Apprenticeship.gov

Project Overview

Apprenticeship.gov is the Department of Labor’s one-stop place for all things apprenticeship. Whether it’s prospective apprentices looking for new opportunities, employers searching for how to register their apprenticeship program, the media looking for information about policies or downloadable resources, or educators pointing out to students the benefits of apprenticeship.

Project Highlights

Resource Hub

Finding and filtering through resources, such as videos and success stories, had been identified as a concern by users of the site. Resources were hard to find and there was confusion when multiple versions of the same file were scattered throughout the site. We recommended a central place for these resource types and to provide an easier way to manage these resources. We created new customizable entities for each resource type. These resource types could now have tags, categories, searchable text for specific keywords, and other metadata laid out in an accessible, user-friendly form. Instead of the 100% manual process used previously. Additionally, we added automation for the more visual aspects of the design like automatically retrieving the first page of an uploaded PDF for the resource thumbnail.

Events Hub

An Events Hub had been on the wishlist for the client for a long while. At the time, the agency was putting a greater emphasis on outreach through these events. Our goal was to have a simple, easy to navigate front-end while connecting our back-end to Salesforce. It was determined early in the project that events management would be handled in Salesforce. At the time, we didn’t have a good way to pull information from Salesforce; so we had to create one. I built and configured a connector using Salesforce APIs and then mapped custom Salesforce entities to our content types. Automating the process further, I set up a cron to sync Salesforce with our back-end every few hours.

Policy Document Migration

A smaller, but important, initiative was to have an easy way to view policy documents released throughout the history of the office. These documents go back to the 1950s with some of the earliest ones being scanned versions of the original documents. Ideally, we could automate some of the process instead of manually reading through these documents and manually entering the data into the newly created content types. Luckily, some data has already been digitized on dol.gov; but the client wanted more information not available on dol.gov and wanted this information to be “in-house”. I created a migration script to pull the existing data from dol.gov and then another migration script to look through all the documents going back to the 1950s to pull missing data like dates, IDs, and summaries. Out of almost 400 documents, my script was able successfully pull data from 82% of the documents. With the data in hand, we built out a simple table for users to search, filter, and view bulletins and circulars from the 1950s to today.

Responsibilities

During the development of apprenticeship.gov, I was involved in many of the architecture discussions deciding how to build out a new feature, section, or initiative.

Once a direction was chosen, I would develop the back-end, front-end, and facilitate the launch of the feature, section, or initiative following the requirement(s) given by the team.