Beyond the Classroom: How NDDOT Is Expanding the Impact of Career Profiles

What started as a way to highlight careers at the North Dakota Department of Transportation (NDDOT) has evolved into a powerful tool for recruitment, career exploration, and employee development – reaching everyone from middle school students to seasoned professionals.

Taking full advantage of its Golden Path Awareness Membership with unlimited employer-written Career Profiles in Compass, the NDDOT currently highlights 24 profiles covering everything from heavy equipment operator to chemist, archaeologist, pilot, and civil rights director. Each profile features detailed career descriptions, helpful links, related resources, photos, and often a video.

The Career Profiles are easily accessible by middle school and high school students in Compass, but the NDDOT didn’t stop there. Thanks to the open URL feature, the department is widely sharing the profiles beyond the classroom – on websites and socials, with college students, and even with its own employees.

“We can update all of our career information in one spot,” says NDDOT Talent Acquisition Manager Lynn Spomer. “We put everything we want in there, including photos, videos, and all of our state links. We can teach young students about what we do, but we can also show adults as well. We really use the Career Profiles for everything.”

Taking Career Profiles to the next level

As the mastermind behind the NDDOT’s extended use of Career Profiles, Spomer first learned about Compass while working for North Dakota Parks and Recreation. When she moved to NDDOT about a year ago, she began exploring how she could leverage Compass to more effectively and efficiently educate audiences of all ages about the wide variety of careers at the department.

She started by creating all NDDOT job descriptions solely as Career Profiles in Compass. This eliminated duplicates, streamlined editing and updates, and simplified all career sharing opportunities.

Now the DOT is linking those Career Profiles to its new careers website for the state, adding them to job postings, pairing them with their own CareerViewXR field trips for school visits, and sharing snippets on its social accounts. Spomer is also using the Career Profile to build one-pagers for students to share with their families, displaying them on the big screen during presentations, utilizing them as a training tool during new employee orientations, and even sharing them with current employees who are switching careers.

Spomer says the Career Profile creation process is clear and straightforward, which helped her build so many. She starts each one using the NDDOT’s job description, breaks up the content to fit the Career Profile sections, and uses AI to generate related Holland Codes, hobbies, and high school classes and activities. She then reaches out to current NDDOT employees for the day-in-the-life sections to highlight what they really do and the importance of it.

“I’ve been gathering the additional details directly from our staff and showing them the Career Profiles when they are completed,” Spomer says. “We’ve really been using them a lot with our own staff, and they’ve come in handy.”

Reaching students of all ages

The NDDOT shares its careers with students as young as elementary school, but mostly through hands-on events, like Touch a Truck, showcasing big equipment. The department starts using Career Profiles in middle school, as students learn about career clusters and related classes. Spomer integrates Compass and Career Profiles into her talks about specific careers, what it actually takes to construct a road, or all of the jobs that are involved in operating the DOT.

“At first, students don’t realize how much it takes to run a whole agency,” Spomer says. “They don’t think about anything other than plowing roads or filling potholes. When we talk about engineering, testing the soil, concern for wildlife and endangered species, and more, it opens their eyes to so many different careers.”

By high school, students are interacting with the NDDOT through presentations, career fairs, classroom visits, and hopefully soon, work-based learning experiences – all supported by Career Profiles. The same holds true for college students. Spomer and other staff use Career Profiles to help build relationships with the students, talk about available internships, and better describe available careers.

Often, it’s about highlighting unexpected careers at the NDDOT (like a biologist or attorney), sharing engaging details, or even getting students inspired about careers they didn’t think were available to them.

“I love to see young women, especially, take hold of that,” Spomer says. “I try to bring women engineers with me to classroom presentations. My daughter is a heavy equipment operator in the US Army, for example. Anytime you can show something that is not typical, it opens their minds.”