Work Smart, Study Strong: How FlexiHub's UX Empowers Students to Find Part-Time Jobs in Sweden

Overview

As a group of international students in Sweden, we decided to design an app that can help both international and local students in Sweden to find part-time jobs during their study. Since Sweden is considered as an expensive country for many students, we believe this app can facilitate the job seeking process for many students living in Sweden and can help them to have a better student life in this country.

How is the student life in Sweden without a job?

The short answer: difficult! That's right, but why is that?

According to the website of Study in Sweden (2023), the average cost of living in Sweden for students ranges from SEK 8,000 ($765) to SEK 13,500 ($1,292) per month which is higher than some of the other popular countries in Europe such as Italy and Germany( avg. €700). This clearly shows why students especially those with unstable financial situation need to work during their studies to live with less amount of stress. Also, don't forget non-EU/EEA students that have to pay tuition fees that range from 80,000 to 140,000 SEK per academic year. A student told us:

"My Masters' degree would cost me a total of 280,000 kronor ($40,500) and that's aside from my living expenses," he says. "Pakistan is a poor country, and the situation is getting worse day by day. I might earn that much money after a lifetime of working, but only then." Sadiq Malik, a Pakistani student from Stockholm University

In addition, the Employ Chain website states that many college students seek part-time jobs not only for financial reasons but also to gain practical work experience in their field of interest to be prepared for their post graduation era and their career.

What are the challenges to find Part-time Jobs?

We began our user research process by carrying out a survey and share it with students from different Swedish universities to realize what are their biggest problems to find a part-time job in Sweden. Around 150 students participated in our survey and based on their answers, we managed to extract these insights:

How about employers?

We also conducted a series of in-person interviews with 10 local and small businesses in Jönköping to understand what are their challenges to find and hire a part-time employee, especially students. These are some of the most common and key points that they mentioned:

User personas

After analyzing the answers of survey from students, interviews with employers and doing a market research, it's time to create our user personas. Our target users fall into two categories: job seekers and job providers. 

Job seekers are university students, including local and international students. The primary goal for student job seekers is to earn additional income, gain workplace experience, and expand their social network. As for job providers, they aim to recruit part-time employees through the platform.

What is the solution to these problems?

Based on the understanding and analysis above, we had a brainstorming session and our final idea is to create a dedicated part-time job platform for university students. This platform would initially offer authentication by linking with university email accounts to verify users as students of a particular university. In addition, it would act as a platform through which small and big corporations in the proximity of universities could advertise for part-time work.

We design FlexiHub app as a mobile application that intends to facilitate connections between international students in Sweden with part-time jobs suitable for their requirements and schedule. The app would provide a number of features to help students find and apply for jobs, including:

• Authentication using student email

• Job listings and search

• Easy CV builder

• Easy application process

• Student/Employer profiles

What will the user Journeys look like?

We defined a user journey map for each of these personas in FlexiHub app.

What's going on in the market?

We conducted a competitor analysis to see what have been done by other job-seeking platforms. We identified several platforms that could be our competitors. Here is a comparison between all of these platforms and what we are going to offer:

Pixels to Possibilities: Unveiling the High-Fidelity Prototype

After this research process, it's time to reveal the appearance of our solution:

Takeaways

Impact

• Providing students the opportunity to have an income around 10,000 SEK per month

• A win-win situation for both students and businesses as they can connect to each other more efficiently

• Gaining practical experiences during their study which will be helpful for students in their future career

• A good opportunity for networking and possibly find a full-time job after graduation

What I learned

Doing this project gave me lots of insights about some common job seeking challenges that students encounter in Sweden. In addition, during my interviews with some businesses I noticed that despite the fact that companies and businesses are not allowed to discriminate between candidates, some of them are biased about international student and prefer not hiring them at all.

Challenges

Reaching out to both students and employers was the biggest challenge for us. Half of the businesses refused to talk and have interview with us which made it difficult for us to reach an ideal number of employers especially in a small city like Jönköping and caused a longer time of research.
Also, to make our research more citable, we tried to send our survey to students from different universities across Sweden which again, made our research process slower.

Next steps

• We're considering form a partnership with Student unions and Career Centers in different universities of Sweden to introduce this app better to students.