Co-designing a Talent Attraction Platform for Chile’s Service Station Ecosystem

When a Corporate Training Academy Needs to Redesign its Reason for Existing

Academia Copec is the training and development arm of Copec, Chile’s largest fuel distribution company. Its founding purpose —to support the human capital development of service station workers and their families, connecting their aspirations with new educational and employment opportunities— was ambitious and socially meaningful. But by 2021, the institution faced a critical strategic question: was its current service offering actually reaching the people it was designed for, and was it generating the shared value that both the company and the broader ecosystem needed?

The challenge was structural. Copec’s service station network operates through concessionaires —independent operators who employ the attendants and manage day-to-day operations. Academia Copec’s programmes were designed from the top down, without systemic understanding of the realities of workers, concessionaires, families, and community allies across Chile’s diverse territories. The result was an institution with genuine potential but limited evidence about what its users actually needed, and limited mechanisms for involving them in shaping its offer.

Then, in 2021, a workforce crisis accelerated the urgency. A severe labour shortage hit service stations across the country: concessionaires were struggling to hire and retain attendants, vacancies went unfilled, and the standard recruitment pipeline was failing. Over a third of unemployed candidates who participated in a pilot programme found work before concessionaires had even contacted them for an interview. The existing model for attracting talent was simply too slow and too disconnected from the ecosystems where workers and jobs actually existed.

The dual challenge —strengthen Academia Copec’s strategic value proposition and solve an urgent operational crisis around talent attraction— required a methodology that could work simultaneously at the institutional and the community level: understanding users deeply, involving stakeholders collaboratively, and designing services that could function across the heterogeneity of Chile’s territories.

Neither challenge could be solved from a desk. They required going into the ecosystem and designing with the people who inhabited it.

From User Research to Ecosystem Design: a Two-Phase Methodology

UNIT structured its work in two sequential but connected phases. In the first —running from October 2021 to April 2022— the team focused on understanding the Academia Copec ecosystem and strengthening its value proposition. In the second —June 2022 to January 2023— UNIT co-designed the Labour Attraction Programme: a concrete service platform addressing the workforce crisis through a participatory, evidence-based design process.

Phase One began with ecosystem mapping —a structured effort to understand who the key actors were, what they needed, and how they related to each other. UNIT conducted actor mapping workshops with the Academia Copec team, stakeholder interviews, and an extensive benchmark research study of more than 50 case studies from 10 countries identifying analogous academies and talent development initiatives. This research base was complemented by 28 participatory instances across the full project span: 20 interviews, one in-person workshop, three online workshops, and four micro-workshops via WhatsApp —the last of which proved essential for reaching frontline workers in remote and informal contexts.

The result of Phase One was a strengthened value proposition for Academia Copec: a strategic architecture that defined how the institution should position itself within Copec’s ecosystem, what services it should prioritise, and how it should engage its key stakeholders. This work directly enabled Phase Two.

Phase Two applied a participatory design methodology to co-create the Labour Attraction Programme with its intended users. UNIT worked with 47 people across 27 co-design activities —including six workshops with the Academia Copec executive team, three workshops with concessionaires, two workshops with service station attendants, six key actor interviews, and two territorial field visits covering stations in Santiago, the North, Centre, and South of Chile. Participants represented both urban city stations (70%) and highway stations (30%), ensuring the design was grounded in the full geographic and operational reality of the network.

The design process moved through five stages: understand, listen, define, design, and plan. Each stage produced validated outputs that fed the next. The final product —the Labour Attraction Programme —was not designed for its users but with them: its three attraction routes (territorial, digital, and referral), its digital employment platform, and its specialty certification model all emerged from the collaborative process and carried the legitimate ownership of those who had shaped them.

More than a service design project, this was a capacity-building exercise in participatory governance for Copec.

Impact

Networks and Collaborations

The project was developed in collaboration with Academia Copec and Copec’s strategic leadership, involving the Director and the management teams of the Formation, Development and Employability, and Extension units. For the Labour Attraction Programme, the project also engaged Fundación Emplea as a strategic partner and pilot co-implementer for the first attraction programme cycle.

The multi-actor scope of the project brought together voices from across the ecosystem —14 concessionaires from across Chile’s four macro-regions, 19 service station attendants (including immigrants and young workers), six key ecosystem actors including employment specialists, municipal allies (OMIL), and digital platform operators, and the six-person Academia Copec executive team. The collaborative architecture required to work simultaneously across these groups was itself a methodological contribution to Copec’s internal culture.

Designing for the Ecosystem, Not Just the Organisation

The Academia Copec case illustrates a broader challenge that organisations across Latin America face when their purpose extends beyond their own boundaries: how to design services and programmes that genuinely work for dispersed, heterogeneous ecosystems of users and partners who have historically had no voice in shaping what they receive.

Corporate academies, social innovation arms, and training programmes in the private sector often struggle with exactly this tension: they are created with genuine social intent, but they default to top-down programme design because the tools for genuine co-creation with frontline users —workers, concessionaires, community allies— are not part of the standard institutional toolkit. This project demonstrated that participatory service design can operate effectively within a corporate context, generating both social value and strategic clarity.

The two-phase structure is itself replicable: an institution-facing phase that strengthens strategic clarity and value proposition, followed by an ecosystem-facing phase that translates that strategy into services co-designed with users. This sequence builds internal alignment and external legitimacy simultaneously. The result is not just a better service, but a better relationship between the organisation and the communities it serves.

In a region where labour informality, high turnover, and mismatches between job supply and worker profiles are persistent structural problems, the Labour Attraction Programme offers a model worth learning from. By making job opportunities visible and accessible —with geolocation, standardised information, and a referral model that amplifies existing social networks— it addresses structural barriers rather than symptoms. And by building the programme through the concessionaires and attendants who would use it, it created the trust and ownership conditions that most top-down recruitment platforms cannot.

The worker experience, understood as a system of interconnected touchpoints and relationships, becomes an axis of institutional strategy —not just a human resources problem to be managed, but a design opportunity to be acted upon.