Kicking Off Something numo
Exploring the challenge of future workforce shortages and our takeaways from a successful client kickoff
Hey there! Here’s a tl;dr from the last post: I introduced the team and discussed how we defined team dynamic based on individual goals and skills. Now, let’s get to why we’re all here and how we kicked off with gumption.
“What do you want to do with your life?”
You’ve probably thought about this more than once. But I want you to reminisce back to your high school or middle school days — how did you go about answering it back then? It’s a loaded question with a lot to unpack…especially for a teenage student. This is a large part of what we’ll be exploring. But why students, and why career planning?
According to reports released by Allegheny Conference, the Allegheny region faces an anticipated workforce shortage of 80,000 people over the next decade. The findings identify a number of challenges the region faces in terms of filling the workforce gap, some of which evolve heavily around education and grooming students for the demands of future workforce.
So over the next seven months, we’ll be working with numo and Allegheny Conference to explore the student’s career planning journey, understand the many influences that come along with career decision-making, and identify how we may reduce friction in the talent pipeline for the Pittsburgh region.
But let’s back up a bit… where did we start?
Client Kickoff, of course! But it wasn’t just that. Our team was scheduled to be the last team to have our kickoff — which came with it’s pros and cons. Pros being that we had extra time to prep and we could go into the meeting having some knowledge of the space. Cons being that we were going to be the last team to gain some clarity and direction from our clients. So with that in mind, we decided to hit the ground running.
Starting Secondary Research
We were fortunate in that we had a pre-existing 60-page report that helped us start wrapping our heads around what future workforce shortage looks like for the Pittsburgh region. The report gave us some really great insight to what lens our clients were looking at the issue through. A few key findings that we found particularly interesting and relevant to our project were:
- Educators’ ability to provide effective career awareness and prep can be attributed to a few factors: lack of real-time job data, lack of time / ability to integrate into classroom curriculum, and lack of info about future workforce trends.
- There’s tons of opportunity for employers to collaborate with the education system to build a talent pipeline that’s aligns workforce demand with the future workers of the region.
- Allegheny conference has partnered with multiple non-profits and companies to start actively addressing this issue with initiatives like Partner4Work and Appalachia Partnership Initiative.
So with these insights, we decided to divvy up some more (of the many) lingering questions we had in order to bring our own knowledge to the table. We explored topics like Pittsburgh history, current education and employer career prep programs, and theories of future workforce with automation. While we continued to explore the domain, we started with kickoff prep.
Going into Kickoff with Intention
Although we spent a good chunk of time reading into the report and secondary research, we allotted some time the week of kickoff to go over the meeting logistics and content. Here’s what we did to go into kickoff feeling confident and prepared.
A Running List of Questions
We quickly realized that we had more questions than we could account for, so we kept a running list of all the questions that came to mind. We realized some may be more relevant than others after we talked to the client, but if we had one…we made sure to write it out.
Establishing Kickoff Goals + Structure
As we started to write out questions, we quickly realized that there was probably way more questions than we had time to cover in the Kickoff. We had three hours with the client, so we established three goals: (1) building rapport and understanding project roles, (2) understanding project domain and background, and (3) aligning on current project goals, risks, and expectations. Then we prioritized, time boxed and buffered…this was key. 🔑
Keeping things Interactive
One of my biggest fears was us sitting around a table talking for three hours. So we added in two activities to keep the room engaged and interacting in a way that wouldn’t be just us in front of laptops asking each other questions.
First, we did Collaborative Mind Mapping to get a better understanding of how our clients see a particular topic (“Talent Pipeline”) related to the project. Second, we went through Goals and Risks to align on what success looks like, what their project expectations are, and any possible foreseen risks of the project.
Before kickoff, we tested these activities with some other great MHCI’ers (thanks Team All Scripts, Asha, Rob and Ravi!) and modified as needed. This helped immensely because day-of kickoff activities went incredibly smooth, and the information we got from the activities was invaluable.
And the day of Kickoff…
We dressed “smart casual,” printed our materials, and went in to the meeting with a sense of excitement. We ended up having four client attendees that belonged to two different stakeholders groups, so our activities were great tools to get everyone on the same page and gain a shared understanding of the project. The time-boxing and buffer time allowed us to run through the entire agenda right on time, getting all of our meeting goals achieved. And last but not least, I have to say we have some pretty amazing clients — they were engaged at the meeting and extremely enthusiastic about the project. Overall, it had to be best case scenario as far as kickoff meetings go!
The Debrief and Key Takeaways
Kickoff was only the beginning and it definitely showed that we had our work cut out for us. The next morning we met up to go over our main insights and takeaways — here were things we found most interesting:
- This one of numo’s passion projects. They’ve been working on it in their free time and have done some research and conceptual designs. However, they were excited to bring us on as ‘young minds’ that could dedicate more time and may be able to empathize more with what career planning looks like nowadays.
- From the mind-mapping activity, we found that the clients really focused a lot on the feelings around career pathways. They were adverse to the term “pipeline,” which sounded somewhat sterile and corporate as opposed to something more human and experienced.
- From the goal and risks activity, we found that the client was really aware that the problem space is huge. They were very pragmatic, suggesting that we find one single need and solve it really well, rather than “boiling the ocean”. This aligned with one of the risks they called out — staying “too broad for too long.”
- Leveraging our client’s school contacts for research would require certain clearances and IRB that could take a while to acquire… so that was something we wanted to start addressing asap.
To wrap this one up…
Having a successful kickoff really put us on track to start the project off strong and build a strong relationship with our clients. As a team, we’re all thrilled to be working on improving career preparation and planning for K-12 students. Over the next few weeks we’re going to be coming up with a plan and diving into some intense research to narrow in on project scope, starting with who we want to target. Read more about this in a few days when our Research Lead, Nathan, catches you up on our research plan.
Catch ya around soon! ✌️
Our 5 Quick Kickoff Tips:
- Define meeting goals and prioritize the agenda.
- Time box and leave buffer time for each agenda item.
- Engage everyone in the room — activities help!
- Don’t forget to establish rapport with the clients.
- Leave time for client questions, they’ll appreciate it.
