Studio Fall 2020
How might we leverage the LMIC to create a sustainable impact on Dallas County?
In the summer of 2020, after several decades of serving the community as seven individual colleges, Dallas College reinvented itself as one college with seven campuses. The Labor Market Intelligence Center (LMIC) was expected to play a significant role in bringing the campuses together by providing the Dallas College Network with data and decision support to ensure that the curriculum would produce workers with the relevant skills for Dallas County businesses.
TEAM:
Meredith Davis | Kyle Dvorak | Mishaela Korenak|Kyle Spencer
The team learned that although the LMIC was doing a great job providing resources and information pertaining to workforce demands to Dallas College and nonprofits, it did not have a way of tracking their successes or impact. The recommendation was to develop an approach and multi-part feedback system to measure success. This was done by creating a comprehensive process and system in which the LMIC could evaluate their organizational success, track, and communicate their accomplishments.
This team created a system that allowed the LMIC to evaluate their organizational successes through the analytics platform Power BI, a customer survey through Qualtrics to generate meaningful feedback, an auto-response email to redirect customers to their online request form, and dashboards to communicate their value through storytelling. This new approach would also allow them to show and share their successes to prove their value to Dallas College, future customers, and themselves.
All this makes for a better work environment and allows the LMIC to function at a higher level. The long-term implications included a greater level of data insights being provided to customers and the community, which would benefit the social, technological, economic, environmental, political aspects of Dallas College, and the broader Dallas community
TEAM:
Samantha Navarro | Regina Nippert | Dominique Wells
The team uncovered a need to utilize LMIC collected data to create value alignment between students and future employers. This would empower students to better navigate the career lattice towards successful employment, create a more equitable job search process that would help entry-level employees find employers who value them and share their values, generate greater retention for Dallas College students at school and at work post-graduation, and help employers to be more competitive and values-driven.
Four design principles emerged for how the LMIC might improve conditions in Dallas County, whether they were focused on improving the LMIC’s impact by addressing either its functionality or its reach.
- Students always first.
- Encourage Exploration.
- Improve Life.
- Create Stickiness.
A values survey was created and was recommended to be added as part of the Dallas College enrollment process. Guidance included: students to complete the survey on an existing student platform, more visible links and additional links to the Department of Labor website, link locations, and the type of data to be collected including employer values. The team delivered a concept that showed that values matter.
