Career Navigation Technology 2020

This resource may be useful for a number of stakeholders, including:

• program directors and career counselors, identifying tools they can use to help their clients;
• investors and philanthropists, illuminating where investment is needed;
• technology entrepreneurs, shining a light on what’s working and where innovation must happen;
• business operators, identifying great ideas they can scale and grow; and – employers, demonstrating how they can adopt talent strategies that benefit not only employees and job candidates, but also the bottom line; and
• workers, highlighting tools out there that could be the key to finding a meaningful and evolving lifelong career journey.

The issue brief provides a history of career exploration and navigation beginning with low-tech approaches like networking with family and friends, combing through newspaper ads, and signing up with person-to-person placement services, jobseekers started turning to high-tech tools. Databases of job openings and information about career options emerged and flourished online. And advanced search and data-aggregation technologies made massive amounts of data available, speeding up the job search and hiring processes for both workers and employers. Now, a second revolution is on the horizon. Advances in data science, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are fueling smarter career navigation platforms that offer more precise matches and deeper insights that are customized for individual users.

The authors introduce the terms Discover, Connect, Position to Succeed, and Develop as shorthand for these shared activities: Workers explore career pathways and employers of interest, employers look for candidates to fill jobs, jobseekers and employers hope to connect with one another, and both employers and jobseekers use technical tools to increase the likelihood that the match will succeed. The brief notes examples of virtual resources and services for workers, employers, and intermediaries to facilitate career connections.

(This report is 75 pages long.)

The authors present the following trends they anticipate influencing career navigation.

In the most urgent and exciting trend noted by the authors, employers, education providers, philanthropists, and technology vendors are stepping up in response to the twin crises of 2020— the global pandemic and widespread economic disruption. Through technology and boundary-breaking partnerships, new collaborative models are connecting jobseekers to training and career opportunities at scale, addressing a key breakdown in the market—the gap between who is most in need of support and who is most able to pay for it.

The authors note that many career navigation technologies today offer jobseekers better information about the knowledge, skills, abilities, and connections they need for a career that will unlock economic opportunity and personal growth. They help workers find right-fit jobs by matching their strengths and experience to open roles, and help employers improve their hiring processes and talent retention rates by better understanding what signals to pay attention to and what kinds of engagement yield the best results.

The authors provide several recommendations for the career navigation platform of the future:

• Asset-based approaches to building social networks that recognize, honor, and activate the resources embedded within diverse social networks outside of education and jobs.
• Establish intermediaries as long-term allies with workers and job seekers as an extensive network of contacts that facilitate opportunities for employment and career advancement.
• Building and validating skills that can signal job-oriented strengths through career navigation platforms that are designed to strengthen a worker’s growth mindset, ability to set long-term goals, stay organized, think critically, make sense of data and data sources, and communicate effectively.
• Using information to help workers identify best-fit careers by using data to uncover opportunities for users based on general “good jobs” criteria (high-growth, living wage, and advancement opportunities) and individual concerns (Can I get to the job? Is there a trajectory for advancement? Does the employer offer benefits that support my family’s needs?).

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2020
• Author(s): Bertrand, C.; Swartsel, A.
• Funding Source: Walmart Foundation
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies