SkillNav career GPS

Too many students are ill-prepared by their education systems to integrate into the workforce and escape dead end work - especially in Nigeria, with its massive young workforce that lacks critical basic employability skills.

Our solution to help bridge the broken education to employment pathway is SkillNav, a “skills GPS” app that skills up workers and scales up small businesses. 

Workers can 1) "map" out in-demand skills to learn, 2) get daily bite-sized coaching and behavioral nudges before each shift/workday and 3) get employer feedback and earn certification for competencies consistently demonstrated on the job.  

Our big idea: reach workers, especially low-skilled frontline workers in the global service sector. Give them SkillNav to build key employability skills on the job, from hygiene and punctuality to professional communication and problem solving. Get businesses to adopt it as a performance management tool, so new skills help unlock management roles and higher pay.

The disconnect between education and employment is acute in Africa, with its massive young workforce lacking critical basic employability skills. Employers report that even the highest educated African youth are not employable; 75% of university students don’t have formal jobs 5 yrs after graduation.

This problem has a high cost for workers. In Africa, 15-20M youth will enter the workforce each year for the next three decades. The majority will be trapped in a cycle of dead-end precarious low-wage work – a tremendous loss of potential on a continent that needs their full contributions.

It also has a hidden cost for employers, who churn through “cheap” workers. The constant flow of new, raw workers requires constant supervision and results in constant firefighting as quality suffers and customer service issues abound. Employers spend all their time micromanaging vs. growing their businesses. Even if they have a plan to scale operations, they have no management pipeline to help execute it.

Workers need to build marketable skills to escape dead-end work. But they need to do so on the job; they must learn while they earn, since many cannot afford further classroom education. If workers could skill up effectively, businesses could scale up.

SkillNav makes education and employment one continuous learning journey, directed by the learner, enabled by technology, and monetized in the labor market.

Here's how:  

• Every shift or workday, workers log into SkillNav to log their work and track their progress.

• SkillNav uses machine learning to report out the supply and demand of key skills in given industries and geographies, and breaks skills (“customer service”) down into a series of observable, practicable actions (“smile and greet every customer who walks in”) that can be demonstrated and described in a microlearning module and reinforced with checklists and behavioral nudges.

• Once managers give feedback that skills have been mastered, it automatically unlocks new skills learning targets for the worker, graduating them from basic “soft” employability skills to technical, vocational and management skills – all driven by actual employer demand.

For workers, SkillNav is like a GPS tool, telling them where they are, mapping a skills-building path to where they want to go, and inculcating these skills with daily bite-sized coaching.

For businesses, SkillNav is an objective performance management tool, collecting feedback and manager satisfaction, boosting productivity and giving visibility on what’s being done and who has leadership potential. 

Primary target: frontline workers (i.e., workers who deal directly with customers or are directly involved in making a product), both low-skilled youth entering the workforce and existing workers who feel stuck in dead end work.  

Such workers are mostly women aged 17-36, without university degrees, working shifts in service industries and earning low wages. Sans SkilllNav, workers are unaware of their skills gaps and how to fill them to unlock increased responsibility and income. They want to be more valuable to employers and have increased opportunity and earning potential but don’t know how. 

Secondary target: Job creators / employers (especially small and medium size business owners struggling to scale up their businesses with a low-skilled workforce and few HR resources

We've spent years learning about our target populations. In 2017 we used an early version of SkillNav to upskill 300+ street youth in a cleaning business and saw a 1.4x skills increase, 2x boost in income, 45% increase in worker productivity, 80% reduction in service quality issues.

In 2018 we placed 2000 unemployed students in 400 local small businesses, using SkillNav to equip them for work and secure their employment.

Our team itself includes many formerly low-skilled and underemployed youth.