Career coaching platform for stay-at-home parents
UX research ▪ Volunteer ▪ Tech Fleet Company
How might we help stay-at-home parents return to the workforce conveniently?
UX research apprentice
July 2023
Defining the scope
Our client was a stay-at-home parent who had faced a lot of struggles while returning back to the workforce. Her struggles were so intense that she wanted to build a solution to help other parents who are in the same position as her.
Her initial idea was to build a career coaching platform for stay-at-home parents returning to the workforce. Our job was to do the Phase 0 of this project meaning to validate if this is a major pain point and if the market needs a product like this.
After interviewing her, we came up with a list of assumptions and our job was to testing the validity of these assumptions.
Many parents, especially moms, decide to quit their job and stay at home when their children are born. When they decide to go back, they face a lot of problems like resume gap, lack of confidence, lack of professional network, etc. These problems make the returning journey to the workforce super hard.
The goal of this phase of the project is to get a better understanding of the journey that stay-at-home parents go through while returning to the workforce.
User interview
Our primary target group were stay-at-home parents based in the US who have plans to return or had already returned to the workforce.
We interviewed 7 college-educated stay-at-home moms based in the US. Five candidates were planning to return to the workforce and two of them had already returned.
Script: We went over all the questions that we wanted to ask during the interview and made sure there are no bias, no hidden assumptions, etc.
Interviews: We conducted each interview with one interviewer and one note-taker. I participated in 3 interviews as both interviewer and note-taker.
Survey
We designed a comprehensive survey to validate the findings of the qualitative research. It comprised of the following sections:
Research findings
We transferred all the 7 user interview transcripts to the UserBit for further assessment. Through the tagging system of the UserBit, we categorized the interviewees’ quotes and analyzed the charts that were provided.
We started analyzing the google form charts by finding the most important insights and the correlation between different categories.
We put all of our findings together to find frequent patterns. The main categories were:
Frequent patterns
7/7 interviewees required some form of flexibility in their new job to be able to balance their work and home life.
72% of survey respondents said that “Family Obligations” will be a challenge when they return to the workforce.
5/7 of Interviewees felt uncertain about abilities since they have been away from workforce for a long time.
80% of survey respondents reported little to no sense of confidence in their technical skills and qualifications.
7/7 Interviewees found enjoyment and purpose in doing work outside of their parenting work.
56% of survey respondents needed personal fulfillment outside of caregiving responsibilities by working.
6/7 Interviewees cited financial reasons like the high cost of childcare and medical benefits for returning to work.
62.2% of survey respondents decided to return to the workforce to have additional income.
7/7 interviewees mentioned networking as one of their main approaches of landing a job.
60% of survey respondents have found networking particularly helpful during their job-hunting process.
4/7 User interview participants mentioned joining communities as a solution.
30% of survey respondents have found communities particularly useful in terms of volunteer work and networking.
Jobs-to-be-done statements
Each apprentice from the UX team paired up with one apprentice from the product strategy team to put the final insights together. Product strategy team was working on the competitive analysis and finding market opportunities.
We wanted to match each research insight with the findings of them to see if there’s a market opportunity for a product backed by research results.
Each team member voted on the importance of each JTBD statement and marked them as top, middle, or low level of importance considering these factors:
I want to find a job with flexible working hours or remote options when returning to the workforce so that I can provide for my family financially and still be a present parent without sacrificing job or familial responsibilities.
What I can do is looking for a job on Moms project, LinkedIn or other job boards, but job listings have limited flexible options and/or very competitive job market, especially for people with job gaps like parents.
I want to feel confident when applying for jobs so that I feel that I can trust my skills to do the job without having an imposter syndrome.
What I can do is seeking mentorship/ review resumes, mock interviews, but there are limited quality resources tailored to the time and need of stay-at-home parents.
I want to have additional household income when returning to the workforce so that I can keep up with the cost of living without the pressure being on the single income of my partner.
What I can do is looking for a job on Moms project, LinkedIn or other job boards, but job listings that may be friendly to returning parents are scattered across the different job boards– they are hard to find.
I want to find leverage in the pools of candidates when applying for jobs so that I can stand out among other candidates and land a job easier without having to apply for many job applications without hearing from them.
What I can do is connecting with people on LinkedIn or joining professional communities, but my current network is limited and the success rate of cold outreach is low.
Vision for the next phase
Final validation of the product strategy team:
Next steps
Working in an agile environment under a tight timeline while mastering new tools has taught me a lot. How to work through lots of data, how to collaborate with a team, etc.
It was a great learning experience and I hope to update this case study by working on the next phases of this project.
