Career Compass Challenge

Overview

<p>COMPETITION AIMS<br>This Career Compass Challenge is part of an effort to modernize the American workforce, but in order to do that we are focusing on the National Science Foundation as a model. This Challenge will address the changing nature of work, and the pace of change to the types of work, needed to carry out essential missions for the American people and create the Workforce for the 21st Century, starting with NSF. At the conclusion of this Challenge, NSF hopes to have created a "market" for technology solutions that will help employees plot a path for changing careers or identify how to move forward in their current career path, while also facilitating continuous reskilling.</p> <p>Moreover, the Career Compass Challenge will help inform further collaborative, cross-sector innovation that Federal agencies are pursuing more broadly, such as through the Government Effectiveness Advanced Research—or GEAR—Center. The GEAR Center will facilitate applied research to tackle management challenges at the Executive Branch enterprise level, confronting shared issues like workforce reskilling that cut across Federal agencies and other stakeholders. To the extent that this Career Compass Challenge is intended to explore creating a culture of a continuously ready workforce, on a small scale for NSF – by leveraging thought leaders across the American public, academia and industry – this challenge may be a model for learning how to successfully tackle other broad opportunities through a crowdsourced, test and learn model. <br>COMPETITION OVERVIEW<br>The different types of roles and opportunities the Government offers the Federal workforce are more diverse than they have ever been, and the way federal staff work is changing. Federal employees no longer stay on a linear career path in the same field for most of their careers. Instead, many employees are branching out by making lateral moves into different fields. In addition, the pace of changes to the types of work that employees do, largely because of the ever-changing pace of technology, has increased dramatically over the past few years. It is difficult for agencies to identify and provide training for the workforce at the same rate of those changes. And it's likely that the Federal Government is not alone. The winning solution will:</p> <p>Describe the proposed solution, explain how it works, and clearly identify how it will solve the problems articulated in the challenge description<br>Address individuals as the end user for the solution, starting with NSF employees<br>Explain the competitive advantage of the approach<br>Include a comprehensive workflow for the proposed solution<br>Provide an example use case ("Part 1") or working prototype ("Part 2")<br>Include a visual representation of the solution, such as a drawing, architecture diagram, or framework</p>