Customer/User Job-to-be-Done or Problem

As a Program Owner, I want to see what labor market outcomes my program best matches to, so that I can determine if changes need to be made and identify opportunities my unique program may provide.

Value to Customers & Users

• Educators will receive outcome matches to their programs that more consistently make sense and will be based on the most important, or core, courses/skills of that program. 

• Educators can differentiate easily, in the tool, between their required core courses and those from general education or electives that are not as relevant to our key personas.

• Skills from non-core courses can be taken into account without skewing outcome matching.

Value to Lightcast

When program owners, deans, faculty members, and other key users see a program match to wildly out-of-sync outcomes to their program(s), it can be very jarring. This initial disconnect can create a lack of interest or trust in the data we are providing. This can result in a barrier to success right from the start with an account. Improving our outcome matching will have a direct impact on both account stickiness as more users at an institution will be likely to engage with the tool. It will also impact new sales as this problem is also often present in sales demos as well. Especially when we are showcasing one of that school’s own programs. Finally, lowering the barriers to use of Skillabi data reduces the time and effort of account managers in client success with Skillabi. 

Target User Role/Client/Client Category

This initiative is targeted at Program Owners/Directors primarily, but also relates to deans and other academic leaders who are interested in comparing programs against labor market outcomes to see where they best fit within that space.

Delivery Mechanism

Users will see the impact of this change in the “Top Matches” show on the market alignment page for each program. This will be enabled by marking core courses for each program either by the user, or by the CST team during Skillabi site building.

Success Criteria & Metrics

How will you know you’ve completed the initiative? How will you know if you’ve successfully addressed this problem? What usage goals do you have for these new features? How will you measure them?

• Increased adoption of our key value driving features (Market Alignment, Taught VS Sought, and Benchmarks)

  • Measured by seeing a 5% uptick in adoption from the current baseline of ~37% (as of end of Q3-2022)

• Reduce instances of customer aversion to our outcome matching for a program.

  • Less instances of customers reporting that the results “don’t make sense”, or state that the information isn’t useful due to the matches displayed.

Aspects that are out of scope (of this phase)

This initiative is meant to support the ultimate goal of “accurate” program to outcome matching. This phase is one piece of supporting that goal, but only deals with improving the skills used to match a program by focusing on the core courses. Future initiatives will deal with improved matching models and moving towards the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy instead of Skill Clusters for that purpose.

Solution Description

Early UX (wireframes or mockups)

Program Contents Dashboard

Core Course Selection

Program Core Course Result Comparisons

Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

 May put less strain on the matching model as we will be sending on average less skills to be matched.

Will need to ensure that core course selection is accessible and selectable in more than one way.

Dependencies

N/A

Legal and Ethical Considerations

No

High-Level Rollout Strategies

• Initial rollout to all customers as an option in-tool

• New Skill Tagging Project will incorporate this after roll-out

• Previously completed projects will be updated upon refresh

• A Pendo Guide will direct existing customers to this feature and allow them to make changes if desired.

Risks

• This could add extra time for the CST team on manual projects and preparing projects for upload.

• There may be edge cases where programs don’t have clearly defined core courses.

• An extra layer of complexity can cause confusion, but this is hopefully mitigated by being an optional feature and being mostly delivered for clients.

Open Questions

How do we account for marking core courses in our CST team recording process?

Can we easily update previously skill-tagged accounts to incorporate this option?

Complete with Engineering Teams

Estimated Costs

Direct Financial Costs

Are there direct costs that this feature entails? Dataset acquisition, server purchasing, software licenses, etc.?

Team Effort

Each team involved should give a general t-shirt size estimate of their work involved. As the epic proceeds, they can add a link to the Jira epic/issue associated with their portion of this work.