ECT Career Pathways

Need: Many current ECT students are facing challenges with career pathway planning. There are a lot of available resources about career pathways provided by the ECT program and through other channels as well. However, many are lost in the massive amount of resources, resulting in deep confusion around professional identity. Students may still not know what these career pathways are and how to meaningfully engage with them. We need to better understand what their specific concerns and challenges are to better design a solution that targets them.

Concept: The first step in designing a learning solution to the challenge of planning ECT career pathways was understanding how students feel about the challenge. We administered a survey to validate that the career pathways issue was indeed a problem, and learn about the problem from our learners themselves. While Google Forms produces a few visuals to make better sense of the results, Google Data Studio offers more functionality to help us as a research team and our client interact with the data. This dashboard visualizes results to the research question, "How confident do you feel in planning your career pathways from a scale of 1-10?", breaking it down by demographics, including years of professional experience, international vs. domestic student, part time vs. full time, and stage in the program. It also ties the data directly to a persona, helping to humanize the results.

Learning Theories

This dashboard employs an emotional design by integrating a persona to introduce the data to the viewer, triggering an emotional connection, as well as crafting a story around which to frame the data. It reflects the data storytelling framework by leveraging data, visuals, and narrative to explain, engage, and enlighten, and ultimately prompt change for the viewer (Data storytelling, 2021). Rather than resisting stories and the emotions inherent to a good story, it embraces and elevates emotion, a core principle in D'Ignazio & Klein's (2020) Data Feminism framework. Stories help activate multiple parts of the brain, such as:

• the Wernicke's area, which controls language comprehension;

• the amygdala, which mediates emotional responses;

• and mirror neurons, which facilitates empathy (Dykes, 2021).

The more parts of the brain activated, the more likely our hippocampus, which stores short term memory, is to transfer that information into our long term memory.

References:

Beame, K. (2021, February 18). Thinking like a data feminist. Medium. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://medium.com/ihme-tech/thinking-like-a-data-feminist-4dc5e2b58bfc

Data storytelling: How to tell a story with data. Business Insights Blog. (2021, November 23). Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/data-storytelling

D'Ignazio, C., &; Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. The MIT Press.

Dykes, B. (2021, December 10). Data storytelling: The essential data science skill everyone needs. Forbes. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/03/31/data-storytelling-the-essential-data-science-skill-everyone-needs/?sh=7f5980d652ad