SkillsIdentifier: A Tool to Promote Career Identity and Self-efficacy Among Underrepresented Job Seekers

Today\u27s employment applications enable job seekers to improve their skill sets and build social networks with potential employers and colleagues. However, many of these tools cater to higher-educated and relatively affluent job seekers. Research suggests that underrepresented job seekers face challenges associated with articulating their skill sets and understanding those skills\u27 transferability across jobs and might prefer employment tools to address these types of challenges over others. Because such articulation is vital in today\u27s job market, we designed, developed, and evaluated SkillsIdentifier, a tool to assist job seekers in identifying their current skill set. We evaluated the tool with 20 U.S. job seekers and found that it helped to enhance their career identity and self-efficacy. We contribute the empirical results of our evaluation and design implications for supporting these constructs among underrepresented job seekers

Understanding factors of successful engagement around energy consumption between and among households.

ABSTRACT An increasing number of researchers are using social engagement techniques such as neighborhood comparison and competition to encourage energy conservation, yet community reception and experience with such systems have not been well studied. We also find that researchers have not thoroughly investigated how different households use these systems and how their uses differ from one another. We explore these questions in a 4-10 month field deployment of a social-energy monitoring application across 15 households, in two distinct locations. We contribute results that describe conditions under which these techniques were effective and ineffective. Our results imply that understanding factors such as a building, or community's layout, context knowledge of community members, accountability and adherence to social norms, trust, and length of residence are key for future design of social-energy applications

Opportunities to address information poverty with social search

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147350/1/Wheeler et al. Opportunities-address-information-pov CHI LBW2017.pd

Designing Technology to Support Safety for Transgender Women & Non-Binary People of Color

This work provides a preliminary understanding of how transgender women and non-binary people of color experience violence and manage safety, and what opportunities exist for HCI to support the safety needs of this community. We conducted nine interviews to understand how participants practice safety and what role technology played, if any, in these experiences. Interviewees expressed physical and psychological safety concerns, and managed safety by informing friends of their location using digital technologies, making compromises, and avoiding law enforcement. We designed U-Signal, a wearable technology and accompanying smartphone application prototype to increase physical safety and decrease safety concerns, reduce violence, and help build community.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154051/1/StarksDesigningTechnology.pdfDescription of StarksDesigningTechnology.pdf : Main articl

Learn With Friends: The Effects of Student Face-to-Face Collaborations on Massive Open Online Course Activities

This work investigates whether enrolling in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) with friends or colleagues can improve a learner’s performance and social interaction during the course. Our results suggest that signing up for a MOOC with peers correlates positively with the rate of course completion, level of achievement, and discussion forum usage. Further analysis seems to suggest that a learner’s interaction with their friends compliments a MOOC by acting as a form of self-blended learning.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116274/1/Brooks et al. 2015.pd

Self-regulation and Autonomy in the Job Search: Key Factors to Support Job Search Among Swiss Job Seekers

Technology integration in the workplace context has led to substantial growth in high- versus low-skilled jobs, and thus, further disparities between workers and those who were already unemployed. Technology use is also being used more frequently in the job search process, which could further lead to disparities, especially for job seekers experiencing marginalization. Thus, we conducted a controlled longitudinal field deployment of two employment-based tools—RevueCV and InterviewApp—among 46 Switzerland-based unemployed job seekers. Using the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we sought to understand how the tools affected job search self-efficacy, subjective norms and job search attitudes—the three factors that influence a job seekers’ job search intention. Although participants appreciated the support the two tools provided, and the inherent study benefits, our interview and survey results showed no substantial changes in their TPB values, primarily because the tools provided overlapping services with the local job placement offices. However, results of our interviews found autonomy, or the lack thereof, to be a key factor contributing to job seeker dissatisfaction. We introduce the concept of self-regulation to the TPB as an explanatory construct and contribute design and theoretical implications to support autonomy among job seekers with less control of their job search

Elucidating Skills for Job Seekers: Insights and Critical Concerns from a Field Deployment in Switzerland

This article contributes results of a longitudinal field study of SkillsIdentifier, an employment tool originally designed and assessed in the United States (U.S.), to support ``underrepresented'' job seekers in identifying and articulating their employment skills. To understand whether the tool could support the needs of job seekers outside the U.S., we assessed it among 16 job seekers with limited education and language resources in Switzerland. While many of our results mirrored those of the U.S., we found that the tool was especially beneficial for non-French speaking immigrants who needed support describing their skills outside of their native language. We also found that listing skills like ``active listening'' without important context was insufficient and risked hiding key skills and meaning behind those skills to employers. Taking these factors into account, we illustrate the design implications of our findings and directions for practitioners who wish to design employment tools in support of job seekers, especially those who have traditionally been excluded from the labor market. We then provide insight into the potential for unintended consequences as a result of focusing solely on skills in a post-COVID labor market and contribute ways to mitigate them

Consequences, schmonsequences! Considering the future as part of publication and peer review in computing research

Research in computing is becoming increasingly concerned with understanding and mitigating unintended consequences of technology developments. However, those concerns are rarely reflected in how we submit, review, and publish our own work. Specifically, in talking about how our new apps, devices, and algorithms will change the world, we focus almost exclusively on positive consequences. There have been calls to require some speculation about negative impacts as part of the peer review process. This workshop will explore how to think about and report potential negative consequences in our papers in a way thatâ s practical, inclusive, and achievable. The aim is to draw on scholarship around creative-yet-grounded speculation about technology futures and to consider how these might be applied to publication and peer review. The workshop aims to inspire the CHI conference and the computing research community to meaningfully consider and act upon the potential negative implications of their work