CareerVillage.org

The global career readiness crisis has left 225 million youth un/underemployed. This crisis exists because youth don’t know how to prep for careers in the Digital Workforce and there are not enough school counselors, mentors, or internships to help. As a result, <10% of high school students have a career plan and most will graduate without any extracurricular career prep experience. Without help most youth will not be ready for the Digital Workforce.

Our solution uses crowdsourcing to provide on-demand personalized career advice. At CareerVillage.org, students can ask any question about any career. We automatically match questions to working professionals, who submit answers online for all to see.

We have mobilized 35,000 volunteers on 8,000 career topics and served advice to over 3.5M online learners.

As a result, we see students being more knowledgeable about careers, feeling more confident, creating career plans for the first time, and getting great jobs. 

Millions of young people in our lowest-income communities face a daunting challenge: how to transform educational isolation and economic disenfranchisement into excitement for bright futures and employability skills that put them on the path to success. They're left to find and follow their path alone, without access to career advice. We call it the guidance gap, and it's crushing young peoples' hopes and dreams the world over.

Underrepresented youth and youth in high-poverty areas disproportionately report weekly anxiety about their career readiness, but don’t feel they have access to working professionals to answer their questions. As a result, fewer than 1 in 10 high school students have a career plan, most will graduate without any experience doing extracurricular career prep activities, and over 80% of college graduates finish college unemployed. 

Every student deserves to get their career questions answered, but most  youth don’t have the access they need. 

This problem persists because the traditional solutions don’t scale. There are almost 500 students for every high school counselor in the US, and not enough mentors or job training programs for every student in need. We cannot give every student personalized career guidance using 20th-century support models. 

We reach students through schools in low-income communities, and in addition, many students discover the site while doing career research on Google.

So far 3.5M online learners have used CareerVillage. They face huge pressure to pick the right career, identify and build skills, and balance a fast-changing job market. They have no access to advice through school, and traditional online resources are hard to find or often untrustworthy. Surveys of US youth show that they feel they have no information, opportunities, and relationships to gain career knowledge.

CareerVillage is the oasis in the desert — especially for first-generation college students, immigrants, minorities, and others underrepresented in their dream careers. 

That’s why Armani, a CareerVillage student, said “CareerVillage has provided me with the guidance in order to make smart decisions concerning my career. After reading my advice, I began to research prerequisites for jobs regarding finance. I also began to explore my interests by doing more extracurriculars regarding business and science to see what I actually enjoy.”

CareerVillage.org uses crowdsourcing to unlock career advice at massive scale.

How it works: On our digital platform students can post any question about any career. The platform then analyzes those questions and automatically distributes them to matching members of our online volunteer corps. Our volunteers can answer questions from any computer or phone, usually in ten minutes or less. Our global community of 35,000 working professionals come from all walks of life and backgrounds, and work in thousands of different occupations. We have a 98% answered rate, answer quality is extremely high, and on average questions get answered by 3 different people, providing students with multiple perspectives. 

Our vision: Our moonshot goal is to become the gold standard source for top-quality answers to every question about every career for everyone. Our community wants to do for career guidance what Wikipedia did for basic knowledge. For us success means solving the problem at scale. If successful, a Billion youth will have access to trustworthy guidance in minutes. That means:

• A randomly polled group of Seniors will say “CareerVillage” if asked where to find trustworthy career advice
• 100% of youth spending ANY time this year thinking about careers will have visited CareerVillage
• Top 3 rank for 99% of career question searches on Google

Why this matters: We're building a society where every generation stands ready to leave our differences behind and unite behind a shared goal goal of helping the next generation find success.

CareerVillage.org challenges the 1:1 model of mentorship. We enable asynchronous, crowd-based mentorship, which unlocks large numbers of potential mentors to achieve huge impact in a scalable way.

By lowering the barriers for participation, our model mobilizes volunteers who would never otherwise be able to get involved. With 25m Americans saying they would like to mentor but haven’t yet, the potential is huge. That means we can offer the most personalized, life-changing, and engaging career advice, with the ability to reach tremendous scale. That’s a combination that can’t be offered by any of the 1:1 mentoring programs, afterschool career training programs, video sites, or textbook-like resources. 

That’s why after using CareerVillage, NFTE Regional Director Rob Piercey said “after seeing it in action, I can say that Careervillage.org is a game-changer.”

Our theory of change is based on the premise that certainty unlocks action. 

Students want to be prepared for the Digital Workforce, but are typically blocked from taking action because of the paralyzing uncertainty they feel about how to best prepare. CareerVillage addresses this gap by providing students with on-demand personalized advice that is high quality and trustworthy. By being there for them, we help dispel that uncertainty paralysis. As a result, students are free to begin taking the tens of thousands of micro-actions that they must execute to be career-ready. 

Serving currently: 3.5 Million people have been served so far. 

Serving in a year: By the end of 2020, we will have reached our 4.5 Millionth learner.

Serving in five years: Our goal is that within 5 years we'll have served out 50 Millionth leaner, if not much more.

Why so many? Our open-access platform is growing virally and through organic search, which expands as our content grows. We look to Wikipedia and Quora and StackExchange as examples of how growth might look for our resources. 

Expanding awareness of this awesome program is our primary goal. We do that in many ways, including through expanding our range of content, empowering our current community members to refer their friends, and partnering with employers, schools, nonprofits, and professional associations.

Over the coming year and within the next five years, we'll continue to iterate on the core user experience, drive community growth through marketing and partnerships, and steadily drive up our content base until it is the largest and highest quality available anywhere. 

The largest barriers are:

1. Access to acceleration capital
2. Adding support for languages other than English

1. Access to acceleration capital

We have built a corporate partnership program that has allowed us to derive revenue from grants and earned income. Our partners are Fortune 500 companies who sponsor our work and provide us with volunteers from their employee base. For companies, it's a great way to give back and have an impact while providing their employees with an easy-to-implement digital volunteering program. This is very attractive to them in comparison with traditional volunteer programs that require large-scale event planning, travel logistics, and physical materials. For our students, it means more volunteers ready to answer their questions and more funding for the CareerVillage.org staff to provide support, improve the platform, and keep the servers (and lights) running!

2. Adding support for languages other than English

We're going to begin gathering data from our volunteers about their spoken languages, and formally launch new languages when the number of volunteers in that language reaches 2,500. We plan to launch Spanish in late 2020 and then expand to others. The incentive will be for each volunteer in a new language to help us spread the word and recruit other volunteers who can help that language "tip" over the 2,500 mark so they can launch formally. 

Last year CareerVillage.org served career advice to learners in 190 countries. Every one of ServiceNow's markets is active on CareerVillage.org. 

However, more can (and should!) be done. We would like to work with ServiceNow to form partnerships with organizations in many of those countries whose students could benefit from access to digital workforce career advice.

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We've crowdsources more career advice for more people than any other organization in history. Our three core competencies are:

1. Community mobilization - We know how to attract, activate, and engage large number of people as part of movements. We capitalize on momentum with simple calls-to-action that allow enthusiasm to multiply and our reach to compound. 
2. Rapid software development - We move quickly and build beautiful, engaging software that is reliable and highly performant. Most nonprofit organizations don't deliver rapid software development, so it really sets us apart from most. 
3. Partnerships - We are able to form partnerships with major Fortune 500 companies, public sector leaders, and professional associations because we conduct ourselves professionally and with efficiency. 

CareerVillage.org was founded by Jared Chung and Jen Pan. Jen experienced the need first-hand as a first-generation immigrant to the United States. Jared experienced it first-hand as a young person in the New York public school system, and as a mentor working with young people struggling to navigate the complicated high-stakes transition from the education system to the job market. Our founders know that students left to fend for themselves stand at a huge disadvantage in starting their professional lives.

Jared and Jen met as consultants at McKinsey in 2005 and left after a combined 10 years at the consulting company in order to find ways to improve the world for people everywhere. 

Corporate partnerships are our primary revenue stream. We provide companies with a custom online volunteering program to engage employees company wide. Employee volunteers provide our students with career advice that is relevant to their skills, experience, and interests. The company provides funding that we use to keep on growing. In the past we received seed funding through grassroots philanthropy and grants, however that is now a very small portion of our funding. Because corporate partnerships cover 100% of our costs, we now view philanthropy as growth capital to accelerate our growth.

CareerVillage.org is already financially sustainable. Awards and philanthropic capital we raise is now used to accelerate our growth!

We hope to add ServiceNow as a major volunteerism partner. We seek ServiceNow's support to engage 100% of its 8,666 employees in answering at least 1 question from 1 student this year. We also hope to engage ServiceNow staff in the following additional ways:

1. Make service part of the Day 1 experience for new employees by scheduling a CareerVillage.org advising session into the standard onboarding training agenda.
2. Make digital volunteering a part of company-wide volunteer weeks
3. Add a CareerVillage.org Booth to the Knowledge 2020 conference (if we have time -- or to Knowledge 2021)
4. Allow us to job shadow Bill McDermott and publish a "Day in the life of a CEO" story to our Pinterest Story for our students to see and be inspired by
5. Join in CareerVillage.org Tech Week 2020 by promoting the program with your nonprofit partners and employees. 
6. Engage ServiceNow staff in some of our 65+ pro bono project options

...and more! We've worked with companies to craft custom volunteer projects to meet your corporate culture and your company's strengths, and we'd welcome the opportunity to do that with ServiceNow as well. 

In addition to partnering directly with ServiceNow (as described above), we are looking to expand our partnerships with the following sectors:

1. Public sector leaders including San Jose Mayor Sam Licardo

2. Workforce development boards including The Silicon Valley Organization

3. Schools and nonprofits including the Santa Clara Unified School District and AnitaB.org 

All of the above examples are for San Jose, but we would like to do the same in all of ServiceNow’s other major locations around the world as well. This is a key part of how we spread awareness of our program with youth and with volunteers in new countries!