Ikigai ID

Most jobs will change (WEF) and 133m new jobs emerge (McKinsey institute) due to automation and the unbundling of jobs in the future of work. This calls for a rapid and sustained up- and re-skilling of the workforce. But whilst a third of the global workforce are at-risk of automation, many feel paralysed to act. 

Our mission is to help lower skilled workers access insights and guidance to make informed employment and training decisions for achieving dignified, fulfilling and resilient career lives. We provide them with a mobile and desktop application service to:

1. Assess and benchmark their professional skills and competencies

2. Identify data-driven career pathways, training and employment opportunities that boost employability and land higher-quality jobs

3. Build the career management habits and skills of resilient career lives.

Giving everyone access to career guidance, Ikigai ID is developing a more resilient workforce, growing job mobility and ending structural unemployment.

Ikigai ID is for those workers who find themselves ill-prepared for and not able to withstand and recover from economic shocks and labour market shifts.

As machine technologies take over routine-biased tasks, jobs in the middle of the skill distribution are displaced by machines, causing unemployment. Middle-skill jobs are the most impacted during recessions too: during Covid-19, unemployment rose by 2.1m across the OECD and in the US reached its highest levels since 1948. Industrial, construction, and service trades were the most affected, with automation rates on the rise. 

As some occupations shift toward high-quality, high-skills jobs, the demand for high-level cognitive and complex social-interaction skills and for specialist, blue-collar skills rises. Talent is scarce: 2 million manufacturing vacancies in the US will stay unfilled until 2024, yet the wages of high school–educated workers keep declining. Lower skill adults are almost half as likely to participate in training than high skilled adults (OECD), keeping them out of high-quality jobs.

This is mostly because they do not know whether training will benefit them and how (OECD), requiring career guidance to go hand in hand with training programs. But career guidance is not available and unaffordable for this target demographic.

As lower skill workers miss out on high-quality, resilient careers due to lack of engagement with apprenticeships and training, Ikigai ID offers them step-by-step guidance to keep a finger on the pulse of their career health and actively manage it. 

Our MVP is a desktop and mobile application service for building a competency-based CV and portfolio page, visualising and benchmarking skills and competencies and discovering suitable jobs or training opportunities that boost employability for higher-quality jobs. 

Subsequent versions will also offer interactive career pathways and personalised guidance, based on future skill insights, scraped from industry and labour market reports and analysed by a machine-assisted research team. For example, a US assembly line worker earning $33,000, may identify a 2-steps career change to requalify as construction supervisor, which is not at risk of automation and can make double that salary.

Based on user feedback, we also may include links to networks, human career coaches, micro-credentials, learning games and externships for learning about and building experience in target roles or verticals. 

Performance goal-setting is a result of practice. Ikigai ID offers job seekers the support they need to build behaviours and habits for active career management.

Ikigai ID is for at-risk workers or workers made redundant within three months in verticals that are lacking high-skill talent, like technology industry and industrial, construction, and service trades. We work with outplacement agencies, training academies or directly with the employers to reach our customers.

Professional trades are prioritised at MVP stage: skills, knowledge, and abilities have been mapped and professional qualifications exist. Technology professionals constitute our growth market.

Evidence tells us that low skilled, displaced workers and those whose jobs are most at risk need training the most but they train the least. This is due to a lack of motivation, meaningful training options, time or money. We provide affordable guidance to those with no access to career guidance but with sufficient time and money to invest in training and apprenticeship opportunities. Whilst research by MIT highlighted that we increasingly quantify different aspects of our lives, MVP testing will validate our costumes’ attitudes towards technology-assisted career monitoring and guidance. 

In Year 2 we plan to expand from the UK to Europe and the US, as we continue building brand reputation and partnerships for global expansion.

My target population are lower and middle-skill workers, less able to withstand labour market shifts especially, during a recession. This speaks to the focus of the challenge on automation and Covid-19 and their impact on job losses and shifting skill needs.

Career guidance is a crucial factor in upping participation in training opportunities by lower skill workers. Ikigai ID will offer affordable and personalised career pathways and guidance to discover and grow into higher-quality jobs and more resilient careers. Our technology-based solution therefore equips at-risk and displaced workers with skills, resources, and networks to access job opportunities.

By applying behavioural science and the latest technology to distill data-driven insights about our customers’ skills and job market’s in-demand skills into tangible job and training options and personalised career pathways, Ikigai ID makes a premium career service available and affordable to lower skill workers. We are also the first to bring labour market foresight to the worker instead of the employer and make it digestible. Our service complements existing job search and training outlets, bringing 360 support to vulnerable workers who now have at their fingertips a way to actively manage and keep on top of their career health and security.

Ikigai ID uses a unique combination of natural language processing technologies to organise CVs by skills and competencies categories and machine learning algorithms to search for these across large and diverse datasets. Adaptive learning technologies are built into our algorithms to learn from user interaction and weigh in their preferences for results selection (training/job opportunities) and interaction (guidance chatbot). In future versions we envision working off our proprietary algorithm to build predictive learning models capable of making informed predictions about in-demand skills and job configurations across sectors and industries.

From IBM Watson to Gmail, GM’s autonomous cars to Google Lens, Amazon’s to Netflix's recommendation engines, natural language processing, machine learning, adaptive and predictive technologies have wide and proven industry and user applications.

Ikigai ID provides tech-enabled, affordable and personalised career guidance to workers in jobs at risk of automation, helping them identify more resilient career pathways and training opportunities for high-quality employment, starting with low and medium skill workers across construction, industry and service trades. We do this through a unique combination of machine learning and natural language processing technologies that analyse and make sense of large, unstructured labour market datasets and with intuitive and engaging interfaces for personalised career exploration and chatbot guidance for making informed employment and training decisions.

By making career management available and affordable, intuitive and engaging, Ikigai ID breaks down common barriers of lack of motivation and information for planning career pathways and taking up training options that we know are required to fill in-demand and high-quality, high-skill job vacancies and lead to career resilience and financial security. Ikigai ID makes it a habit to check in regularly on career health. At scale, we will have contributed to building a more resilient workforce in the face of labour market shifts and economic shocks and to system change, fulfilling in-demand skills to ultimately end structural unemployment.

Our team is small and we are at Prototype stage, but from 2022 we plan to grow beyond the UK, partnering with regional recruitment and outplacement agencies; training centres; professional bodies and employers in target sectors. In the early stages of product development, user interviews will help to establish the pain and product-market fit and to iterate product versions. We will be growing the team of user and labour market researchers and AI and data experts in line with our user-led product iteration. 

Once trading, we will be measuring our impact through core business and user KPIs (unit economics; active monthly users; customer acquisition cost); output indicators (job/training match rate; NPS score) and outcome indicators (user engagement with in-app career management functions; skills, salary levels and days of unemployment national benchmarks). Control studies will help us qualify the impact of our intervention and we are seeking academic partners for designing and implementing these from Q4 2020.

2020: 0 customers (Prototype stage)

2021 target: 2,000 paying customers at $150 average price per user per year

2025 target: 2m customers - conservative growth forecast based on rate of growth of popular coaching and health management apps and dollar value of global vocational market (est. 160x, at $48b by 2024); non-sponsored professional coaching market (3x, at $1bn, 2016, ICF) and 2018 e-learning market (600x, at $190bn, GMI).

Year 1 (2020): Build founding team for Prototype validation and establish product-market fit. Raise grant or angel funding to grow team

Year 2 (2021): Grow team to develop and deliver v1; build partnerships to establish user adoption at scale and beyond UK. Start revenue generation and raise funding to grow the business in year 3 

Year 3 (2022): Grow the business and hit profitability (financial details provided further down in the application)

Financial backing in order to sustain v1 development activities in 2021 and partnerships in place in order to drive user adoption at scale.

Applying for prizes and grant funding and/or seeking angel investment

Myself full time, an IT agency (but I intend to hire developers as I raise funding) and a team of 5 advisors across neuroscience, edtech product, VC and HR backgrounds who have advised me formally and through regular advisory meetings on prototype development and user testing.

I am an executor: I have built incubators and professional development programs from boardroom to studio floor. I have established charities and built partnership initiatives across continents.

Working with clients, from my own personal experience and through the user interviews I have conducted as part of my research, I have developed empathy and appreciation for the drivers and the blockers to changing careers and re-entering the workforce from unemployment.

I started my career working in the decent jobs initiative at the ILO. I want to spend the next ten years of my life bringing practical solutions to the marketplace, at a time when this need has never been bigger.

This is my portfolio: https://gaiainesfasso.wixsite.com/resume

I am very aware that for the venture to succeed in the initial stages, I need to find at technical co-founder and this is my present priority. I have a good network of experts through my VC and start up connections. But I know that the right fit might take some time to materialise. Meanwhile, I need to keep developing the prototype and I need funding and networks in place to start validating the product.

Customer Segment: medium to low skilled workers, starting from technology industry and construction, service and industrial trades, globally

• Value Proposition: accessible, affordable, personalised career guidance to spot higher-quality, short and long term employment opportunities and make more informed employment and training decisions

• Channels: initially, through partnerships with regional recruitment and outplacement agencies; training centres; professional bodies and employers in target sectors. Then word of mouth, followed by targeted ads through most popular social media channels with our target group.

• Customer Relationships: at point of sale, mostly via the website and can be personal via live chat. Through customer engagement and sales renewal process, the relationship is automated, via the app and in-app functions and notifications. When operations are live and the customer complaints department is in place, this will be personal (outsourced).

• Revenue Streams: direct sales, starting with £150 annual membership or £14.99 monthly rolling subscription. Horizontal growth model, growing across geographies through regional partnerships. Future opportunities may include offering B2B intelligence services, depending on the competitive position on the market at the time. There is minimal direct operational input per customer, so the business model is vastly scalable with efficiencies of scale realised from year 2.

Yr 1: 2020

Income: $0

Expenses: $0.3m total (2 co-founders, 1 research analyst, IT infrastructure and operating expenses)

Net Profit: -$0.3m

Cash Balance: -$0.3m

Yr 2: 2021

Income: $0.3m

Expenses: $0.5m (2 co-founders, 1 research analyst, 2 developers, 1 sales & marketing analyst, IT infrastructure, office spaces and operating expenses)

Net Profit: -$0.2m

Unit economics (rough est.): -$200

Cash balance: -$0.5m

Yr 3: 2022

Income: $1m

Expenses: $0.5m (as yr 2)

Net Profit: $0.5m

Unit economics (rough est.): $167

Cash Balance: $0m

Cost Assumptions (per year):

$30,000 IT infrastructure 

$6,600 per desk

$50,000 average salaries for staff until year 3 (1.2x cost to business)

Notes about post-coronavirus economic slowdown:

• Evidence from 2008 financial crisis of rapid recovery in coaching industry because of structural adjustments (9% YOY median growth, Bersin by Deloitte) 

• 170% growth in e-learning in 2015-2018 (GMI), forecasted to $325 Billion by 2025 (Research and Markets), now even more likely to continue to grow  

• Structural labour market changes likely expedited.

MIT is a thought leader in the future of work landscape and the research by the team has greatly influenced my solution design. For my venture to succeed, the product needs to be backed by science and build on the latest technology. I cannot think of a more ideal technology and science partner than MIT for my particular mission.

Whilst the MIT brand carries with it important reputation and network value for the venture, the commitment to shape a positive future of the workforce by Solve and IDE and the people behind them, make MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy’s (IDE) Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC) a trusted partner also for finding distribution partners and board members.

Routes to market: outplacement agencies, training academies and employers in construction, industry and service trades and the technology industry.

Academic partners for product development (behavioural and data scientists) and for control studies design and implementation.

Team and board development.

Advocacy partners: to bring the cause of skill development and job mobility at the forefront of labour policy dialogue.

To start with, outplacement agencies, training academies and employers in construction, industry and service trades and the technology industry for recruiting users.

Then universities and research centres to inform product design and control studies design and implementation.

Finally, for profit and not for profit organisations dedicated to the cause, like GM indeed or World Economic Forum, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation or past Solver teams like Refactored.ai

The opportunity to learn from GM about how they are looking at the future of work is invaluable. Being an innovation leader in the market, that has been driving the application of new and green technologies by making the challenging shift to electric vehicles whilst responding to societal needs to produce PPE, carries with it a great responsibility to develop the workforce along with the business needs. 

GM is focussed on upskilling and reskilling for continued market innovation and resilience and I would love to understand how they are approaching and implementing this in-house and working with their suppliers. The dream would be that Ikigai ID partners with GM on a global pilot to make it easier for them and their staff to identify talent development and value-add opportunities at GM.

The Prize funding will be used to grow the team to develop v1, also with the insights acquired from GM.