How Break Through Tech is Doubling the Number of Womxn Graduates with Computer Science Degrees
Design Better Experiences with Journey Mapping
“Companies listen to other companies.”
These were the words of Amy Furman, Break Through Tech’s Director of Programs, at a celebration this spring.
Despite all of the hoopla around TikTok, WhatsApp strategies, and Instagram ad targeting, it turns out that word of mouth is still the most effective form of marketing. In fact, 72% of people report that friends and family are their most common source of news. The efficacy of word of mouth marketing holds within the business world too. As one example, 61% of IT buyers say colleague recommendations are the most important consideration when making purchasing decisions according to a Demand Gen report.
The power of colleague recommendations proved to be true for Break Through Tech New York (hereafter referred to as Break Through Tech), the public-private partnership initiative between Cornell Tech, City University of New York (CUNY), and innovative corporations, aiming to double the number of CUNY womxn graduating with degrees in computer science. While womxn are graduating from college at an unprecedented rate of 58%, the percentage of womxn graduating with degrees in computer science and IT is near an all-time low. The catch-22 starts well before graduation: having an internship on one’s resume nearly doubles the likelihood of landing a job within six months of graduation, but less than 5% of womxn undergraduates studying computer science at CUNY receive coveted internship offers. Meanwhile, technology is rapidly changing the course of our lives and womxn are not well represented in building that future.
To address this, Break Through Tech aimed to continue to rapidly expand the impact of its highly-lauded Winternship program, a paid, 3-week computer science internship for freshman, sophomore, and some junior womxn with a wide range of companies including global organizations, tech start-ups, and nonprofits. Break Through Tech sought to explore additional ways to expand the program as well as their team’s capacity to onboard Wintern host organizations. They asked Sharehold to take the lead on its employer research to identify new opportunities and, ultimately, to guide its growth.
How might Break Through Tech empower employers to further its mission?
Our Aha! Moment
Like many of Sharehold’s projects, our research process began by looking within the Break Through Tech team through organizational research. Very quickly, we uncovered two key insights:
- The Break Through Tech team focuses on programs that can scale easily and have an exponential impact. This is a resourceful team already working at maximum capacity and time is their greatest resource.
- Making the employer journey more turnkey presents the opportunity for an even better employer experience and increased capacity for the Break Through Tech team. The team reports that significant time and energy support the employer recruitment and onboarding process.
Identifying opportunities within the employer recruitment and onboarding journey was pivotal to expansion and increasing impact.
What is a Journey Map?
Journey mapping is a tool used to develop empathy and identify opportunities for core stakeholders by imagining and creating a visualization of a product, program, or experience from the mindset of the stakeholder (in this scenario, employers). Ultimately, a journey map helps you design a better experience.
Journey mapping is an activity typically completed during the inspiration phase of the design process. You might use a journey map at the beginning of a project to show what you know about your community or organization as it stands and identify areas of exploration. Alternatively, or additionally, you might use a journey map at the end of a research process to visualize what you’ve learned through your research and to highlight areas of opportunity.
What Break Through Tech’s Employer Journey Revealed
In the case of Break Through Tech, we began to piece together the employer journey through our design research with employers. We interviewed twelve employers representing ten organizations participating in the Winternship program across a variety of factors: technical and operational roles, executive and non-executive roles, small and large companies, and both nonprofit and for-profit. We also included one non-participating company as a comparative reference for the employer experience.
Here are a few key findings from our research with employers:
- A standardized onboarding experience supports employer success. Employers seek increased guidance and structure as they prepare to host and create projects for Winterns. While Break Through Tech is eager to support Winternship programs that suit a variety of employers’ needs and ideas, employers reported that this left them with so many options, it could be difficult to choose their next step.
- Employers are hungry for peer-to-peer support and a shared ritual experience. Employers want to hear more from other employers about their projects and experiences. Prior to our research, employers and Winterns had little interaction across organizations, largely due to the condensed nature of a 3-week internship. However, a community-like experience not only provides Winterns with increased networking opportunities, it helps employers drive internal buy-in around greenlighting a Winternship program within their organizations.
- There are two employer personas: The primary persona is a Champion, a leader or rising star motivated by Break Through Tech’s ideals. They look to make a difference and see the inherent value of the program’s impact. A Champion builds enthusiasm and consensus across their team around participating in the Winternship program. The secondary persona is an Advocate, someone who sees the execution of the Winternship program through. They like to do the right thing, rely on facts and figures, and are impressed by Break Through Tech’s results.
These insights helped Break Through Tech more fully understand the employer journey and identify opportunities to grow the Winternship program. Naturally, the team was excited to receive this feedback from employers and eager to provide greater structure, more information, and increased connection.
Based on our findings, we refined our challenge to focus on each stage of the employer journey:
How might we build a system to magnetize, embrace, and activate Winternship employers?
Co-Designing Solutions with Employers
After sharing and debriefing insights with the Break Through Tech team, we invited the employer research participants to take part in a Co-Design Workshop with Sharehold and Break Through Tech. This brought nearly every research participant, plus a few more from outside of the current community, into the design process by creating a shared knowledge base of insights from which we could generate potential opportunities.
Our Co-Design Workshop grounded all participants in the employer journey. We shared our insights through the lens of a journey map, confirming each step with the employers in the room. We emphasized that areas of possible growth are not points of weakness, but opportunities for enhancement and new ideas.
Employers reviewing and adding onto the journey map during the Co-Design Workshop. // Lianna and Aly from the Sharehold team during the Co-Design Workshop.
Next, we turned it over to employers to generate tactical solutions where an opportunity was identified. Each of the three phases of the journey — magnetize, embrace, activate — became a unique design challenge with its own round of Crazy Eights for solution brainstorming. After sharing and voting on ideas, cross-employer teams collaborated to build out solutions for each stage of the journey to share with the entire group, including the Break Through Tech team. We then asked employers and the Break Through Tech team to separately organize the concepts on an effort vs. impact prioritization matrix.
Employers shared their Crazy Eight brainstorm, voted on ideas, and then built out complete concepts for each stage of the employer journey.
Scaling Break Through Tech’s Impact
Ultimately, Sharehold and the employer community zeroed in on four primary areas of opportunity with one immediate recommendation to set the tone for the employer journey: P2P tools.
Employers are highly invested in the success of the Winternship program and Break Through Tech, and wanted to share resources between organizations and build buy-in for Winterships within their teams. As a result of our research and the ideas generated in the Co-Design Workshop with employers, Sharehold recommended customized resources for each of the Champion and Advocate personas to provide the onboarding information relevant to their specific needs, whether that included compelling stories or a checklist of to-dos. In other words, employers designed a solution consisting of tools to fuel increased word of mouth communication across colleagues and professional peers.
Another opportunity that employers identified at our Co-Design Workshop was an increase in the number of in-person community events to further strengthen relationships between employer teams and learn about one another’s projects. Traditionally, Winternships culminate in a closing event and based on employer feedback, this season’s event was strictly celebratory with a retro theme as a nod to technical product retrospectives.
The Break Through Tech team celebrated their “retro” event earlier this spring on the tail of a big announcement: an expansion partnership with Pivotal Ventures which will bring Break Through Tech to three cities and five universities in the next several years,
Since the launch of Break Through Tech, the number of womxn graduating from CUNY with bachelor’s degrees in computer science has increased by 94%. 55% of womxn who participate in the Winternship program secure an internship the summer following their Winternship. As Judith Spitz, Founder and Executive Director of Break Through Tech, said at the retro event, “this is a transformational event in the lives of students.”
Now, employers have the tools they need to more quickly onboard into the Break Through Tech employer community and bring along their colleagues and peers, too. This means Break Through Tech can scale its impact even further — within NYC, to Chicago, and beyond — to increase the number of womxn graduating with computer science degrees, working within the field, and building an inclusive future.
To learn more about journey mapping, download Sharehold’s free journey mapping toolkit. Have more questions? Interested in using design research and journey mapping to improve your most important stakeholders’ experience and to scale your impact? Email us at hello at sharehold.co.
