"Self-Made" a future focussed careers platform for youth

How does a young person come to think about their future in a rapidly changing world?

We believe that a futures focussed, global 'careers' platform build by self-made could inspire young people to dream and imagine a life for themselves that matches where the future is heading.

The world is changing at a rapid pace. Young people today will work in a number of fields throughout their life- in many 'jobs' and industries that do not yet even exist. The changes are already evident- we have large scale growth in technological and social fields such as software development and aged care. The gig/sharing economy is set to disrupt the way we work in positive and negative ways. Work experience is being harder to come by as increased education rates increase competitiveness for entry-level jobs. And lower-skilled work is being increasingly replaced by machines and intelligent systems. 

The challenge and opportunity here is how we help young people to build the skills necessary to successfully manage their 'careers' for the future. A future that is going to be increasingly shaped by technological advancement and global shifts on a scale that humanity has never seen before. 

Optimistically, the work ahead is to help young people capitalise on the 'new landscape' and help them shift their 'careers' mindset from one of climbing a ladder, to surfing waves in a high tide sea. Worryingly, if the work is not done now to help young people develop the right mindset for their careers, the risks to individual young people and local/global economies could be dire. Compounding this, are the types of challenges we may expect to see in the future such as: the impacts of climate change, finite natural resource depletion, technological disruption & warfare, ageing economies and increasing globalisation and competition. 

With our careers platform, "Self-Made" we would seek to co-design with young people, those in private industry, and universities and feature rich media content (videos, challenges, quizzes) focussed to engage young people on the future of work.

The world of work is changing. Traditional Kindergarten to highschool level education in regards to careers is struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change. A scalable and adaptable, user-centric means of educating and inspiring young people to think about the future is needed. 

Self-Made was born out of a design process that sought to address the issue of youth unemployment. Original prototypes included a platform to connect young people with employers.

After further interviews with young people, we uncovered a key source of conflict was how young people fear their futures. Furthermore, we have spent time with careers teachers, and have found them to be riddled with limited resources. Careers education also has tended to be ad-hoc, with some students missing out.

Compounding our research is a large amount of "future of work" research, such as FYA.

The impact is to catalyse a shift in how young people approach the future of their work. That they feel inspired and empowered to confidently explore their education and work. 

Young people aged 12-25 would benefit, as well as, we hope, broader society and economy does as well. 

The careers platform will originally seek to be online, and available on web and mobile technologies. 

We would seek to offer the platform through schools, as well as through youth support centres, Government youth agencies, and with individual subscriptions or users. 

Measure users - 1 Million users around the world

Surveys, Interviews, focus groups, ethnographical research in classrooms, user research - Youth engagement

I think it is unique in the sense that we seek to co-design our development process and create a user-centric platform. Our aim is not just to 'educate' but to inspire. 

Our platform is unique in it's usage of technology because of the fact that we strive to focus on what engages young people best. Through rich media content, and interactive activities. This would be one of the first global careers platforms of it's kind. 

Self-Made was born out of a design process that involved research, asking 'how might we' questions, ethnographical research with careers teachers and by sitting down and talking to young people and mapping their needs and dreams. 

The platform also endeavours to co-design with youth in every regard, including having schools based champions, internal youth lead teams and local/national youth ambassador programs. 

The platform would be accessible through school subscriptions, youth and community resources, as well as individual sign ups online. 

We would design the platform to be a social enterprise business model, with core purpose built into the company incorporation, in order to stay independent and self-sustaining. 

We would seek to subscribe schools with low cost yearly or one off costs and a low subscription fee for individuals. 

Ongoing development and maintenance costs. 

School budget limitations. 

Scaling to Asia-pacific countries and beyond- cultural, language and content adaptions.

Connecting with like-minded partners who want to shape the future of careers education!

None, but i'd love to have Atlassian on board! 

Very few. Accenture has a skills to succeed platform, but that is based on resume skills.