PART 1

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

As a Program Owner, I want to understand which in-demand skills are most important to my program and help directing resources when realigning curriculum so that I can create the highest amount of impact for the success of both my students and my program.

Value to Customers & Users

• Information about whether skills are increasing or decreasing in demand will help supplement overall job posting demand values to give a better picture of what skills are really being valued in industry. This will lead to more actionable insights for users.

  • Knowing the historical trajectory of demand for certain skills, while not a crystal ball, can shed light on the future that helps faculty anticipate shifts in the job market, and give confidence in the demand of the skill in question

• Similarly, additional skill data such as listing the Necessary/ Defining/ Distinguishing skills will give even more in-depth insights on the relative importance of skills. 

  • This will help users identify between general high-demand skills and those skills which truly add value such as a salary premium.

  • This will help users focus their efforts by prioritizing skills that are important in different ways.

• This additional information will also give users a better starting point for common use cases like Program Review by offering actionable insights rather than data alone about skill demand for their educational offerings.

• For those users looking to create new offerings, this detailed data will be invaluable to scoping out what should be taught to give students a competitive edge.

Value to Lightcast

• This information will make the insights from Skillabi’s main feature (taught vs. sought skills comparison) more actionable, which will lead to increased ROI for our customers. This will help with overall retention of Skillabi accounts and help to build a better reputation.

• One challenge during Skillabi implementation is providing guidance on the steps to take to begin acting on the data surfaced through the tool. Contextual skill data will help us tell a better story and point out places to start for customers.

• More refined and contextualized program insights will likely be a better selling point for potential customers and should produce more effective demos. This will lead to an acceleration in Skillabi ARR by shortening the sales cycle.

Target User Role/Client/Client Category

The primary persona for this feature is Program Owners, but has application for any Skillabi user making use of Market Alignment information.

Delivery Mechanism

This feature will be delivered as additional data available on the Market Alignment page of the Skillabi tool. This information will also be available for export. 

Success Criteria & Metrics

This Epic will be complete when users can access and review the following extra skill insights on the Market Alignment page:

• Skill Growth (whether the skill is increasing or decreasing in demand and by how much)

• Skill Growth Projections

• Necessary/Defining/Distinguishing Skills

• Skills that offer a salary premium

Success metrics for this include:

• Increased actions taken based on insights gained from Skillabi

  • Measured by: TBD (Likely a combination of customer research through surveys or interviews and analytics reflecting program/course edits by customers)

• Increase in Core Feature Adoption:

  • Baseline = ~30%

  • Expected increase to 45+% in combination with other factors by the end of Q2 2023.

• We receive positive feedback from customers, either directly or through Education Success.

  • This feedback also notes that this information has unlocked new value for Skillabi at their institution.

Aspects that are out of scope (of this phase)

Bringing this information to places outside of Market Alignment in Skillabi. There could be applications for this information at the course level, or other places later.

PART 2

Solution Description

Early UX (wireframes or mockups)

Early Mock-up

Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

Consider accessibility requirements.

Dependencies

N/A

Legal and Ethical Considerations

No legal or ethical concerns.

High-Level Rollout Strategies

• Initial rollout will be to all customers with an in-tool Pendo Guide to accompany it. This will help guide users through the new workflow.

• Individual stories in this epic will be placed behind a feature flag to prevent partial implementation causing confusion.

• The release to production will come after an announcement in the “headlines” of our Product Update to inform sales, support, marketing, and other interested parties.

Risks

• Adding additional information to the market alignment page could complicate the page enough to take away from its simplicity. This could lead to a barrier to use.

  • I believe this is outweighed by the value of this new information and we can take steps to make this additional detail an opt-in option.

Open Questions

• Are there any new APIs involved in accessing this data?

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.