CareerOneStop Wins Prestigious Minnesota Tekne Award

CareerOneStop, a U.S. Department of Labor-funded website run by the State of Minnesota, has won a Tekne Award from the Minnesota High Tech Association in the category of "IT Software and Hardware Communications and Infrastructure." The site's redesign was based around a content management system from SDL Tridion a best-in-class provider of enterprise Web Content Management (WCM) systems and solutions and part of the SDL Group, leader in Global Information Management (GIM) solutions. Other nominees for Tekne Awards- the highest honor in Minnesota-based technology, included innovations from a diverse range of businesses, software and websites.

Under the guidance of Program Director Mike Ellsworth, CareerOneStop integrated SDL Tridion technology in order to better serve users looking for jobs, workforce counselors, employers and economic developers. The Tekne Award panel highlighted the CareerOneStop site as the premier source for online career information, containing a greater breadth of data than any other public or private site. With over 24 million unique visitors per year and a healthy 12 percent annual growth, Ellsworth is proud to run a site that has become extraordinarily useful in the midst of high national unemployment rates.

"Beginning with a facelift in 2007 and continuing with a rearchitecture effort in 2008, we redid a large portion of the site," says Ellsworth. "We integrated SDL Tridion and Endeca ®,a search engine vendor, while undertaking seven different user experience projects that looked at usability and accessibility issues as well as creating a new information architecture and a taxonomy. Over the two years we completed a comprehensive restructuring that reflects a better understanding of our users and how and when they search for information. The magnitude of our restructuring and its subsequent success is why we won the award."

A recent example of how the restructuring helped CareerOneStop meet critical user needs was its launch of a portal designed to help newly unemployed workers find retraining opportunities and information on new jobs. While the initial microsite took site editors five weeks to prepare, with help from SDL Tridion WCM software, they were able to repurpose and customize the same content for U.S. autoworkers in only 5 days. Ellsworth expects the next repurposing to take as little as 5 hours.

"Quickly responding to our users has become a top priority and SDL Tridion remains our main component in order to accomplish this," says Ellsworth. "SDL Tridion has helped to truly modernize our infrastructure and target more specific niche audiences that we couldn't reach in a timely manner before."

"CareerOneStop has been one of our best customer examples to demonstrate what WCM systems and solutions from SDL Tridion can do over multiple years," says Jan Jaap Kolleman, CEO of SDL Tridion. "Starting with a simple graphic redesign and infrastructure changes, CareerOneStop's implementation of SDL Tridion has provided numerous benefits such as rapid content updates, personalization and templating. These functionalities allow the site to really serve and respond to its users. We offer our congratulations to CareerOneStop on winning a Tekne for its innovative and socially useful website."

SOURCE: CareerOneStop