FinessEd
The Education Unit:
Saifeldin Ahmed
Scott Mitchell
Cesar Piedra
Naju Rahim
Cypress Rhodes
Tatyana Ricketts
Cindy Wong
Description and Pitch
“FinessEd connects the passion and interests of lower-income area high school students with opportunities and accessibility to jobs and training, to help everyone finesse their ideal future.”
These days, a college degree is the minimum requirement to get a job and start a career, but very often it is not enough. Many jobs require prior experience or certifications to have a chance at getting it. Not only that, many students, especially in lower income areas cannot afford to get a college education, but FinessEd is here to help. FinessEd seeks to connect high school students who have passion and interests in certain careers and career paths to certification training modules, companies and recruiters, and career opportunities like internships. For students, FinessEd provides accessibility to relevant knowledge, certifications, and experience in order to enter the workforce and gain an income, and eventually, should they choose to, begin their college career. For businesses, FinessEd provides a large pool of job candidates who will be provided the specific resources in order to succeed and do well on the job.
High Fidelity Prototype
Link to High Fidelity Prototype:
https://www.figma.com/file/AD3yfal096URadHa8PMmJJ/FinessEd-Redesign?node-id=0%3A1
Lessons Learned
Stakeholders
Customers
Scope
With FinessEd we want to make our scope as wide and accessible as possible
KWHL Table
What we know | What we want to know | How we can learn more | What we learned |
A job certification is a great alternative to receiving a degree for obtaining specific jobs | Exactly how effective job certifications are in obtaining relevant job positions | Conduct research on current job listings, checking to see how many positions require or prefer certification(s) | The healthcare, repair/maintenance, and computer/information sciences job fields often prefer or require that job candidates hold certifications. |
A significant amount of high school students who do not enroll in college say it's due to the expense | If this career development is appealing to low income high school students | Conduct interviews with current high school students to figure out if a certification program is something they would be interested in | Students are generally unaware of industry standard certifications. An increase in marketing in public schools is imperative for students to be aware of our existence |
Underprivileged students and companies both benefit from a new certification platform | Who are our competitors and how our platform can be designed for more accessibility | Conduct analysis of our direct competitors’ platforms to see how we can distinguish ourselves | Competitors sites such as Coursera and Udemy seem to cater to existing professionals and intermediate level professionals. We want our courses to cater to beginners and people who are undecided in their career choice |
Primary Research Summary
Primary Research Summary Contd.
Secondary Market Findings
● 47% of tech professionals have a certification[1]
● E-learning increases retention by 25 to 60 %[2]
● Certification preparation leads to confidence[3]
● Certified employees consistently perform better[3]
● Finances were cited the most for the reason students are not attending college[4]
● The number of students who expected their highest level of education to be an occupational certificate or associate’s degree has more than doubled since 2009[5]
● 42% of companies say that E-learning has led to an increase in revenue[2]
● IT organizations seem to recognize the value of certified employees and promote certified IT professionals more frequently than non certified IT employees[3]
1. Kolakowski, 2020
2. Gutierrez, 2020
3. Anderson, 2019
4. Klein, 2017
5. Jaschik, 2019
Context Diagram
Cross-Functional Flow Diagram
Process of Creating Account and Gaining Certification
High Level IT Arch
“It’s fully managed, multi-region, multi-master database with built-in security, backup and restore. It can be easily integrated into AWS Lambda to run as a message broker”
( Tong, 2019).
SWOT Analysis
Opportunities
More partnerships with companies and schools
Create website and mobile application
Go global
Strengths
Able to download set of trainings to “offline”
National and Exclusivity– since we want to target different Companies as partners
Weaknesses
Restricted to mobile apps
Niche audience
Small focus group
Inexperience
Threats
Competitors: Free and other applications in the education market
Companies are constantly changing
Succession is based on how to the students do
Ethics
Issue: Users can potentially go against our terms and agreements. Potentially, partnering companies can be biased without knowing.
How to address: Review companies’ information before they get published making the information of each student limiting to employers. Provide them with enough information of the students to contact them if they find them to be a good candidate.
Privacy
Issue: Students information will be posted on our app and their personal information can potentially be shared. Students may worry about their security on apps collecting data on them.
Partnering companies’ information will be used in training and helping students for their future. Their company information can potentially be shared.
How to address: We want to limit the amount of information that can be seen outside of our company. Each student user will exactly what information will be shared.
Partnering companies will only have allowed users to access their company’s information. We will leave notations indicating which areas they might want to omit from their content. Prevent a user from screen recording while accessing our app.
Security
Issue: Student users and partnering companies will share their passwords and may share other information with us.
How to address: Users private data and passwords, will be protected with our online security and monitoring of any malware. Added measures to have the users change passwords, two-point authentication, and etc to better secure their information.
Cost
Cost Spreadsheet
The projected costs is based on the average start ups for each category
Benefits (contd.)
Appendices
Sources for Secondary Market Research
Anderson, C. (2019). Impact of Certifications and Training on Career Milestones. Retrieved 16 October 2020, from https://comptiacdn.azureedge.net/webcontent/docs/default-source/MemberResources/comptia-idc-impact-of-certifications-and-training-white-paper.pdf?sfvrsn=e9d2e41a_0#:~:text=to%20the%20enterprise.-,We%20found%20that%20training%20and%20certification%20positively%20impact%20IT,to%20the%20enterprise%20by%20observing%3A&text=Time%20to%20first%20promotion%3A%20IT,%22never%20certified%22%20IT%20professionals.
Gutierrez, K. (2020). Facts and Stats That Reveal The Power Of eLearning [Infographic]. Retrieved 16 October 2020, from https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/bid/301248/15-facts-and-stats-that-reveal-the-power-of-elearning
Jaschik, S. (2019). What the data show about high school students' expectations of going to college | Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 16 October 2020, from https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/07/08/what-data-show-about-high-school-students-expectations-going-college
Klein, R. (2017). This Is Why 12 Percent Of High School Graduates Don’t Go To College. Retrieved 16 October 2020, from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-students-dont-go-to-college_n_5901124
Kolakowski, N. (2020). Are Tech Certifications Actually Worth It?. Retrieved 16 October 2020, from https://insights.dice.com/2019/03/04/tech-certifications-actually-worth/
Appendices
Ethics - Privacy - Security
Ethics - Issue: Although our app is focused on helping students in lower economic areas and partnering companies, users can potentially go against our terms and agreements. Potentially, partnering companies can be biased without knowing.
How to address: We have a system in place to review companies’ information before they get published so that we can make sure it fits within our mission statement and doesn’t cause any harm to any student. We found a way to prevent further biases with employers by making the information of each limiting to employers. We would like to provide them with enough information of the students to contact them if they find them to be a good candidate. Cost for this would be included in our planning costs.
Privacy - Issue: Students information will be posted on the app when Partnering companies look at them. They can share personal information, since this information is shared via the internet, this leads to the possibility of being misused. Students may worry about their security on apps collecting data on them.
Our partnering companies’ information will be used in training and helping students for their future. This may give access to company practices to various users. Giving anyone access to company information can potentially be harmful depending on the information that is released, due to possible misuse.
How to address: Like with any app, we will try our best to protect our users as best as possible. Since we are hosting student data, we want to limit the amount of information that can be seen outside of our company, so nothing is misused. We let the students know which information will be shared with companies. With this, students will be able to know exactly what is being shared.
For our partnering companies, we will implement system that will only allow said users to access their company’s information. Due to us reviewing content before it is uploaded, we will leave notations indicating which areas they might want to omit from their content. We would like a system that would prevent a user from screen recording when they are accessing our business partners side of the site, to better prohibit the release of company information that could be used to do harm.
Costs for this will be included cyber security and cloud structure costs.
Appendices
Ethics - Privacy - Security
Security - Issue: Student users and partnering companies will share their passwords and may share other information with us. This information can potentially be hacked into and their data may be stolen. Similarly, the above can happen to our partnering companies, whose information will be stored with us.
How to address: Along with their private data and passwords, the best we can do is improve our online security and keep an eye on any malware that might interfere with our site and customers. Added measures to have the users change passwords, two-point authentication, and etc to better secure their information. The same would go for our partnering companies as well. Securing their information and giving them an issue free experience will better our relationship with them and allow us to be better prepared to diligently work with them.
Costs will be included with our cloud and cyber security costs.
Resources
https://calculator.aws/#/estimate
https://www.smartsheet.com/expert-guide-cost-benefit-analysis
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-school-size-stats/national-data
https://high-schools.com/directory/nj/counties/middlesex-county/34023/
https://high-schools.com/directory/nj/counties/hudson-county/34017/
Low-fi Prototype/
Annotations
1
2
3
Low-fi Prototype/
Annotations
5
4
Low-fi Prototype/
Annotations
1
2
3
Low-fi Prototype/
Annotations
5
4
6
(Student view)
(Employer view)
Low-fi Prototype/
Annotations
2
1
4
3
(Student view)
(Employer view)
Team Role Assignments
Role | Member |
Team Leader | Tatyana |
Project Manager | Cypress |
Documentation Manager | Shared Role |
Business & Finance | Scott, Cesar & Naju |
Design & Development | Saif & Cindy |
Gantt Chart
slides
organization of our Stage 2, 3, and 4
work.
Next Steps
Stage 4 Work
Summary
Stage 3 has brought forth many improvements in several areas