"Wonderful work on our platform – Everything looks great, and you did such a great job!"
Our 9-Year Partnership with Myers-Briggs: Softjourn's Expertise in Building A Top Career Platform
Over the years, our team has showcased their expertise and flexibility, continuously improving the platform by integrating new features and technologies to meet the dynamic needs of our client and their users.
ABOUT THE CLIENT:
Challenge
Myers-Briggs needed a customizable, scalable platform to support educational and career tools, but faced challenges with managing data, non-technical users, and transitioning from outdated tech.
Solution
Softjourn developed the VitaNavis platform using Angular, Node.js, and PostgreSQL. We handled both frontend and backend tasks, introduced new features, and ensured scalability through modern technologies.
Benefits
Our partnership helped Myers-Briggs create a flexible platform, expanding their client base and enhancing user experience, while providing scalable, innovative solutions for career exploration and academic planning.
Introduction
Myers-Briggs is renowned for its globally popular career tests and has expanded into innovative educational platforms that merge academic planning with career readiness, empowering individuals to make well-informed decisions about their futures.
Our partnership with Myers-Briggs began in 2015 and has evolved significantly. Over the years, our team has showcased their expertise and flexibility, continuously improving the platform by integrating new features and technologies to meet the dynamic needs of our client and their users.
Our Projects Together:
We’ve worked on a variety of tools and features for Myers-Briggs throughout our 9-year collaboration. Below, we've shared some of the most interesting projects we've worked on together with Myers-Briggs.
The Myers-Briggs Team
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Assessment
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Assessment (MBTI) is one of the latest assessment tools our team has worked on. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a powerful tool that assists students in gaining a deeper understanding of their unique personality traits across four key dimensions.
By synthesizing these preferences, the assessment categorizes students into one of 16 distinct personality profiles. This self-knowledge empowers students to make informed decisions about their educational and professional paths, enhancing their sense of direction, focus, and choice-making abilities both during their academic journey and as they embark on their careers.
VitaNavis Features
One of Myers-Briggs’ most recent innovations, the VitaNavis platform, enables users to explore educational and career paths tailored to their passions and strengths, providing detailed information on careers including salary expectations, job prospects, and necessary skills.
When they proposed the new platform idea, Softjourn was tasked with bringing it to life. Our team of developers and Quality Assurance engineers developed VitaNavis from the ground up, managing both frontend and backend development and adapting to the project’s expanding scope.
From inception, we worked closely with Myers-Briggs to understand their needs and transform their initial concept into a functional platform. Although their team advised on database options, Softjourn assumed full responsibility for the development process.
Occupation Comparison Tool
On the VitaNavis platform, the Occupation Comparison tool is a feature our team has developed that allows users to compare the specific requirements of occupations against each other’s profiles or user’s profiles. This tool is driven by ONET data and all of its assessments as well as user profiles.
Education Planning
In 2022, our team of developers worked on the Education Plan feature, which helps users create personalized roadmaps for their academic and professional journeys. This feature provides users with a comprehensive plan to achieve their career goals.
The continued development and integration of features such as the Education Planning and Occupation Comparison tools demonstrate the client’s commitment to providing a comprehensive VitaNavis platform for career exploration and personal growth that serves many users at colleges, universities, and educational institutions worldwide.
Resume Builder
The Resume Builder, released in 2021, is another notable feature that enhances the user experience on VitaNavis. This tool provides users with a variety of resume templates to choose from, simplifying the process of creating professional and tailored CVs. By leveraging the information gathered from assessments and the Education Plan, users can easily generate compelling resumes highlighting their unique skills and experiences.
Each substantial report serves as an additional feature, continuously expanding the functionality and value provided to VitaNavis users. These reports offer in-depth insights into users' strengths, interests, and potential career paths, empowering them to make informed decisions about their future.
Experiences
The "Experiences" module is a significant development for Myers-Briggs, enhancing the platform's functionality by incorporating various modules such as assessments and competency reports.
This innovation includes reports like the SuperStrong, which helps students identify how their interests can lead to academic and professional success, and the CPI 260, which analyzes how a student's strengths and learning styles intersect to optimize educational outcomes.
Initially, setting up the Experiences was technically challenging due to the project's scale, but the flexible and extensible design facilitated the integration of new features and assessments over time.
Other VitaNavis Functionalities
Other VitaNavis functionalities we have worked on are:
- Career Pathways lets users follow the suggested education pathways based on the results of assessment tests and explore different career pathways manually. This feature also allows students to get additional information about occupations, required skills for certain jobs, education level, salary range, and more.
- Credential Management is a useful feature that allows users to document their education credentials (e.g., certificates, badges, degrees, etc.) and update, edit, or remove the education credentials.
- Education Pathways is a feature of VitaNavis that allows users to explore institutions tailored to their career choices and preferences and manually search for specific educational institutions. Users can also find valuable information about educational institutions so they can make educated decisions about future academic enrollment.
- Skills Builder allows users to determine what skills they may have acquired at their jobs. The system will look up the skills associated with the occupation that the user enters, weigh them based on their time at the occupation, and add them to a collection of skills.
- Analytics is a useful feature that allows users to monitor usage, analyze results through aggregated data, and create custom views based on the school’s needs. This feature is only available to users with access to the Admin panel)
Challenges
No project is without its challenges. While we’ve been building world-class educational platforms for Myers-Briggs, we’ve faced some obstacles along the way. Here is how we’ve overcome these challenges:
Database Issues
In 2017, our client suggested using a graph-oriented database as they used it for other projects. This would add significant time to the project, so after discussion, we decided to switch to SQL, allowing us to move forward more efficiently.
Angular Rewrite
In 2020, Google announced that it would no longer support an older version of Angular. As a result, we decided to rewrite new features in the latest version of Angular, while rewriting the old Angular code little by little, to ensure a smooth transition.
Scaling
When we began working with Myers-Briggs in 2015, our team had just five members. Since then, our client has grown and so has our dedicated team working on VitaNavis. By 2021, Softjourn's team had expanded to include 12 developers, with a total team size of 20 people.
This growth has not only helped us scale with the client and strengthened our ability to tackle complex issues but has also provided us with the flexibility to add on-demand team members as needed.
The Benefits
The success of the projects we’ve worked on with Myers-Briggs can be attributed to our great collaboration with the client. With our team's expertise and hard work, we’ve delivered high-quality solutions that meet the client's requirements and exceed their expectations.
A standout feature of our approach is proactive problem-solving. Rather than rigidly adhering to specifications, we critically analyze projects to foresee and mitigate potential issues, ensuring smooth development.
The breadth of Softjourn’s experience is also pivotal. Our team’s expertise in mobile, backend, and frontend development, along with code audit services and app modernization, enables us to effectively update applications while preserving their essential features. This comprehensive skill set facilitates informed decision-making, anticipates challenges, and crafts effective solutions.
Additionally, Softjourn places great emphasis on collaboration and this tends to greatly enhance project outcomes. Open communication and valuing each team member’s input fosters a productive environment that drives project success.
Conclusion
Our long-standing partnership with Myers-Briggs has been a remarkable journey of growth, innovation, and success. Since 2015, our dedicated team has worked hard to bring the client's vision to life, developing a robust and feature-rich platform from scratch.
As we look toward the future, we are excited to continue collaborating with Myers-Briggs and contribute to the platform's ongoing success. Our plan for future collaborations includes:
- Development of new features: We will work closely with the client to identify and develop new features that align with their vision and meet the evolving needs of their users. By leveraging our expertise and staying up-to-date with the latest technologies, we will ensure that VitaNavis app remains at the forefront of innovation in the career exploration and personal growth space.
- Improvement of current user flows: We will continuously analyze and optimize the platform's user flows to enhance the overall user experience. By gathering user feedback and conducting thorough testing, we will identify areas for improvement and implement solutions that streamline processes, increase engagement, and drive user satisfaction.
Our team at Softjourn is committed to maintaining the highest standards of quality, reliability, and innovation as we continue to support our client on its mission to empower individuals in their educational and professional journeys.
We are confident that our strong partnership, combined with our shared vision and dedication, will lead to even greater success in the years to come.
Partnership & Recognition
