How can Learning and Employment Records help bridge skills gaps for Walmart employees?
Role
User Researcher
Project Type
UX Research, Service Design, Data
Project Type
Mural, PowerPoint
Overview
🔎 Problem
Frontline workers often face barriers to getting jobs that properly recognize their skills and experience. Ageism, discrimination, lack of recognized experience, and algorithmic barriers hinder these workers, and new technologies like LERs, while promising, risk reinforcing these inequalities.
☝🏽 My Approach
In collaboration with frontline workers, we conducted a three-session workshop, Resume Redo, to explore how LERs could help or hurt their chances in the job market. The sessions focused on understanding the workers’ job search experiences, uncovering hidden barriers, and identifying design principles for inclusive LER technology.
⚡️ Impact
The insights from the workshop shed light on the complexities frontline workers face and demonstrated the importance of user research in creating inclusive job technologies. These findings provided the foundation for the development of design principles that ensure LERs accurately reflect workers' diverse experiences and reduce the risk of reinforcing bias or discrimination.
My Process
Background
As conversations around Learning and Employment Records (LERs) began gaining traction, there was a noticeable gap in understanding how they could apply to frontline workers—particularly in roles where on-the-job skills go undocumented or underappreciated by management. This session series was designed to engage frontline workers directly, to explore how LERs could benefit them, and to gather input on the challenges they face in having their skills recognized and validated. The goal was to ultimately shape how LERs could be designed to capture and communicate these often-overlooked skills.
The first session focused on getting to know the participants, and understanding their roles, responsibilities, and experiences in their jobs. We explored how frontline workers view their own contributions versus how their employers and families perceive them. This session aimed to highlight the disconnect between the actual on-the-job skills frontline workers use daily and how much of that is recognized or valued by their managers and employers.
Data Point: When participants were asked about what their boss thinks they do versus what they actually do, there was a significant gap. Many participants shared that their employers only understand a fraction of their responsibilities or oversimplify their roles.
Insight: This misalignment can lead to underrepresentation of skills, which may affect opportunities for career advancement and skill validation in technologies like Learning and Employment Records (LERs).
Data Finding 1: Many participants feel their full skill set is not recognized by their employers, which creates a gap in proper skill representation for future job opportunities.
Session 2: Barriers to Job Search
We dug deeper into the job search process and identified the structural barriers that frontline workers face. This session explored not just the job market challenges but also how biases, discrimination, and limited opportunities restrict the career growth of participants.
Top Barriers Identified:
Ageism
Algorithmic barriers (e.g., resume scanning tools not recognizing non-traditional experience)
Discrimination (racial, gender-based, and socioeconomic)
Limited job opportunities and pigeonholing
Data Finding 2: Technology-driven barriers like algorithms can deepen inequality by overlooking non-traditional experience or undervaluing diverse backgrounds.
Session 3: Introducing LERs and Evaluating Impact
In the final session, we introduced the concept of Learning and Employment Records (LERs) to the participants. The goal was to understand how LERs could either help or hinder their job prospects and career development, especially in the context of skill validation. Participants were encouraged to share their thoughts on how LERs might work in practice, and whether they felt that these digital records would accurately reflect their work and experience.
Key Concerns Raised:
Overemphasis on formal credentials: Many participants worried that LERs might focus too much on formal education and certifications, missing the informal skills they had gained on the job that are often crucial to their roles.
Discrimination: Some participants expressed concern about how LERs could inadvertently reinforce biases if they included sensitive information like gaps in employment or age.
Potential benefits: Others saw the potential of LERs to validate overlooked skills and experiences, providing a more holistic view of their capabilities.
Data Finding 3: LERs have the potential to reinforce bias unless designed inclusively to capture all forms of experience and skill, both formal and informal.
💭 Takeaways
The Power of Listening to Users: Conducting this series of design thinking workshops and speaking with 45+ frontline workers revealed the real, often overlooked experiences these individuals face in their roles. This reinforces the value of direct engagement with the people you are designing for, ensuring their voices shape the outcome.
Inclusive Design to Avoid Harm: While Learning and Employment Records (LERs) have the potential to positively impact workers by capturing informal, on-the-job skills, they can also inadvertently harm those they are intended to help. This occurs when frontline workers are excluded from the conversation, resulting in a solution that overlooks their realities and reinforces bias or pigeonholing.
User-Centric Design is Key: This project reaffirmed my belief in speaking directly to users. Understanding their pain points, what they need, and how technology can be more inclusive is critical. Without their input, decisions made for them may not reflect their true needs. Listening to their voices and engaging them throughout the process leads to more empathetic and impactful solutions.
The Disconnect Between Decision-Makers and Users: Often, the people who make decisions about the implementation of new technology, like LERs, are far removed from the frontline. This gap can result in unintended consequences and solutions that miss the mark. Including the voices of those most affected is essential for designing tools that empower, rather than hinder, their progress.
