Alera
Passion Project
1 Month
2025
Alera is an all-in-one upskilling platform that combines learning, career guidance, resume building, and job discovery into a single, unified experience for students and early professionals.
Learning platforms, job portals, and career guidance tools often exist in silos, forcing users to juggle multiple products with little continuity. Users struggled to connect skill-building efforts with real career outcomes, while platforms failed to provide a guided, end-to-end growth journey.
I designed a unified LMS that connects learning paths, skill validation, resume creation, and job opportunities within a single ecosystem. The platform guides users from upskilling to employability through structured flows, personalized recommendations, and clear progress visibility.
The hardest part wasn't designing the platform — it was figuring out what order things should live in. Students don't think "learning → resume → jobs." They think "I want a job, what do I do next?" That single reframe changed everything. The dashboard stops being a library and starts being a to-do list with a destination.
I gave myself one month and one rule: don't start in Figma until I've talked to at least five people who've tried to upskill while job hunting.
What I heard wasn't surprising — it was specific. People weren't confused about what to learn. They were confused about why their learning wasn't translating into job callbacks. They'd finished courses, built projects, updated their LinkedIn skills section. Still nothing. The gap wasn't knowledge. It was signal — they had no way to prove they'd grown.
That reframing changed the product. This stopped being an "LMS with a job board attached" and became something closer to a career evidence platform. The resume builder, skill validation, and job matching aren't add-ons — they're the point.
I mapped the full journey from "I want to learn X" to "I got an interview because I learned X" and designed backwards from the interview, not forwards from the lesson.
I looked at four direct competitors — Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Internshala, and Unstop. Each had strong points. None connected skill-building to job readiness in a single flow. Coursera has the content depth but stops at the certificate. LinkedIn Learning is good for passive watching but doesn't guide what to watch next. That gap — active, outcome-driven learning — is what Alera fills.
Key UX Decisions
Decision: Used a "career outcome" label on every course card instead of just hours + rating. Why: Users in interviews kept asking "but what will I be able to do after?" — the label answers that before click.
Decision: Separated "Browse" from "My Path" in navigation. Why: Discovery and progress are different mental modes — combining them created cognitive load in early wireframe testing.
Decision: Resume builder is gated until 1 skill validation is completed. Why: Prevents empty resumes and creates a natural motivation hook — users have a reason to finish their first module.
Users completed the onboarding flow without assistance
Moderated test, 5 participants
Avg. time to discover and enroll in a course
vs. 12 min on Coursera (observed)
Users understood their skill progress without explanation
Progress visibility test
Avg. satisfaction score across 5 testers
Post-session survey
I tested the prototype with 5 students in moderated sessions. All 5 completed the course enrollment flow in under 2 minutes. 4 out of 5 could navigate from a completed course to a matched job listing without any assistance. The one person who got lost said "I didn't expect jobs to be here" — which told me the tab label needed rethinking, not the layout. Post-test, 4 out of 5 said they would replace their current setup with Alera if it were live.