Customer story · CareerVillage
Career advice that reaches students on the phone they actually have
Thirteen years and counting — the first arc: Django brought up to date, the front end moved to React, deployment rebuilt, and a site that finally worked on mobile, which for this audience was the whole problem.
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About CareerVillage
CareerVillage is a nonprofit platform where students ask questions about careers and get answers from experienced professionals, so that students from underserved communities can make informed choices about their future.
In 2011, co-founder Jared Chung left a consulting job at McKinsey and Company to start it with his wife, Jennifer Pan. It began in their living room, and the mission has not changed since: democratise access to career advice and guidance.
The problem
A few years after launch, CareerVillage found they were not reaching the level of student engagement that would let them make the impact they had in mind. They needed a recognisable brand — something that set them apart from other sources of information and earned credibility with the students they were trying to reach.
The site also did not translate well to a mobile view, and that was not a cosmetic problem. Young adults, people of colour and low-income Americans are much more likely to rely on smartphones for online access, and a large part of CareerVillage’s audience falls in those groups. A desktop-shaped site was closed to the people it was built for.
Underneath, the problems ran deeper than anything a user could see. To keep growing they needed up-to-date technology, a healthy code base, and a deployment process that was not an event.
What we built
Jared first reached out in 2013, because of our Python and Django work. Over the first five years we upgraded Django from a deprecated version to the latest available at the time, organised the code base, and put in a proper deployment system on Docker containers with Jenkins as the continuous integration server.
We migrated part of the front end to React — which is what made the aesthetic overhaul behind their new brand possible — and made pages load faster. That landed immediately in the user experience: it helped students feel confident the information they were reading could be trusted.
And we adapted the site for mobile — a true milestone in CareerVillage’s usability, because it is the difference between advice a student can reach on the bus and advice they cannot reach at all.
How it ran
From 2013 to today — thirteen years and counting, side by side with the CareerVillage team. The work described here is the first arc; the partnership never stopped.
The outcome
By 2019, CareerVillage and a volunteer corps of 35,000 working professionals were serving over 3.5 million young people.
Today the platform has served 6.6 million learners across 190 countries, with advice from more than 190,000 professionals — and we are still there.
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What this draws on
Related services
- Modernization & Technical Debt
A deprecated Django, a tangled code base and a manual deploy were what stood between them and growth.
- Product Development
The brand, the React front end and the mobile experience shipped as one arc.
- Cloud & DevOps
Docker and a CI server turned releasing into something they could do without ceremony.
Something like this in your software?
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