Finding your next career move

Skills Development Scotland (SDS) is Scotland's national skills body. They are responsible for the provision of career-related guidance, employability skills and modern apprenticeships across Scotland.

Their flagship product, My World of Work is the public-facing platform for primary and secondary schools. It was developed on a legacy Drupal stack which was creaking under the weight of customisation and additional micro-services which had been added over the years. This was reflected in the poor user experience which led many in-house advisors using third party systems to complete career guidance in schools.

The challenge

The organisation had recently updated their proposition to include careers provision for the whole of Scotland. This was a marked shift for My World of Work which had been created with secondary school pupils in mind.

I undertook a large piece of design research which included interviews and workshops with subject matter experts, careers advisers, education specialists and teachers. Following its conclusion, I developed a provisional information architecture alongside the in-house SEO team which built upon the successes of the platform as well as highlighting key areas of bloat which could be removed without significant impact on organic search traffic.

The final stage of the project was to develop a lean design system which would be implemented in phases as the Drupal monolith was split in preparation for the migration to Drupal 8.

The outcome

The body of work completed on this project was unparalleled either before or after in my design career. It encompassed every aspect of modern UX design: strategic planning with c-level stakeholders; research with end-users and career professionals; creation of prototypes and designs which could be rapidly tested and iterated upon; design sprints with stakeholders and team members; training of developers and product managers to understand more about the user-led design process.