Skills Navigator
Product design
/
2019
UI and UX design, information architecture, component library, logo design, marketing collateral, book layout
A CV is a list of claims nobody checks. The platform had to replace that with something a person actually does – and then show an employer the difference, including the honest third answer, where nobody knows yet.
Skills Navigator is a skills-matching platform for the harbour regions of Flanders and the Netherlands – Antwerp, Ghent, Terneuzen, Rotterdam – built under an EU cross-border programme. I designed the platform, and everything the programme put its name on: the logo, the letterheads and business cards, the posters and roll-ups that travelled with it, and the research book.
Skills are proven by doing, not claimed on a CV.
Skills are proven by doing, not claimed on a CV. A talent completes activities – a short stepper: an intro, a résumé, a motivational nudge, a summary – and each one rates a set of skills. Every job posting lists what it needs, and opening one shows the breakdown skill by skill: matched, not matched, and not yet rated. The third state is the one I cared about. It separates a skill someone lacks from a skill nobody has measured yet, and it points at the activity that would settle it.
A job’s skills breakdown – each required skill shown as matched, not matched, or not yet rated, with a count of how many are already covered.
An activity – the intro and résumé step of the short stepper a talent completes, one of the routes that puts a rating on a skill.
An employer building a job doesn’t only tick skills off a list. Step four of the six is a ranking: drag each required skill from absolutely necessary down to not needed, so a posting says how badly it wants a thing rather than only whether it wants it. A coach sees the other end – one talent, every activity taken, every skill scored across all four categories, in a single view.
Ranking a job’s required skills – step four of six, dragging each one from absolutely necessary down to not needed.
A coach’s view of one talent – every skill scored across all four categories, in the single screen the coach works from.
The model underneath came from somewhere else: AP University College ran the research – eighteen 21st-century skills in four categories, tested against real vacancies across six port areas. The platform’s job was to make that model usable by three different people without any of them having to read the study.
I designed the logo before any of the interface existed – two overlapping pennants that double as direction arrows, standing in for the two “A”s in NAVIGATOR, blue for the water the work moves through, yellow for the energy it demands.
Skills Navigator logo – two overlapping pennants that double as direction arrows, standing in for the two “A”s in NAVIGATOR.
Then everything the programme needed in order to show up in the world. Letterheads and business cards. Posters. Roll-up banners reset for each host city, because the programme moved between them, and every stop had to read as the same initiative rather than a local one.
One of the roll-ups – the host city named in the yellow band, harbour photography below it, and the programme’s partner logos along the foot.
The programme also published its findings as a book, and that was a layout job of its own: fourteen employer case studies – BASF, ENGIE, Middlegate and Scalda among them – sorted into context, example and idea, with a coloured dot on each so a reader can tell what kind of story is coming before starting it. Laid out cover to close.
Goede Praktijken – the programme’s own publication, carrying fourteen harbour employers’ case studies, laid out cover to close.
A web platform for three roles, an identity, the print that carried it from city to city, and a book of fourteen case studies. Four kinds of work that on most projects go to four different people, and here came to the same one.