Career Camp: AI Career Coach
This project started from my observing the need to help new college graduates navigate their career. The scope quickly expanded to include high schoolers struggling to find a career path and mid-career workers looking to make a change. I consulted and partnered with an experienced hiring manager as I engineered the AI Agent and considered features.
The Challenge & Strategic Opportunity
The Problem: How do we offer an AI agent that is honest, factual, and still kind in its responses? Training an AI agent requires careful, specific wording that takes into account the model's personality and ingrained desire to please the user.
Secondary Considerations: How do we offer advice to the most users while keeping the service as affordable as possible?
My Role: As the experience design expert, I collected market and user research, designed the end-to-end experience, and engineered the AI Agent.
Strategic Focus: The primary goal was to shift from providing answers to teaching the user to be self-sufficient. Our agentic AI will offers multiple draft suggestions while explaining the logic behind them. The user may copy those suggestions to edit on their own.
Design Action & Execution
Discovery & Pain Points: I uncovered multiple edge-case pain points but focused on three career stages:
High School students: The students I talked with were worried about choosing the wrong career path.
College students, including new graduates: My research participants felt under-prepared for their job search. They found the support through their school was a good start, but left searching for more complete answers on their own. An edge-case emerged for graduate school candidates looking for help with their CV.
Mid-career workers: Participants expressed concern about the long-term viability of their current role, while others were simply ready to make a change. Both groups wanted help but lacked the funds for what can be high priced coaching.
Targeted Experience Design: To create focus and reduce cognitive load, the final design breaks out each stage of the user's coaching journey. The first section allows the user to edit or write their resume. Section two gives them a report outlining career paths, estimated pay and the outlook for a chosen field. In the third section, the user is given interview coaching based on their needs. The human-written, Career Camp Blog is also available for general advice and as a reminder that real people are supporting the app.
To keep the app affordable I chose an ad supported model. The ad revenue should outpace the model's cost, even with heavy users.
As the Career Camp Blog grows and matures, it will be more fully integrated into a future version of the app.AI Training: I engineered the agent to understand that pleasing the user means factual and accurate responses. It is free to disagree with the user in a polite and professional way.
Other Considerations: The app and our blog website meet WCAG AA compliance. Career Camp and our blog are also responsive from mobile-first to Tablet in both orientations. The blog is also responsive to desktop.
The app also includes night mode, the preferred experience for user under 30 years old.
Future versions of the app will be available for desktop and iOS.Validation: My extensive usability testing started with individual testing sessions. After refinements based on those sessions, I expanded to closed testing, then to open testing in multiple countries.
Outcome & Impact
While testing feedback was generally positive, we were not prepared for the impact Career Camp has already had.
Student results: A high school user informed us that she chose her career based on the questions the app posed to her.
A college senior successfully completed his CV for graduate school after having "left the school's writing center with only a partial CV."Career changers: Adult users have shared their success with editing and writing their resume. One user gave us the feedback that he felt confident with his resume for "the first time in years."
I continue to monitor feedback and will update Career Camp as needed.
Career Camp can be found on the Google Play Store.
