Ryan Han, Ethan Xu, and Megan Chan
Canada
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Completed in
2023
EQ Hacks is excited to announce our 1st-place winner feature article on CareerShield by an incredible trio: Ryan Han, Ethan Xu, and Megan Chan.
In the status quo, members of the youth face subpar part-time jobs, a lack of career certainty, and child exploitation. Thankfully, the CareerShield team aims to lessen the stress of youth in the workplace—a problem that continues to grow exponentially, especially among new workers who often find themselves under scrutiny and are unknowingly exploited.
It encourages safety, youth protection—it's perfect!
CareerShield is a multi-faceted platform designed to promote job accessibility and safety for the youth. Upon signing up, the website's job application feature suggests relevant job opportunities based on users' interests. But what sets it apart is its commitment to providing crucial information about potential employers, such as workplace culture, leadership, long-term stability, and discrimination and harassment data. These features encourage companies and businesses to promote higher and stronger workplace standards.
Resources Section: CareerShield offers a resource section where users can access videos, documents, and blog posts about specific careers and general workplace topics, including exploitation and legal rights.Not only that, but users can save vital posts for future reference.
Workshops: The workshop page enables users to discover interactive workshops in their locality, covering a wide range of career-related subjects. These workshops offer guidance on crafting a tailored career path while ensuring a seamless and secure transition. This becomes particularly invaluable for first-year university students entering new academic environments, as they gain exposure to work settings, easing the challenges of entering the job market.
Job Application: The job application feature curates relevant job listings aligned with their interests, spanning diverse fields like customer service and internships. Facilitating informed decisions, the platform provides metrics on workplace culture, leadership, long-term stability, and discrimination and harassment when users apply to companies. This not only sets expectations but also incentivizes companies to maintain higher workplace standards to attract more applicants.
Friendly Design (EQ Hacks loved this part!): The CareerShield design process involved strategic steps to ensure an effective and user-friendly interface. Initially, a low-fidelity wireframe was crafted to detail essential features and visualize the website's look and functionality. For the target youth demographic, a minimalist layout was prioritized, considering the website's complexity. Through Figma, a reactive prototype was developed based on the low-fidelity wireframe. The high-fidelity wireframe phase focused on selecting inclusive color palettes, with an orange scheme chosen to accommodate red-green color blindness. Rounded components, such as buttons and fonts, were incorporated to enhance visual appeal and accessibility.
Legal Chatbot: CareerShield also features a legal chatbot powered by OpenAI (GPT-3.5 turbo), offering quick, accessible, and comprehensive answers to workplace and career-related queries. With CSS, HTML, and Javascript, the team was able to create a complex AI model that educates users about their rights, ensuring they are aware when exploitation or unjust treatment occurs.
Not everything goes smoothly. We know!
The CareerShield team participated in their first hackathon, encountering unfamiliar features, the need to ensure functionality and the challenge of coding on a deadline. As a result, the three team members had to think creatively and organize their multifaceted ideas, especially when integrating interactive workshops into the project.
“As students ourselves, we thought of what we would want to see more of, and workshops were something that we felt were lacking. Then, we went through the struggles of how we would make this all into one project, but wireframing our ideas helped put everything into place, where we could visually organize our thoughts.”
CareerShield's multifaceted approach is a source of pride. It amalgamates a resource hub, job portal, and an AI chatbot. Additionally, the rating metric feature for job applications considers factors like job benefits and mentoring programs.
Equally important, the team's achievements include a functional carousel and an AI chatbot, which required extensive research and time to implement and integrate.
Participating in their first hackathon taught the trio how to transform their solution into a practical project. It cultivated their problem solving skills—fostering creativity and innovation. Working together as a team also emphasized the importance of collaboration and leveraging diverse skill sets to get the job done.
We're curious... What are CareerShield’s future plans?
Ryan Han, Ethan Xu, and Megan Chan plan to expand into a user-friendly app for broader accessibility. To accomplish this, they look forward to implementing proactive strategies, ensuring users and youth are shielded from workplace exploitation. This could involve companies providing detailed information about work environments, hours, and safety indicators. Anonymous ratings from current or former employees and clear codes of conduct are also planned features. Data analytics and monitoring will help identify potential workplace exploitation trends.
Additionally, the team encourages clear codes of conduct outlining expected behavior and rights. Analyzing data and monitoring trends through data analytics would enable them to identify potential workplace exploitation proactively.
CareerShield's current focus is on maximizing social impact and benefits for youth, with commercial potential explored further down the line. Their mission is to support youth, guide them toward safer workplaces, and set them on the path to a brighter future—all of which align very closely to EQ Hack’s mission.
Overall, EQ Hacks found CareerShield to be an incredibly useful tool for protecting the youth. AI legal advice is a driving and unique force for guiding inexperienced workers, and we noted it to be one of the most well-done ideas to be released throughout our Equitable Elevation competitions. With its already impressive presentation and potential, we hope that CareerShield will be further developed for actual use in our world!
Check out the CareerShield team's work here:
Test it out here! https://careershield.netlify.app/
If you liked this article and enjoyed Ryan Han, Ethan Xu, and Megan Chan's project, feel free to leave a comment of support on their DevPost page.
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