Career Navigation Portal

A centralized digital platform to help enable a path for all associates to effectively manage, navigate, and own their career at Walmart.

 

Business Problem

The impacts of broad labor trends like the Great Resignation, an aging workforce, and the Great Reassessment caused Walmart to reimage how to attract, retain, and develop the workforce. One thing became clear agnostic of industry, Career Management was at the forefront.​

Discovery

Many various one-off resources had been deployed providing some form of career management solution without the enterprise perspective. To better understand the impacts of this, the team conducted about 100 hours of focus group/listening session from associates within a broad array of tenure. We discovered a few key themes:

  • Associates had no means of formal exploration.

  • Associates did not have a centralized location to go for career support.

  • Associates had a difficult time navigating a large complex system of Walmart .

  • Associates didn’t always have the accessiblity to resources to sharpen their skills as a candidate.

 
 

Solution

Enabling a path for all associates to effectively manage, navigate, and own their career at Walmart through a digital experience, Career Navigation Portal (CN), with 3 focus areas: Inspiration, Exploration, and Preparation.

Approach

My role: Interim Product Owner, Project & Program Manager, and Graphic Designer

Platform Hosted on: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Timeline: Portal Launched 7/20/22 - present

Putting the associate at the center of their development required alignment with the business, leadership buy-in, and integration of workstreams. To streamline the workflow, we created a team inclusive of a Product Owner, Digital Learning partner, Experience Delivery & Measure partner, Curation & Design partner, and scrum master.

In consideration of our 3 focus areas, we wanted to re-engage associates with the company through a series of inspirational connection points, dispel the vast landscape of Walmart through formal and autonomous exploration across businesses and functions, and provide associates with career support through a series of resources and candidate preparedness tools.

We developed working relationships with:

  • Human Resource (HR) business partners across the enterprise to help us identify Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). In collboration with the SMEs, we built content about the business from the business.

  • Internal content and creative teams to help us create learning content, videos, and various work.

  • Tech Enablement team to deliver measurement strategy, implementation, and tech support.

  • Data scientist team to create the associate assessment tool and how to scale that outwards.

After 3 months since CN launched, we noticed that majority of the users were field facing (in the stores, clubs, and DCs/FCs). This shifted our priorities towards field associates and making sure the next few content pieces we launch will meet their needs.

 
 

Featured Tool - Career Navigation Inventory (CNI)

First in-house psychometric assessment created to give associates insight about their working styles, work-related interest, career motivators, and some personality indicators.

This tool will enable:

  • A more informed career conversation with their managers, leaders, or mentors.

  • Have an increased awareness for career planning.

  • Have identification of career preferences and themes.

Once an associate has taken the assessment, a report will be emailed to the associate within 1 business day. It’s a 12 page report showcasing career aspirations, leadership focus, work focus, work styles, learning styles, and personality traits.

To date (as of November 2022), we have over 4,000 CNI completions. Our goal is to reach 10,000 CNI completions by the end of the fiscal year.

 
 

Outcome

We have seen fruitful progress and excitment generated since the launch of the Career Navigation Portal. Over 100,000 for both unique vistors and page views (data as of November 2022). We have also started embedding the portal in moments that matter in an associate’s journey - new hire onboarding calls, talent acquisition processes, associate resource groups, and more.

We are also scaling our content to include the International and Sam’s Club Support Team.