What is My Career NJ
My Career NJ is a one stop shop for New Jersey residents looking to up-skill, find job training, make a career move, or just simply look for career related resources.
As the product designer for My Career NJ, my goal is to take an array of tools, built by different agencies, and combine them into a cohesive visual and experiential product.
My Career NJ averages about 20K users per month and services training providers, training seekers, and others on their career journey.
Where MCNJ is headed
Due to the nature of how the project came to fruition, we have to iterate at a rapid pace in order to improve usability. Our main focus as a product team are the following areas:
Guide the user
Simplify the experience
Improve resident lives
Training Explorer
The NJ Training Explorer is My Career NJs most used and successful tool. The goal of the Training Explorer is to help training seekers in New Jersey find accredited programs that can be used to enter or move up in their career of choice.
As a product designer, my main job is to ensure that New Jersey residents can easily find programs that meet their financial and occupational needs.
Using a Credential Engine, our team handles thousands of trainings in a data set, cleans them up, and then presents them to training seekers. We also surface trainings for the most in-demand occupations in the state. Those trainings are often eligible for funding assistance and are popular with training seekers and career one-stop agents.
Design System
A major challenge in building My Career NJ is consolidating the different tools under one umbrella design system. The initial pieces were build by various government and non-government agencies. This means that many of the components across the product use different code bases. Others do not meet basic accessibility standards.
A major focus is to document and organize components in one design system while adhering to New Jersey Web Design Standards.
My Career NJ uses a mix of components from United States Web Design Standards and Material Design.
Challenges
This project is not short on challenges. Managing and designing around them has been both the most difficult aspect of the job, but also the part that has allowed me to improve my skillset as a designer the most.
If I look back at where I was two years ago when starting the project, I can really see the growth in design thinking thanks to all the challenges of the project.
