Immigrant Career Coach

A job-readiness platform (Web+Mobile) helping skilled newcomers navigate the Canadian workforce with confidence

Canada admits over 400,000 immigrants annually, many of them highly skilled professionals. Yet a significant portion spend months; sometimes years; in underemployment or unemployment, not due to lack of qualifications, but due to a gap in understanding how the Canadian labour market works.

Immigrant Career Coach is a non-profit digital platform (Web+ Mobile) that bridges that gap. The organization approached the design team with a clear mandate: build a scalable, accessible product that delivers personalized career guidance to skilled newcomers; one that provides them the personalized support, and helps them take confident, informed steps toward meaningful employment in Canada.

The Problem

Despite arriving with internationally recognized qualifications, skilled immigrants consistently face barriers when entering the Canadian job market:

  • Unfamiliarity with Canadian resume formats, interview norms, and workplace culture
  • Difficulty understanding how their credentials and experience translate to Canadian role expectations
  • Limited professional networks and no clear entry point into their industry
  • Fragmented, impersonal resources that offer generic advice rather than tailored, role-specific support

The result is prolonged job searches, underemployment, erosion of professional confidence, and poor integration outcomes.

Existing tools were either too broad to be useful or too narrow to be scalable. The opportunity was to design one coherent, intelligent platform that addresses all aspects of job-readiness for skilled new comers.

Project Goals

The business and design goals were aligned around three outcomes:

  1. Reduce time-to-employment for skilled newcomers by giving them a structured, personalized path to job readiness
  2. Increase platform engagement and retention by making progress visible, giving proper plan of action, and making mentorship accessible
  3. Build a scalable architecture that could serve users across professions, industries, and immigration timelines

My Role

I led end-to-end product design, including research, user flows, IA, wireframes, UI design, prototyping, and usability testing for both the web platform and mobile app.
Understanding The User
  • User research
  • Personas
  • Problem statements
  • Competitive audit
  • Ideation

User Research: Summary

I began by reviewing Vaughan Public Library data on job-seeking newcomers to identify common settlement and employment challenges. Using these insights, I developed interview questions and conducted user interviews with recently arrived skilled immigrants.

Participants consistently reported difficulty securing employment despite strong experience in their home countries. Key challenges included understanding Canadian hiring expectations, adapting their resumes, preparing for interviews, evaluating credentials, and navigating an unfamiliar job market without guidance or networks.

The research highlighted a clear need for a centralized, culturally relevant platform offering structured job-readiness support, role alignment, practical tools, and accessible mentorship; insights that directly shaped the core features of Immigrant Career Coach.

Persona: Sofia

Sofia is a new immigrant and a skilled Software Engineer who needs support understanding Canadian hiring standards because she is uncertain how to present her experience in this new market.

Persona: Daniel

Daniel needs clarity on how his extensive international management experience aligns with Canadian industry standards, as well as guidance on required certifications and networking pathways to position himself competitively for mid-level roles.

Competitive Audit

I conducted a competitive audit of existing newcomer employment and career coaching platforms to understand their strengths, limitations, and overall user experience. The analysis revealed that while many tools offer general job search resources, most lack personalized guidance, role-specific Canadianization insights, AI-driven resume or interview support, and structured mentorship pathways.

These gaps highlighted key opportunities for Immigrant Career Coach to differentiate itself by providing a more tailored, culturally relevant, and comprehensive job-readiness solution for skilled immigrants.

Click to view full Competitive Audit and Audit Report

Ideation

I sketched quick paper wireframes to explore ways to solve the key pain points found in current coaching services; mainly lack of personalization, unclear guidance, and scattered resources. These sketches helped me rapidly test layout ideas, compare different flows, and identify the most intuitive path before moving into digital wireframes.

Stars were used to mark the elements of sketch that would be used in the initial digital wireframes.

Starting The Design
  • Digital wireframes
  • Low-fidelity prototype
  • Usability studies

Digital Wireframes

After Ideating and drafting some paper wireframes grounded in the insights gathered during user research, I translated the key needs and pain points into early digital wireframes. These wireframes helped test information hierarchy and ensured the design direction aligned with actual user behaviors and expectations.

Low-fidelity Prototype

To prepare for usability testing, I created a low-fidelity prototype that mapped the core user flows across all major features. This allowed me to validate navigation, task completion, and overall information structure before moving into high-fidelity design.
Lo-fi Prototype

Usability Study: Overview

I conducted an unmoderated usability study with 5 participants, each using the prototype independently for 20–30 minutes. The goal was to evaluate how easily new immigrants could complete key actions such as finding mentors, exploring job opportunities, and progressing in their career roadmap. User feedback helped refine navigation, clarity of labels, and overall task flow.
Tasks Assigned
These were the main tasks assigned to participants:

  • Find a mentor using the search or filter options.

  • Browse job listings and open a job detail page.

  • Explore the Learning Hub and locate a course relevant to their field.

  • Check their Roadmap progress from the home screen.

Findings
These were the main findings uncovered by the usability study:
  • Users asked for breakdown of what contributes to career progress (skills, resume, networking, interview readiness) so they could understand what to work on next.
  • Users struggled to understand mentors’ core strengths at a glance. They wanted a faster way to identify who could actually help them.
  • Users wanted the ability to save mentors for later.
Refining The Design
  • Mockups
  • High-fidelity prototype
  • Accessibility

Mockups

Based on the insights from the usability studies, I added a Career Progress Dashboard showing percentage scores for each factor contributing in progress bar and personalized next steps.
Additional design changes were made as users struggled to understand mentors’ core strengths at a glance. So, I added expertise tags (e.g., “Resume Review,” “HR Hiring,” “Tech Interviews,” “Canadian Workplace Culture”) to every mentor card for instant clarity.

Key Mockups

High-fidelity Prototype

The high-fidelity prototype refined the same user flows from the low-fidelity version, incorporating all improvements from usability testing. This stage focused on final visual design, interaction patterns, and preparing the experience for handoff and stakeholder review.
Hi-fi Prototype

Accessibility Considerations

  • Used an accessible color palette and typography that meet WCAG contrast standards.

  • Added clear, descriptive labels for interactive elements to support screen-reader navigation.

  • Included intuitive icons to make navigation easier and faster for all users.

  • Ensured consistent spacing and touch-friendly targets for users with motor or visual limitations.

Responsive Design
  • Information architecture
  • Responsive design

Sitemap

With the app experience finalized, I moved on to designing the responsive website. I used the Immigrant Career Coach sitemap as the foundation for structuring each webpage, ensuring the website delivered the same clarity, hierarchy, and consistency as the mobile experience.

Responsive Designs

I designed layouts for mobile, tablet, and desktop to ensure a seamless experience across screen sizes. Each version was optimized for the specific interaction patterns, content priorities, and usability needs of that device.

Going Forward
  • Takeaways
  • Next steps

Impact

The platform is in pre-launch phase. The outcomes below reflect usability study results, stakeholders reviews, organizational goals, pending post-launch metrics.

  • The Immigrant Career Coach platform provides newcomers with clearer, more confident career navigation through personalized roadmaps, Canadianized job-search guidance, and mentorship support.

  • Usability testing showed measurable improvement in task completion rates between lo-fi and hi-fi iterations, particularly on mentor discovery and progress tracking.

  • The final product brings structure to an overwhelming process and supports a smoother, more informed transition into the Canadian workforce.

What I Learned:

  • Designing for newcomers requires simplifying complex information and guiding users with clear, actionable steps.

  • Users value transparency; visualizing progress, mentor expertise, and next steps significantly improves engagement.

  • Early usability testing is essential; small insights (like the need for tags or favorites) dramatically improved overall experience.

Next Steps

  • Improve AI recommendations by training the model with a broader set of newcomer career data.

  • Add progress analytics for mentors and administrators to strengthen program impact.

  • Introduce a job-application tracker that helps users organize applications and next steps.

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