The Path Toward Narrowing
Continuing research and synthesis to hone down which opportunity areas we want to focus on in the upcoming weeks
Recap from last week: Combining insights from secondary research and interviews, we narrowed our focus in terms of “Who” and determined a few possibilities for “What.” Check out what we did next to work toward our goal of narrowing even further!
Countdown to Decision Time…
Our next milestone was to narrow down to three to five opportunity areas based on what we have learned so far. To ensure we approached this narrowing process as informed as possible, we conducted additional research in areas where we could use more understanding.
- Student Journey from a Psychological Standpoint: Various psychologists (e.g. Super, Bandura, Holland) have developed career development theories that discuss where students lie at various points in time in terms of making career decisions. Common themes among these theories include interest formation, career preference development, and career maturity. Combining insights from each of these theories, we developed a basic understanding of the basic developmental stages students go through in career development:
- Existing Organizations in the Domain: We began collecting a list of intermediary organizations in the Greater Pittsburgh Area that focused on the bridge between education and industry —The Pittsburgh Project, Brightwood Career Institute, The Challenge Program, and Partner4Work are just a few who are currently trying to make a difference in this domain. We also collected contact information for each in case we wanted to reach out to them later on to gain more information.
- Administrative / Policy Perspective: We conducted an interview with a Pennsylvania Department of Education Consultant, who had a lot of knowledge in this domain. His main points focused on the importance of exposing students to all of the options and moving away from the “only one way to win” mindset. Instead of schools bragging that 95% of their students will be attending college next year, they should instead be showcasing that 100% of their students will be attending the best post-secondary option for them to be successful in the future.
- Industry Perspective: We realized that although we had gotten a plethora of information from those currently in the education system (e.g. students, counselors, administrators), we hadn’t yet ventured into the the other side of the issue — industry. We quickly discovered that getting responses from HR reps / employers and individual employees was more difficult than we had thought. Our recruitment efforts for the week (mainly in the form of emails and LinkedIn messages) failed to land us an interview, but we are determined to get conversations with members of industry going in the upcoming weeks.
Synthesizing our Findings…
We created a series of “living” deliverables that we will adjust and modify as more findings come in as well as reference later on.
Continued Affinity Clustering
Using our initial, loose affinity clusterings from last week, we proceeded to create more defined groups. Irrelevant or nondescript notes were removed and groupings with too many notes were divided. Each of these groups was given an overarching theme/sentiment and groups of similar themes were placed into an overarching category. This will allow us to easily understand the main topics at hand as well as the more descriptive themes in each as we proceed with the narrowing process.
Matrix Digitization
As mentioned in last week’s post, we decided it would be beneficial to create a digitized matrix of the affinity in addition to the physical one on the wall. All interview notes were placed into a spreadsheet and organized into tabs according to their overarching category (e.g. students, college, career, parents, structural factors, tools, etc.). Within each tab, themes/sentiments were listed along with which stakeholder (e.g. student, parent, counselor, administrator, etc.) expressed that particular sentiment. Note numbers were indicated for easy reference to the original interview notes and in some cases, a quote was added to display a specific examples of a particular sentiments. We plan to maintain this matrix so we can reference it for examples and validation as we narrow down our opportunities.
User Journey Map
Using the recommended career development timeline for students from PA Department of Education’s 339 policy, the non-negotiable timeline of deadlines from the education system (e.g. course selection, SATs, college applications, and college acceptance), and the psychological development timelines from the career development theories, we creating a living user journey to display where the milestones in these different sources line up in terms of a students’ career development.
We discussed eventually adding less concrete milestones from primary interviews with students — such as what students are thinking, feeling, and doing at various points in time or what pain points and opportunities they experience in each stage.
The goal of this visualization was to display where different timelines align and where they are in conflict with one another (which could be a potential area for opportunity!) as well as serve as a reference for us when it comes to understanding timelines and deadlines in a student’s career journey. We also felt that this would potentially help validate the “Who” we narrowed down to last week.
Ecosystem Map
Based on our understanding of this complex domain, an ecosystem map was developed to display the various groups of stakeholders and where those groups overlap. We felt this would help us visualize the different spaces in terms of interactions or lack thereof as well as determine where we have investigated thus far and where we still need to dive in.
Oh, and an exciting update — we’re going to school!
After some back and forth coordination with the Allegheny Conference, we officially scheduled our first school visit! We will be conducting two workshop / interview sessions with 9th graders at Elizabeth Forward at the end of March. We’re looking forward to coming up with some great activities to do with them in order to get more information and test some ideas!
Thanks for keeping up with our progress! Check out next week’s post to see which opportunities we narrowed down to and how we prepared to present this milestone to our client.
