Why This Stage Matters

Ground your redesign in the real stories of working learners and supervisors. To redesign student employment, you must start with the people actively involved in it. Centering lived experience means putting working learners and supervisors – their voices and emotions – at the heart of this initiative.

In this phase of Discovery, your goal is to understand. You’ll learn about your institution’s student employment system through direct observation, conversation, and reflection. These insights will reveal how student employment systems, policies, and relationships actually play out, as well as where opportunities for meaningful change exist.

Observe Real Workflows

Shadow daily routines and supervision moments to see how work and learning truly happen. Observation gives you context for what working learners and supervisors might describe about their experiences.

• Shadow everyday moments: Watch onboarding sessions, staff meetings, check-ins, and other day-to-day working learner tasks.
• Notice supervision patterns: How do supervisors give their working learners feedback? How do working learners communicate with their supervisors?
• Record what you see: Take notes on what you observe. What do people say or do? What don’t they do?
• Watch for friction: Where do processes slow down or what gets confusing?

No matter how familiar you are with student employment, approach every observation with a beginner’s mindset and pretend you’re seeing it for the first time.

Map the Current Experience

Visualize the full student employment journey from onboarding to exit and note “moments that matter.” Experience mapping helps you translate what you’ve heard and seen into a clear, visual story.

Outline the key stages of student employment:

• Applications and hiring
• Onboarding
• Offboarding

Reflect on the Student Journey

Ask yourself: What does working as a student feel like here on day one, midterm, and at transition points? Reflect on what you know about your institution’s student employment process.