|
Database Professionals and Oracle Consulting Solutions
|
|
|
Mid-Willamette Workforce Network
work-life-success.com
The Mid-Willamette Workforce Network (MWWN) is a group of seven One-Stop Job and Career Centers covering three counties in the state of Oregon, providing employment and training services to people looking for jobs. The federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) was being passed, and a whole new way of providing services was about to be enforced to acquire the funding needed to provide workforce services. The focus shifted from that of providing actual services only to people eligible for enrollment to serving absolutely everyone who walked in the door in any way possible. The MWWN needed a comprehensive system in their Resource Rooms that could help them serve the growing number of job seekers coming into their Centers, with seamless integration to the staff Case Management system for providing further services to eligible customers.
The MWWN design-team wanted a system that would deliver to their customers every ounce of Job Search, Self-Assessment/ Career Coaching and Resume/Application Building material they have in their agencies. Few people get hired on the first interview, so the site would also need a secure Personal Account Portfolio for storing/refining resumes and action plans. They did not want the site to look like a typical government site, but to be obviously built for the customer. The amount of resources on this site would be enormous, but the people using this site could be anywhere from web-savvy to just using a computer for the first time. Therefore, the team wanted the site designed with a massive amount of material offered, yet not have any scrollbars and be extremely simple to use and maneuver through. They required volumes of verbage everywhere, but didn't want pages that were overwhelmed with text. They wanted customers to get access to more than forty-five major services within five "clicks" or less. Last but not least, they somehow needed to collect and store information about the customers they were providing services to with the site, to help validate funding. Of course, serving job seekers at any hour on the world-wide-web, the system should never go down.
InControl Consulting took a design team of coordinators and key line staff from all seven Career Centers through a Business Area Analysis process, creating dataflows of how each business process was theoretically going to be performed, to WIA compliance. From these flows a Virtual Career Center database was built. Through a collaborative design effort, InControl Consulting and Mirror Design Media, one of InControl's Web design partners, integrated new Web-technologies to construct a front-end for the site that both supported the robust Oracle back-end and responded to end-user requirements in a form matching that of MWWN's latest print marketing materials. The system was deployed on an unbreakable Oracle Database/Apache Server, SSL and physical firewall.
Built to augment and strengthen a Career Center's Resource Room and as an internet-accessible "Virtual Career Center & One-Stop" solution, the self-service system was deployed on time and on budget. The system consists of three parts that are accessible to everyone, with enhanced services for individuals who would choose to set up their own personal account. Services include Comprehensive Job Search tools, Resume Builders, State Applications, Workshops, Career Coaching, Aptitude Studies, Interview Techniques, and more. The site, though large and complex, is remarkably easy to use, with value-added services four clicks into the system (even counting the "Check-in" function), and no scrollbars exist on the system's main pages. Data from personal accounts in the Virtual Career Center site can be moved with a click to the Case-Management database, saving staff time by avoiding the need to re-enter information.
The solution was deployed with great success and still anchors service-delivery flow in the MWWN's Career Center Resource Rooms, while receiving more than 40,000 hits each month from off-site users connecting through the internet.
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
