How might we help schools hire great teachers?

Teach Away helps teachers find great teaching opportunities and level up in their careers through various certification courses and programs. We also help schools find great teachers to join their classrooms all across the world.

Since September 2019, I’ve had the privelege of working alongside some passionate teammates to help build out our design processes and improve upon our product features.

Process and involvement

As a product designer at Teach Away, I design experiences for both teachers and school users. Our company has distributed teams all over the world, so I’m often on calls with engineering teams in Albania, sales teams in Edinburgh, and product teams in Vancouver.

Since joining, I introduced our user research process - including scripted phone calls with teachers and school administrators. We encountered a few challenges at first, so we’re iterating on our screening process to improve results and ensure expectations are very clear.

Recommendation Engine

I’ve had opportunities to improve upon a handful of features in my short time at Teach Away, but the most notable project so far involves improving upon our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) - above.

I’ve been working closely with stakeholders and our engineering team to design an experience to support a recommendation engine that our team has built to provide schools with insights into more qualified candidates.

UI Libraries

Another one of my first projects was to build out clean and comprehensive UI Libraries in Sketch so that our designs can be consistent, accessible, and efficient for our engineering team to develop.

Impacts and results (so far)

Since joining the team, I also initiated a process called the Design Guild, which gathers anyone in the company responsible for design collateral (such as members of our marketing team) to meet on a monthly basis to discuss high-level improvements.

One of the biggest challenges we have been tackling as a Guild is auditing our platforms for accessibility and streamlining collateral between marketing and product teams. As a result of the Guild forming, we’ve already started an Accessibility Audit and built the initial versions of our UI Libraries for our budding Design System.

Next steps

It’s an exciting time to be working at Teach Away - there’s so much room for our product to grow to ensure every student gets to experience the power of a great teacher! Stay tuned for more updates.