Workforce Site (Proposed)

IA and Wireframes for a cohesive workforce offering

Great offerings, not so easy to find

Problem: Columbus State offers a variety of workforce programs, both for individual workers or for companies to train their employees. But the offerings are a bit random and hard to find.

Solution: Comprehensive information architecture (IA), content inventory and wireframes.

Tools: Content inventory, Axure.

(This is a speculative project I did over the pandemic. The project is just now getting under way.)

The human milk program is actually really good. It's nationally recognized.

A content model

I had a problem at work, and the next day, I read about it in my grad school textbook. I was looking for a content model.

Our workforce offerings are great, but they can feel a bit random. Most of them were developed through grant programs or in partnership with specific companies, so they don't feel like a cohesive offering. It's hard for a company to predict what we could do for them.

Working with a colleague, I inventoried all of our workforce offerings and the types of things we might offer in the future.

I decided that the basic unit of taxonomy was a "program." Programs break down along several facets:

Training programs for individual workers (IT certificates, Formula / Human milk, etc.)
Training programs offered to workers at individual companies (Nationwide, Heartland Bank, etc).
Ways companies can partner with us (internships, job fairs, etc.)
Programs aimed at specific industries.
General business consulting (this can be practically anything, from Six Sigma to Spanish for Healthcare).

My content model shows this from the program view (bottom up) or from the industry-company-worker view (top down).

Against brochureware

As a large legacy institution, CState's instinct is to create web pages for our offerings - in the manner of a print brochure.

I advocate for content that is database-driven, served up dynamically, and immediately actionable to the user.

Prototype - Axure

With my content model in place, the next step was to mock up a prototype. The taxonomy allows you to browse programs for companies or for individual workers, but also includes information on key industries.

From the bottom up, this prototype assumes a database of programs that can be sorted and filtered.