Portal Manager

I interned for 16 months as a Frontend Software Engineer at IBM. The team I was a part of was called Skills Network. Our mission was to make technology open and accessible to everyone through online courses and guided projects on topics in machine learning and artificial intelligence. These courses are mostly authored in-house by data scientists at IBM. To go along with these, Skills Network also develops and maintains tools including browser-integrated lab environments and private portals, which they provide to private and public organizations. You can think of these private portals like separate, secure instances of Coursera—where admins can provide courses that employees/students/whoever should take. Clients of Skills Network include governments, universities, banks, and private enterprises looking to “up-skill” their workforce.

Getting a Skills Network Portal is a sizeable commitment. To get a portal, you enter into a partnership with IBM to receive top-tier education on a personalized platform. For a predetermined amount of time, you don’t have to pay anything (like a free trial). Portals in this stage were called Pilot Portals. Prospective clients—universities, governments, enterprises—need to book a meeting with a senior-level staff member (we called them Technical Account Managers or TAMs) in order to be provisioned a pilot portal. We don’t just hand these things out willy-nilly. The problem was that this process flowed through our Director. For each prospective client he met with (and he had to meet with all of them), he was the one who assigned a TAM for each portal, i.e. the person that would “own” that client. He was also the one who was responsible for tracking our clients in the CRM and making sure that people weren’t using more than their allotted free trial time.

Portal Manager is the first application built at IBM Skills Network using the Phoenix LiveView framework. Here’s how it works.