Workforce Website Evaluation Report & Rubric
Why are 75% of workforce websites missing worker's top 3 requested solutions? We reviewed 50 sites, created a rubric for making good workforce sites, and reported on the findings.
An Analysis of Workforce Websites and Their Ability to Deliver Value to Workers (February 2022)
What features do workers want most from worker-facing websites? What websites throughout the United States are delivering on those highly desirable user experiences? How might you deliver excellent value to a worker user on your own workforce site?
Through interviews, focus group design sessions, the evaluation of 45 websites, and a survey of 270 career seekers throughout Texas, we find some significant gaps and many opportunities to improve the numerous publicly-supported workforce information websites.
From this research, we created the “Workforce Website Evaluation Rubric,” so that organizations may have a tool for self-evaluating the effectiveness of their sites and strategizing their improvements in a user-centered way.
The first gap is a lack of consistent, modern user experience, likely due to the unique and complex requirements and use cases that workforce websites must satisfy. The second gap is the inability to take the actions most desired by career seekers.
With such a welter of different sites in use across the state, we encourage state and nationwide workforce organizations to consider providing a more effective and dynamic template as a model for agencies, institutions, and workforce regions. A model template is an opportunity to lower site development and maintenance costs, increase the quality of customer service and user empathy, and improve access to existing workforce data and resources.
This report does not include an evaluation of the effectiveness of regions to deliver quality in-person services.