Career Planning Challenges

Three important questions confront job development agencies regarding career path planning for job seekers:

• Will your staff obtain the relevant information needed to assist your customers in assessing their skill levels and potential career options?
  
  There are limits to the information your staff can easily obtain. The right questions may not be asked, and very few customers can objectively assess all of their own skills and deficiencies.
  
  
• How many customers, having attended a vocational course, come back to you saying, "That wasn't the right training program for me?"
  
  Your agency's reputation and performance demand high customer satisfaction, so even one dissatisfied customer is one too many.
  
  
• How much time is spent and paperwork generated by job training professionals when helping their customers determine the right careers and training?
  
  Too much! Currently, though, you have no other options.
  

Vataha: The Next-Generation Solution

Vataha is a new Web-based career path planning system from LA Works. Vataha helps job development professionals and their customers find the right career goals and targets the training customers need to achieve these goals.

Vataha enables job development professionals and their customers to apply real-life skills to real-life job positions. Vataha tackles the complex chores of assessing skill gaps and searching for training so that the job developer can focus more on face-to-face human resources tasks with their customer.

Think about it. If Vataha allowed your staff more one-on-one time with customersÉ

How many more customers could launch and expand their careers the right way, the first time around?

How much would that mean to your agency's level of efficiency, and thus to the bottom line?


How Vataha Works

First Component: Skills Assessment

Vataha steers job seekers toward the right career path by providing several career ladders, depending on their goals. Each ladder represents an occupation that the individual could pursue, each rung building on skills and adding skills as the individual moves up the ladder.

To determine the right rung on each Career Ladder, Vataha assesses six potential skill levels of the customer. The six range from little competency (first level) to expert (sixth). Some skill levels are general, such as the individual's flexibility and interpersonal skills. Others are job-specific, such as computer literacy or payroll management. Job development professional set up a customer's career development plan with the help of Vataha's pre-loaded skills data. This helps the customer understand the range of skills needed for certain positions.

Vataha's powerful engine searches more than 678 different job positions and 94 different skills to establish a detailed matrix for each client. In a matter of seconds, Vataha combs through more than 63,000 units of customized data on skills as they relate to the customer's skill-set and their desired career goals.

When this has been accomplished, job development professionals can launch the second Vataha component:


Second Component: Targeted Training

This component symbolizes the job development professionals' direct hit--finding the right match between the job seekers' skills and the training tools needed to direct the job seeker toward the most appropriate careers.

If a job seeker is interested in exploring a specific career, Vataha will point out the skills the job seeker needs to obtain. This triggers another powerful Vataha tool, the Learning Resources Database. This database is an ever growing bank of resources - online tutorials, seminars, books, college or vocational courses on-the-job training, etc. - to let your client identify the right training to move forward in his or her career. Each offering is linked to specific skills on the ladders - making the search for the right training more accurate.


Impact of Vataha

Your agency already knows the past career experiences of your customers, both positive and negative. With Vataha, you can help them discover a bright new future, and assist them in reaching for the next rung on the ladder.

For more information, call LA Works at (626) 960-3964 and ask for a Vataha Product Representative.