Mentorship: Finding the Perfect Fit For Your Career

By: Audrey, Rachel, Mitchell, Wesley

Problem and Solution Overview

How often do students change their major throughout undergrad? According to online sources, nearly 80% of students will switch at least once! Students realize that their chosen major does not align with their true passion, or they realize they want to pursue a career in a different area. However, this transition can be difficult, given that many industry spaces are heavily saturated with established, qualified individuals who have more experience and who recruiters may feel are more adept for the job.

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants

We conducted user research in two ways. For our first method, we sent out surveys to UW students who were interested in pursuing a career outside of their current area of study. We thought this was an effective approach to our user research since we wanted to collect a wide variety of responses from students. We explored how students currently look for jobs as they switch into different industries (which platforms, forums, job boards they use), as well as how/if they seek help and mentorship from others.

We also performed interviews with some of the survey respondents. The goal of the interviews was to gain firsthand knowledge of any perceptions a respondent may have that would influence their decision to pursue a different career path. In addition to discovering their reasons for changing careers, we also asked about the perceived challenges a respondent may face in making a switch. Through our interviews, we were able to gain a deeper understanding of the motivations and obstacles of our target audience.

Design Research Results and Themes

The majority of our survey respondents are currently majoring in an engineering related major (other than CS or CE) such as electrical engineering and want to pursue software engineering where the usual path of study would be computer science or informatics. We also had a few respondents pursuing a business related major but also want to transition into the tech industry. Lastly, we had one respondent studying EE but wants to pursue medicine and another student studying business but wants to work in sustainability. From our survey results and interviews, we noticed two common themes from our respondents:

Little To No Resources For Those Who Want To Switch Careers

Although many of our respondents found some success using online job boards and platforms like LinkedIn, they found it hard to compete with others who already had the skills in their fields. They found that referrals and getting in touch with those already in the industry the most helpful way to get their foot in the door. We believe the main issue is that there are currently very few resources that are specifically designed for people who want to pursue a career change where everyone is on a similar playing field. One interviewee who made a switch into software engineering described that he was “lucky” because he was able to get into a program that was specifically designed for those who had a non-traditional background.

The Need For Reliable Mentorship

Many survey respondents and interviewees expressed that having a mentor would be the most helpful way to learn the necessary skills to make a career switch. They expressed an interest in not only finding mentors in their field of interest but also mentors who have made a similar career switch as them. However, they explained how they were unsure how to seek out mentors in the specific area that they were interested in especially when they didn’t have any connections in the new field to begin with. Additionally, they expressed that finding a mentor that met their preferences was also difficult. One of the many reasons why many mentorships don’t last long is because the mentor and mentee have different preferences on how often they should meet. Therefore, there is a need to efficiently and effectively find a mentor that meets the needs of the mentee.

Proposed Design

After evaluating our user research, we selected a mentorship app as our final design. Since the majority of our target market are graduating college students and young professionals, we feel that utilizing a mobile platform is the easiest way for this target audience to communicate with. The goal of this app is to allow users to easily find a mentor in their preferred industry, ideally one that has made a similar switch. The user will be able to input their preferences on how often they want to meet with the mentor and what qualities they are looking for.

To differentiate our mobile application from similar platforms, we plan to use a chat bot to aid with quick and easy questions, as well as an automated scheduling feature. The chat bot is very intelligent and can answer most questions a user has, similar to Siri. This puts the pressure off the mentor and the mentee from coordinating times to meet themselves. These are the main features the chatbot can assist with:

• Answering questions about statistics, salary, or other quantitative facts about the industry in interest
• Scheduling meetings by comparing availability between a mentee and a mentor
• The chatbot will ask both mentee and mentor for available times in the next week, and automatically schedule a time for both to meet up
• Updating profile information, such as name, intended industry, experience(s), etc.
• Automated feedback prompts that allow a mentor to leave tips and notes for a mentee in his/her inbox to look at when not in person
• Similar functionality to texting, but without the exchange of personal info e.g. phone number for privacy concerns

The initial sketch of our design looks like this and follows how a user Kelly might use our app!