CoCareer

Job boards offered plenty of listings, but people still needed help understanding which roles suited them and how to move toward those roles. Career changers faced another layer of uncertainty: whether their existing strengths could translate into a different path.

The goal was to connect relevant opportunities with personal guidance, assessment, and practical next steps.

Research combined an analysis of existing career platforms with conversations with job seekers to understand their needs, motivations, and pain points.

I compared Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs, and Wanderer Space, looking at their strengths and gaps rather than collecting features to copy. I then organized the findings into motivations, pain points, and three recurring needs.

I used How Might We questions and Crazy 8s to explore alternatives, then a priority matrix to focus the scope. The central flow connected discovering a suitable role with understanding gaps and taking action.

The onboarding flow gathered the context needed for personal recommendations. LinkedIn import reduced repeated entry of work history, while questions about interests, personality, and salary preferences added information a résumé alone could not supply.

Users could also describe what they wanted from their next career step. The flow then invited them to choose roles to explore, connecting setup to the wider experience.

A compatibility score gave users an entry point into a more detailed assessment. The accompanying breakdown showed how their experience related to a role and where they could improve.

The design connected those findings to role information, career pathways, learning resources, and preparation tools. The AI copilot provided a way to ask follow-up questions using the profile context already gathered.

Across four weeks and testing with more than 50 users, I refined the experience as recurring points of confusion emerged. The most useful feedback concerned what people understood and what they expected to do next.

The role workspace brought exploration, assessment, and preparation into one experience, so users could move from “Is this right for me?” to “What can I do next?”

The pivot to CoCareer called for a new product direction: helping career coaches guide multiple clients through their next career move. I shaped that direction and designed the client management dashboard around the coaching workflow.

The design challenge changed from helping one person decide what to do next to helping a coach understand where each client stood and who needed attention. The dashboard brought client management and progress into a shared view, supporting the ongoing relationship between a coach and their clients.

My scope spanned the product experience from individual career guidance to client management for coaches. CoCareer is backed by Antler and supported by Microsoft for Startups.

The homepage iterations taught me that improving visual clarity was only one part of the problem. Even after the interface looked cleaner, users still needed a clear explanation of what they could do and where to start.

I saw the same pattern in learning resources: making something relevant did not automatically make it actionable. The move toward practice assignments came from observing that gap between saving a resource and using it.

For me, the core design lesson was to connect insight with action. A score, a suggested role, or an AI answer becomes more useful when the experience helps someone decide what to do with it.