If You Build It (a Website), They Will Come (and Learn About Work-Based Learning)

If You Build It (a Website), They Will Come (and Learn About Work-Based Learning)
Author:
Paige Lampert
Work

When you’ve got a lot of information about work-based learning to share with diverse audiences throughout the state of Nevada, you need a well-designed, hard-working, robust website. For The Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation for a New Nevada, the hard-working, creative marketing agency that built that website was the Estipona Group.

The Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation for a New Nevada (OWINN) has more than just a lot of fancy words in their name; they also have a lot of meaningful initiatives on their plate. Among the biggest is developing, supporting and promoting work-based learning (WBL) throughout the state. Because where do future employees get the real skinny about how to do their future jobs? While actually working on these future jobs, obvs. Or at least in some hands-on learning capacity that will help them acquire the skills necessary to thrive.

The Estipona Group was charged with taking the giant bucket of awesome WBL resources available to Nevadans and, for the first time, making them all readily accessible, understandable and inviting in one place.

So we built them a website.

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If you think of a website as a house for an organization’s relevant info, the lifeworksnv.org website is an entire village.

With three equally important and distinct target audiences (students, educators and businesses) all needing access to resources, information and opportunities related to workforce development and employment, there was a lot of content. And it all needed to be intuitive to find and presented in an engaging way.

Bold, animated graphics were created to draw extra attention to topics the client wanted to emphasize.

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For students exploring career paths, the website offers an interactive Career Guide that takes into account their passions, skills and desired industries. If you have to dream about what you’d like to be doing for 40 hours per week in your future, this is a pretty fun way to do it. 

Another major theme of the site was collaboration. We needed a way for students to connect with all the WBL opportunities available to them, so we created an interactive search tool where they can filter opportunities by location, type, industry and various other criteria.

We also provided a way for educators to connect with industry speakers and the classroom resources they need. The site encourages businesses to participate in WBL in a variety of ways, including a “Post Your Internship” form, which enables them to easily share their internship opportunities, including application details.

The “Get Involved with Work-Based Learning” page encompasses all WBL business participation information. Each engagement opportunity includes a short explanation and a simple form that gets the ball rolling with OWINN. In other words, the site is pretty much how all WBL stakeholders in Nevada can join hands and sing Kumbya – virtually.

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The lifeworksnv.org website does a lot of heavy lifting. It provides a colossal amount of data, resources and relevant information to distinct target audiences in very engaging ways, serving as a one-stop shop that supports Nevadans in meeting their career, education and hiring goals.

It’s like a work-based learning field of dreams. Added bonus: no ghosts coming from the corn fields. If you’d like the Estipona Group to build you a web-based field of dreams, give us a shout.

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