;
- Marketing, Social and PR teams that helped launch the Work Wise MVP;
- And shout out to the brain trust that helped us to conceptualize and move this project through: Julia Beizer, Ambika Nigam, David Harding and Marissa Zanetti-Crume.
It takes a big team to get it done here and we’re #blessed🙏 to have such a smart, collaborative crew who’s interested in bringing new ideas to life.
Do you have opinions about your digital experiences? If you’re interested in participating in a future BHIVE research study, let us know. Or ping me via Twitter if you’d like to learn more about how we put people at the center of designing news experiences.
(Icons and illustrations by Janet Sung for Bloomberg Work Wise.)
