Month: February 2016

Reach Up Survey

To see how my audience feels about the product I want to produce, I created a survey with Survey Monkey. I asked questions to find out more about the background of the person answering the survey, involving their work history and the experiences in getting a job. I also asked what kind of features people would like to see from my service.

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I first asked people whether or not they are currently employed and if they are in a career path they wish to pursue. Most of the people who answered are unemployed and only one person out of the people who had a job wanted to continue that line of work. The results of this survey present multiple issues that I hope I’d be able to help with my service. Getting people into a job is one thing, but helping people find a career that makes them happy and want to continue pursing can be another thing entirely. This is what I want to be able to help people with with Reach Up, so that they are not just working, but are happy to be doing so.

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I asked if people would be interested in a service that helps them get a job more closely related to their interests. The results were overwhelmingly positive as everyone who took the survey said that they would. This shows that there is definitely an audience for this product, and many people who would use it.

I wanted to know what kind of features people would want to see from this service, so I asked about a few and left a space for people to add their own ideas below.

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The most popular of the three, with 100% of people who did the survey interested in it, was getting advice from people in the career you are interested in. This is great since my original plan for this service was just this; connecting young people with other people in the industry they were looking to get into. The next most popular result was to hear advice from other users, and this can easily work along side hearing from people in the industry. I can simply have users show if they are employed or not, and if they are what line of work they are in. Being able to know who you are getting your information from helps to quickly see how reliable the information is. I also asked whether or not people would be interested in seeing links to articles relating to the career they are interested in. This was the least popular of the features I suggested but it still seems like something that people would be interested in seeing. No other suggestions were posted below for this question, so I can assume that I covered everything that people would be interested in seeing.

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I asked if people would be interested in seeing positions available from hiring companies that would advertise through Reach Up. These results honestly surprised me as everyone involved in the survey wanted to see this feature. To achieve this I would need to either reach out to people in multiple industries and ask I they would want to advertise positions on this service, or I would partner with another job advertising service to display the positions both on their service and on Reach Up.

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I also wanted to know if people would want to see news relating to job searching. This too proved to be a popular feature that people would want to see. I can add a few links by myself by searching around and checking news sites every so often to see if there is any news relevant to youth employment of just employment in general.

Thanks to this survey I feel a lot more comfortable about Reach Up and what I want to achieve with it. I can see that it is something that my target audience is interested in, and I now also know specifically what they want to see from this service and how popular each of these features would be.

Reach Out, going in a new direction

I showed my proposal to Clive this week and we discussed  my project in greater detail. We spoke about who the project would be tailored to and what the ideal outcomes of the service would be. My original plan was to help those who are searching for a job, or maybe those who have an upcoming interview, get the job they are after by giving advice from those with relevant experience.

While this is useful to those who are already motivated to find a job and know what they want to do, what about those who don’t. This project aims to help those who are unemployed find the job or career path that’s right for them. While a lot of people who are out of work may know exactly what they want to do and how to get there, I feel this project should aimed more at those who are maybe unsure of what they want to do and need some help getting started.

I have a few ideas of how to do this. One, which was suggested by Clive, is to do something along the lines of a quiz to find out what people are interested in and help them find a career that is right for them. The questions would ask things like what their hobbies consist of, what skills they have, what education and grades they achieved and so on. At the end the user would be suggest a few careers that may interest someone like them. I may also include advice on how to get started, like what other skills this job requires and if there is somewhere that offers this nearby.

This is a large shift in the direction of my project, but I think the outcome will be better for it. I think this is something that is more likely to help a wider range of people, while still aiming at the same target audience as before.