A Day in the Life: Exploring the Use of Scheduled Mobile Chat Messages for Career Guidance

Common sources of career information like websites often provide a static overall picture of a job, yet lack personal insights into the daily working life. To address this problem, we present a novel mobile career guidance method: It enables users to remotely gain an impression of different work routines by receiving several short, scheduled chat messages from a persona throughout the day. These messages were previously collected from real professionals reporting on their tasks over a week. We implemented a smartphone application to compare our message-based approach to a traditional blog entry in a two-week within-subject field study (N = 17). Users highlighted that the scheduled messages (1) enhanced their understanding of work routines by integrating career information into their own daily context and (2) offered authentic insights into the jobs. We discuss design implications for mobile career guidance systems and future opportunities for presenting chunks of information in a temporal context.