What is Open Opportunities?

Open Opportunities is a sister site of USAJOBS.gov aimed specifically at existing federal employees. Feds are able to network with communities and specific-interest groups outside of their agencies and develop new skills through learning assignments with other agencies while keeping their current job.

My Role & Responsibilities

• User Research
• Competitive Analysis
• User Interface Design
• User Testing

My Team

• 1 UX Designer (Me)
• 1 Product Owner
• 1 Business Analyst
• 2 Front-end Engineers
• 2 Back-end Engineers
• 2 Quality Assurance Engineers

How the feature came to us

President Joe Biden created a government-wide directive for the United States to attract more entry-level and early-career employees. For the Office of Personnel Management, this turned into becoming a single source to find student internships in the federal government, available to those still attending high school or college.

The research

Our research snag came from the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), which regulates how the government is able to collect information from the general public. In order to get permission to conduct research interviews, we would have had to submit a request that would take about a year to process. Given that we were given this directive in August and had to get something in Prod by February, there wasn’t enough time to reach out to students and the general public.

However the PRA doesn’t cover current federal employees, who I could interview endlessly to my heart’s content. I reached out to some agencies to find current federal employees who were less than 3 years in their career to find out how they decided they wanted to work for the government and what the interview/hiring process was like.

What I found was 2 main cases. Either you have to know someone in the government to know that it’s an available career choice, or you live in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Outside of that, the only jobs students know about are the agencies commonly on television (CIA/FBI/NCIS). Guaranteed no one is waking up one day excited to apply to the National Credit Union Administration.

I was also able to talk to quite a few intern supervisors from agencies, who relayed how they advertise for their internships and what they’re looking for in an intern.

So as silly as it sounds, we prioritized the “sexiness” of our site, wanting to create as low of a barrier of entry as possible to get people’s feet in the door.

The new UI

Our designs have several dozen screens to account for:

1. Creating an internship
2. A student applying to an internship
3. Viewing all applicants and sending acceptance and rejection emails

The application process asked for a lot of data, and we wanted to make sure that the expectations on the applicants was as clear as possible. Communication of information was key, so we ensured that the FAQs and important dates were listed out when they finished the application.

As I said before, many don’t know that the federal government is even an option, let alone know that USAJOBS.gov exists, so we also took this opportunity to do some marketing. Applying to an internship also creates a USAJOBS profile for that person, which means they can now easily apply for government jobs even if they don’t get an internship. We directed them towards USAJOBS.gov and also any student communities on Open Opportunities where they could connect with potential fellow interns.

Usability testing

We were able to test with student intern supervisors at a few agencies, who were excited to see that all of their applicants would now be in one place and digital. One thing they expressed was a hesitancy to view thousands and thousands of applications (common) and to have a way to see who really wanted to work at their agency versus someone who was sending out an application to everything to see what stuck.

We addressed this in a future iteration by only allowing 5 applications per year per person, to ensure students were actively invested in seeking out the internships they wanted and agencies knew they weren’t getting applicants who didn’t care about their agency’s mission.

In that iteration we allowed students to rank their internship choices first through fifth. This especially allowed agencies to select applicants truly passionate about what they were applying for.

The results

In our first internship cycle, we had over 11,000 successful applicants in our system. Our agency partners expressed how much easier it was to select and interview potential candidates, allowing them to keep everything in one place and not have to rely on email too much to deliver news.

As of 2025, Open Opportunities is still the go-to place for student internships and attracts more applicants and agencies each year.

Viewing and selecting applicants