Findings & Insights

Three research takeaways

Non-linear career paths are the new normal. While their Boomer parents stayed in their jobs for a long time, Millennials are thinking of not only switching jobs but entire career paths. “Starting out” can happen several times in the career of a today’s professionals, requiring constant level setting of goals and expectations around what’s realistic. In a world where pivoting is always an option, choosing “what’s next” can feel overwhelming. With Bloomberg Work Wise, we aimed to ease some of those anxieties and help people to make smarter, more inspired career decisions. Some high-level insights that informed Work Wise:

1. It takes courage to make that next move. While people are broadly exploring new or different career directions all the time, it’s hard facts and relevant knowledge of today’s job market that make it easier to make bold career decisions.

People are leveraging online tools to assess the jobs market but they lack the macro view of the kinds of opportunities that are available in their field. We talked to numerous people leveraging jobs search boards and browsing professional profiles for inspiration for the next role, but who struggled to understand the broader trends and opportunities in their industry/field. As one early career professional put it: “I want to better understand the competition for jobs. What are the insights on how to stay competitive?”

Career motivation also comes from more granular starting points. Irina, 29, a digital marketing manager, says she draws career inspiration from the profiles of people she comes across on LinkedIn, “I like to find people who are doing interesting things and companies that I like.” For another interviewee, it was seeing the jobs themselves that helped unlock his ambition: “I don’t know what my dream role is,” said Neil, 32, a fund manager thinking of pivoting into corporate strategy. “It’s helpful for me to see the actual opportunities that are out there.”

Our takeaway: People need a balanced mix of trusted insights to make informed career decisions — but they want clarification, not to be told what to do. From knowledge of the job market to getting into the brass tacks of the types of jobs available in their field (and city, and skill level) — there’s an opportunity to make people feel more informed as they weigh their professional options.

What we did about it: We pursued a two-part user experience that incorporated both data-driven insights (a.k.a. a quiz) leveraging data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census (along with job happiness indicators from MyPlan.com and Glassdoor) and a bespoke editorial newsletter experience that includes research-backed perspective on navigating work and career.

Work Wise results: There was a clear interest in the Work Wise tool; traffic in the first month outpaced our goal by 5 times. It also resonated with the “early career” professionals who overwhelmingly visited our company and people profiles — more than half of Work Wise users fit the 18- to 35-year-old cohort we sought to reach.

2. People value trusted insights. In a professional world where “connections” can feel commoditized, authentic mentorship and perspectives are worth their weight in gold — especially when you’re starting out or making a big career decision.

Professional guidance can mean a lot of different things today. From niche industry meetups to coffees with hiring execs, our interviews revealed a wealth of high-touch approaches that people use to garner perspective on career paths, dream industries and future jobs. What these disparate approaches have in common is that they’re a meaningful way to unlock distilled insights from people with knowledge of a particular field or career path. For one interviewee interested in breaking into cryptocurrency, simply finding a community to connect with on Twitter has helped sharpen his perspective on trends and opportunities in the space — in his own words: “I’ve been to a lot of crypto conferences and met a bunch of people from different industries that I now talk to Twitter which helps feel informed and connected.”

For Hilary, 29, a digital advertising manager looking to pivot, the desire for authentic mentorship is the driving force behind why she’s ready to move on: “I’m pretty open to where I land but one thing I want is a great manager. I’ve never had a lady boss — in my next job I want to work for a female leader who will mentor me.”

Our takeaway: People want professional guidance that’s informed, distilled and relatable. While nothing can substitute those real-world interactions with smart, trusted sources, there’s an opportunity to make “insider” perspectives more accessible to anyone seeking such advice.

What we did about it: We partnered with Bloomberg editorial to identify key areas (The Balance, The Money, The Career, The Pivot) that are commonly on the minds of people making their way through their early-career journeys. Our four-part newsletter series showcases special reporting on each topic, plus the sage advice and curation of Bloomberg stories in those topic areas from editor Dave Rovella.

Work Wise results: Editorial content piqued the interest of Work Wise users: newsletter engagement was 4 times higher than our average and Work Wise feature stories outperformed the site average by 14 times.

3. Investing in new skills is work. People often seek advice and exposure to an industry to determine if it’s worth their effort and time to — and if they’ll be happy once they do.

Being able to contribute meaningful skills (both hard and soft) are the foundation of any job. For some, those skills are best learned by pursuing an MBA or advanced degree, for others, it might be as simple as taking a specific online course or working toward interpersonal goals like executive presence, collaboration, and time management. Understanding what’s really needed to get the job can dramatically influence how much time and money people are willing to invest.

Take it from the perspective of one interviewee looking to pivot into a role that required only some knowledge of data management: “No one has the patience to sit down and go through a 40 hour course on SQL. You just need enough to kind of talk about it in an interview.”

For others, it’s the less obvious skills they’re looking to tackle: Negotiation, working with cross-disciplinary teams, communication. John, 23, a data science master’s student, opened our eyes with the story of why he pursued a different program after a successful internship at a hedge fund: “I faced a big entry barrier in investment banking due to my cultural background. The rules are different in China, things are much more structured.”

For John, interacting with and learning through real-world experience gave him the intel he needed to move in a direction that he felt more aligned to his long-term workplace happiness.

Our takeaway: People want mental shortcuts when it comes to evaluating what it takes to reach their goals, especially when it comes to investing time and resources to learn new hard and soft skills.

What we did about it: We designed Work Wise to give people a leg-up in that process by giving them direction, thanks to research-backed insights and practical tips, designed to help them reach their career goals. The job happiness indicators from MyPlan.com and Glassdoor also offered a more holistic look at potential effects on well-being of certain career shifts.

Work Wise results: Work Wise proved to be a welcomed channel of trusted advice for a broader Bloomberg audience, as 65% of newsletter subscribers were net new users for Bloomberg Media.

Acting On Insights

From paper prototype to MVP

Through quantitative and qualitative research, we identified a cohort of our audience that turns to Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek for career-related content — on navigating professional growth, strategy and career change. Work Wise is Bloomberg’s first product aimed squarely at meeting that audience’s needs by elevating the best of this content from around the Bloomberg ecosystem and delivering it to users through a data-backed interactive experience.

Work Wise was developed in a series of design sprints framed by what we learned from our research. We brought our ideas into a prototype design quickly, put the prototypes in front of users and refined it based on feedback. Next, we worked closely with our editorial partners in a couple of cool ways:

• We mapped out, on paper, an end-to-end user experience of the social tool with users to understand the context, value and weak points in the early Work Wise experience;

• We prototyped a live quiz to help understand the mechanics and UI of our Work Wise data-driven user experience

• We aligned on editorial coverage on areas that spoke to the needs we heard from users, with expert perspective from the Bloomberg editors who work on these beats;

• We designed an MVP engaging experience optimized for social- and mobile-first audiences.

Impact

• Successful MVP refined and launched to 100% of mobile app users in 2019

• 88% of Work Wise post-experience survey respondents said they’d subscribe again

• Work Wise feature articles performed 15x higher than average

• Newsletter clickthrough rates outperformed our average by 4x

• The underlying tech and experience framework has scaled to be used for custom content initiatives and other editorial experiences