The completed project fostering skills development through digital vocational career guidance has been part of a joint government assignment to develop a coherent data infrastructure for skills supply and lifelong learning (N2021/01915 in Swedish). The UX work, including a clickable prototype, a public mural (digital whiteboard) covering the design work, insights derived from interviews and user tests, and recommendations for further development, are now available as valuable resources for upcoming projects. In the long run, our goal is for these projects to serve as inspiration for other stakeholders to create career guidance and job matching services.
The project has been characterized by an open and sustainable approach where sustainability perspectives have been taken into account in all operational parts of the project, as well as concerning the ethical usage of collected data.
By linking labour market and education data, with the help of JobTech Development's open APIs and datasets (the Swedish Public Employment Service), the SUSA Hub (the Swedish National Agency for Education’s Database), the qualifications database (the Swedish National Agency for Higher Vocational Education), the project has aimed at providing insights on how the data infrastructure within the area of skills supply and lifelong learning should evolve.
The project has delivered tangible results through:
- having used kompetensmatchning.se as a practical testbed and demonstration environment. The code is open and published on Gitlab.
- a concept validation (Proof of Concept (PoC) for digital guidance
- forum feedback to data source owners, compiled knowledge on the Swedish Public Employment Service’s Gitlab (Arbetsförmedlingen's Gitlab), and prototype implementation in React with open-source code
- the UX work is available as a valuable resource for upcoming projects
- having utilized data sources aligned with EU-standardized models, while also considering the EU perspective for a potential scalability outside of Sweden
- opportunities of leveraging AI/language models to enhance the connection between individual evaluations and existing data sources.
Key Takeaways and Technical Insights
Among the project’s key takeaways include a growing demand for digital guidance tools, the lack of a national standard for such tools, and a desire for digital initiatives to guide and assist newcomers.
Last, but not least, there is remaining work related to management and technical development.
Read more and explore the various parts of the project here.
**UX means user experience is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service.