Tawanna Dillahunt: “Designing for Employability: Envisioning Tools and Opportunities for Low-Resource Job Seekers”

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are designed to support job seekers’ ability to search for jobs, create resumes, highlight skills, and share employment opportunities. However, the benefits of employment tools and technologies are unequally distributed. ICTs lack advantages for individuals with limited knowledge, skills, or experience to leverage them. Without an understanding of how people from low-resource settings use ICTs for job seeking, the same employment inequalities that occur offline will be repeated in online contexts. Professor Dillahunt will discuss several studies that investigate how ICTs could help job seekers with limited digital skills, education, and income. She will identify principles for innovation and barriers for designers and technologists to address in the future, and conclude with current projects and tools that help job seekers identify career-related skills, obtain application feedback, and find employment opportunities that are aligned with their career goals.