Enabling businesses to hire veterans

The problem to solve

The Prime Minister's Veterans' Employment Program aims to raise awareness with employers, both private and public sector, of the value and unique experience of our veterans.

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) invests heavily in its servicemen and women, and they have a broad range of skills and experience. Their skill-sets, including proven leadership and problem solving skills, are in strong demand and transfer readily to civilian employment.

The Prime Minister’s Veterans’ Employment Program (VEP) identified that their current digital platform was not in line with users’ needs and not able to scale as the Program grew.

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How we solved it

Annex partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) to design and build DVA's new Veterans Employment Program (VEP) beta website on the GovCMS SaaS platform, to help deliver its mission, by creating a platform allowing employers to:

-    sign up and pledge support
-    highlight achievements in the creation of employment opportunities for veterans
-    Promote DoD and DVA initiatives
-    Promote APS initiatives

Following a comprehensive design and content strategy the team implemented a design and content style guide. In parallel to the production of the guide, our Visual and Interaction Design lead worked on how the website could be refreshed and designed to improve readability, accessibility and comprehension.

Throughout the development process, Annex worked with Pragma Partners content writers and created a pre-production environment where DVA content was created, migrated and reviewed using the publishing workflow. Having this environment created an opportunity to train content writers to use Drupal, as well as migrating and approving content along the way.

DVA's users required a comprehensive search tool for which we implemented with Solr. Using Solr has allowed users to complete keyword searches within a clean and user tested interface.