Hourspent Fellowship

Hourspent Fellowship is a skill accelerator program designed for talented people to help them up-skill as they juggle life. We do this by connecting them with highly skilled freelancers on Hourspent. They learn from these freelancers as they work on real projects as a team. We adopt a unique work and learning curve where projects are split in batches for fellows to do while skilled freelancers review and modify them. Fellows can pick corrections from these reviews and modifications to improve. The more fellows learn, and get better, the higher their earnings. The more a skilled freelancer assist fellows, the higher they rank and earn. This creates room for communication and collaboration between Hourspent fellows and skilled freelancers as they horn and master their craft.

By working on real projects with skilled freelancers, they're building the digital skills needed to thrive in their various endeavors. This is addressing workforce skills shortages and gaps.

According to the Coursera 2019 Global Skills Index, two thirds of the global population is falling behind in critical skills, with 90 per cent being in developing economies, including Nigeria. The rate at which technology is evolving is faster than the rate at which skills are being developed.

36 per cent of business leaders in Nigeria and other African countries admitted that they lacked the required people to achieve the full benefits of digital transformation. €353bn lost revenues in the EU due to skills shortages in private businesses alone and West Africa incurred more losses.

Source; https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/entr...

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) “2019 Futurescape Report,”, two million jobs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things, cybersecurity and blockchain will remain unfilled by 2023 due to lack of human talent.

Hourspent targets talented individuals who have the potential to be leaders in the technology sector. Applications are open to anyone over 18 years old and willing to commit to Hourspent for three years.

Rationale for Targeting this Segment:

• Untapped Talent: Africa has a large, fast-growing youth population. Hourspent believes most African youth with surface level skills in IT are as a result of lack of resources and opportunities needed to meet their potential in the technology sector. On Hourspent Fellowship, we seek to bridge this gap.
• Demand-supply Gap: With great talent becoming harder to find in the traditional labor market, many organizations are considering other options to recruit talents. Hourspent hopes to address this demand and supply gap through freelance training and recruitment, as the growing gig economy offers big potential for businesses to find their best fit candidates without wasting time or money.

Hourspent leverage twitter as “scouting” medium, to identify potential participants who are likely to perform well in the program. We track learner progress over time and extract wealth of data points to gain some insights. This help us in creating features towards their learning path in ways that addresses their needs and challenges.

A paid learning program that provides a better, smarter, faster way to develop and measure up skills needed to invent the future.

The program covers advanced business and technical skills such as Design, business support, Video and Image Annotation, programming and application/software development, including full stack development. Work ethics and team-related skills are embedded as part of the learning curve.  We assumed that an ideal candidate must have known the basics or little about the skills he wishes to learn either online or through a trainer before applying.

Applicants fill out an online application here; https://hourspent.com/fellowship. At the first stage, they gain access to Hourspent curriculum, which covers business, technical and team skills. This helps them prepare for the next assessment round. The next assessment includes virtual lab assignments from the business end and test-driven development from the technical end to assess the applicant’s mastery of Hourspent curriculum.

Shortlisted candidates are invited to interview with a panel of Hourspent staff members. Interviewers gauge the applicant’s commitment and alignment to Hourspent values. Applicants who pass the interview are invited to participate in a two-week simulation led by skilled freelancers and are free to set their available hours. This comprises one week of virtual self-learning and one week of product development with skilled freelancers using Hourspent Workstream which have Live streaming functionalities. Applicants are evaluated on their ability to work independently and with a team.    

Hourspent Fellowship is characterized by two features:

Gig-focused Program Provision: The program provides students between six months to three years of intensive on-the-gig learning. Training includes working on real project on freelance basis with already skilled talents freelancing on Hourspent. As their skill improves, it increases their chances of securing full time position with one of Hourspent partner companies or they may decide to freelance either remotely, onsite with next batch of fellows.

Self-sufficient Model: the model is linked directly to employer needs, ensuring continued relevance and funding for the training program.

Hourspent also has a learning management system (still in beta) that tracks participants’ progress and helps customize their professional development plan. The program tracks over 500 data points to measure the progress of the talent. The first six months are spent exclusively on real project-based learning while incorporating feedback from skilled freelancers.

Hourspent Fellowship does not have traditional instructors. It aims to teach its fellows on the job. They are grouped in team with skilled freelancers for support. This training model mimics the process of learning on the job; the “trainers” are skilled freelancers already delivering complex jobs on Hourspent.

We are working to make Hourspent fellowship equivalent to four years of employment experience at top tech companies around the world. Participants develop mastery over a handful of digital skills. At the end of the four years, they possess significant work experience and marketable skills for employers in the technology sector two more opportunity:

1. Entrepreneurship: Some participants start their own business or join entrepreneurial ventures 2. Freelance employment with Hourspent: others returns to Hourspent as skilled freelancers or learning facilitators Employment Oriented Initiatives

This program serves as a local technology hub, providing technology entrepreneurs with the guidance to brainstorm, network, build prototypes, and set up operations. This initiative is expected to result in the creation of new and lasting local businesses.

Currently, we're searching two startups and 20 talents. In one year, we estimate to serve 10 startups, 5 "fortune 500" companies and 200 fellows. In next 5, we estimate to serve 100 startups, 50 "fortune 500 companies" and 2,000 fellows.

Hourspent fellowship seeks to build a vast community of employable talents by 2025. The program focuses on equipping 2,000 talents with digital and entrepreneurship skills.

The actual employment status of many freelancers is unclear, and lots of legislatures are struggling with this issue.

Exactly how all of this will “shake out” in the future is still unknown. This can cause unsettling feelings.

Some studies are showing that, as rapidly as the gig workforce is growing, competition is too. It’s a matter of supply and demand. And as the supply grows, amount of pay consequently decreases. One will struggle with demanding a reasonable and fair rate of pay vs. what others are willing to do the same work for. And you will face the need to increase the number of gigs you go after and the stressful workload that increasing that number brings.

By partnering with tech companies, they'll get to work with our partner's in-house team while we ensure that we have a significant pipeline of secured contract jobs to assign them.

We're equipping them with the most complex digital skills and entrepreneurial prowess. The more challenging such skills are, the lesser the competition.

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In 2009, Blessing Ijoma, the CEO of Hourspent was freelancing on most of the popular freelance platform. She was winning more projects she could deliver within the expected delivery time. She started hiring and managing other freelancers to meet up with her client's demands.

  In 2014, she was managing over 80 freelancers with over 50 reoccurring clients. As she grows her freelance career, she realized she is creating an economic opportunity for her freelancers and clients across the world.

This awareness gave birth to Hourspent.  Later, she started training three talents in digital skills. This helped them freelance to make money while they finished their BSC and Masters. They later joined Hourspent as part of the management team.

Hourspent Fellowship business model is designed to sustain itself and drive scalability. Employer partners, typically based in the United States, pay Hourspent to provide vetted, talented, and fully trained software and business developers for short term ongoing contract work.

Fellows undergo intensive, master’s level, project-based training during the first six-month period. Then they spend 2.5 years working through Hourspent as remote freelancers for global technology companies.

Selling products or services, raising investment capital.