Careershe

Careershe strives to bridge the gap between the academic world and careers by providing transparency to students on careers so that students can make a better decision during the academic pathways. We do this via our smartphone solution that allows students to access regularly updated information (requirements, incomes, future potential etc.) on different careers. We hope to reduce youths anxiety and dilemma but most importantly reduce the social cost of students leaving careers after a short stint and realizing that they wasted significant time and resources acquiring technical skills that they do not use in the future. Most importantly, by providing transparency across careers and making it accessible to all students regardless of their economic status, we hope to level the playing field from the haves and haves not and also give students a sense of purpose and reason on why they need to work hard in their education.

Nearly one-third of higher education graduates in China leaves their first job within the first 6 months of employment, according to a study by MyCOS, a leading higher education research consultancy in China. This equates to almost 2 million students yearly wasting their time due to mismatched career expectations and employers wasting millions of RMB onboarding training cost. On the other hand, if we look at the current career guidance curriculum in China, almost 90% of the high schools do not have any formal career guidance framework, teachers or tools. This means that student overemphasize on academic achievements but essentially are directionless in terms of where they want to develop their futures. We believe this is largely similar, in terms of lack of end career goal in mind, for youths outside of China especially in developing countries in Asia Pacific where education is well regarded to be important. On an individual family unit angle, one can imagine the hardship and pain when rural families realise that their kids are unable to achieve their dreams through higher education due to misaligned expectations from inadequate planning.

Careershe is based in China and is focused on helping students between 15-25 years old learn more about the world of work and providing them guidance in the pathways that lead to their desired careers. Careershe’s main product is a smartphone app that provides structured and transparent content about different occupations, e.g. qualifications required, typical working hours and salaries across the career progression. On top of the career content, the app also contains psychometric tests that provides career recommendations to students and also has a library of university majors information that shows the relationship between university majors to careers. All information are available for a low annual membership rate of 180 RMB. We are currently exploring to expand the solution to provide students further recommendations to skillsets that is required for the desired career pathways and link to our recognised skills training providers. At the backend of our solution, we would like to conduct big data analysis and use machine learning to establish relationships between youths, academic and careers so that we can draw insights for institutions to explore on ways to engage better the youth generation and prepare them in their eventual role in the future of work.

We will start focusing on high school students in China of age 15-18 years old. This is because that we understand that once the student enters into higher education, it is relatively difficult for them to change their pathways. In the earlier part of the project, we have been actively engaging with students via digital marketing while we develop our solution. Currently, we have accumulated sufficient career content and are starting to approach schools so that we can try to pilot including our solution into their curriculum. Once we have proven that our product is able to impact the students in our pilot school, we will then further roll out to other schools. We will measure our impact by directly understanding if the student users would have a good idea of the direction that they would like to take and knows the requirements of that pathway. Also, we will observe if there is an improvement in academic performance given that when the students recognise the end goal in mind, they have a better rationale to work hard towards that goal. We will be able to engage with users through the interactions on our product, surveys and feedback from teachers.

We believe the most important thing for the youths across all income levels and locations is awareness. Without awareness, youths are basically clueless on the path they set foot towards. Furthermore, current online information can be cluttered and untruthful at times and thus it is important that Careershe becomes the one stop resource for students to rely on all career and academic pathway information. As we scale, we believe that we will be able to bring down the price lower so that it will be even more affordable for the poor in China and even across the world

There are different ways to provide career guidance to high school students (but currently mostly absent in China). One way is a school career counsellor will talk about the importance of career planning in class. Another is potentially websites where students out of their curiosity may use search engine to look for related career info. Otherwise, there might be some similar EdTech company providing synopsis of careers on their platforms.

In a way, we are different from all of the above as our product is seen as an one-stop solution of all career and academic related information. The information is structured and easily compared between different occupations - for e.g. you can compare between a lawyer and a computer game developer. This can be done only because our career information are all well structured. More importantly, we provide the facts and actual knowledge of the career that users after looking through our content will have a better understanding and would be sufficient to make a decision to say whether this job is suitable or not. On the other hand, most of the current solutions only focuses on teaching a student on the importance of career planning but when the student wants to know more about a specific industry or interest area, they are asked to simply go read up more on their own. We have tools (and are continuously improving via AI) to provide better and better recommendations to the students on careers.

Firstly, Careershe is a smartphone app that interacts with the student users which means we are able to get personal information about the users (e.g. age, gender, grades, interests, personalities). Also, there will be information about the academic majors and different universities. Lastly, there is also information about careers which I have explained previously. This is actually a big data of information which we will connect them currently via our relational database. We are upgrading our data architecture into a graph mode so that we can visually understand how the data are connected with each other.

Secondly, given the large data set and its information interconnectedness, we will apply neural network and machine learning to look for correlations between the relationships across the metadata and tagging of student personal info, academic info and career info. This will enable us to draw relationship in terms of providing better and better recommendation for users on what is careers may be suitable for them given their input information and also even specific insights that are useful for institutions. 

Thirdly, Careershe hopes to be a platform that accompanies the journey of users throughout their student development from high school to university and ultimately their first jobs. Throughout the process, we hope that users can input their achievements and certifications into our system where we can do verification with the help of blockchain technology. This allows future referencing from employers and also a central database for students.

We are still in the evaluation phase of the technology and thus will still need more time to determine that we will proceed with each specific technology. However, for big data, we are considering to use the technology developed by Oxford Semantics. For AI, this is a common machine learning technology that is used by search engines through metadata tagging. For blockchain, there are quite a few solutions out there but we will take reference from the open source version of Singapore government GovTech OpenCert.

We believe that our solution has the ability to change is because we have identified an unique opportunity to help Chinese high school students to solve their immediate pain-point and also provide a long term solution to their dilemma. Due to education revamp by Chinese ministry of education, there is an earlier need for students in high school year one to decide on the subjects that they need to take for the final year exam. There are 20+ subject combinations to choose from and different combinations will pave a different pathway as it restricts the possibilities of universities majors. In order to help students to effectively solve this problem, the best way is to allow students to start realizing first what are their interest and what possible careers that they might want to do. Next best on their selected careers, we can then understand what types of university majors are suitable for these careers. And with the selection of appropriate university majors, we are then able to tell what are the subjects selections during high school.

Through this process, the students will get to realise that there is a tool that is able to provide very good information about careers and would in any part of their academic revisit this information is able to do so as we established our positioning as a one stop career and academic resource centre.

Given the functionality of product serves the common major pain-point of the high school students, usage can be widespread as long as there are no alternative solutions that competes directly with our platform. And when our product is able to reach to the rural areas due to the high penetration of smartphone in China, the impact can be observed as rural students have the opportunity to understand careers in the urban cities which they have no idea about and likewise for urban students to understand careers in the rural areas.

Currently we have about 5,000 registered users on our platform and our target is to have about 30,000 paying customers and in 2025, we hope to reach to 1.8 million paying customers and this represents only 5% of the market share. With a large userbase, we may consider dropping our price and thus would ultimately result in a even larger 25% of our serviceable addressable market which would be close to 8 million users.

Our goal for next year is to advance the product development and prove traction in terms of paid users and also successful pilots across different schools. We would also like to kickstart with a joint research together with University of Oxford and a local Chinese university in order to build a framework that will help youths in China to identify their skills and competencies required for the future of work. On top of that, we will like to start building an interactive platform that allows high school students to connect more with each other and also lay out their achievements in the profile page.

In 2025, our goal is to reach 1.8 million paid users and also achieve a revenue of 500 million RMB and a EBITDA margin of 25%. We would like to have a significant number of corporate partnerships (overseas education, skills training providers and hiring companies) and also allow our product to not only serve the high school students but also the university students and early careers changers. Lastly, we hope that by 2025 we already have successfully utilised our big data and AI engine to provide better recommendations to the users. At the same time, users are happy to accompany our journey while they continue navigating their pathways together with Careershe.

The biggest hurdle for us would be the successful adoption of solution by the market. This means that we will need to re-iterate on many different possibilities to find a successful go to market strategy that allow us to spread across China and even outside. 

The 2nd hurdle is the ability to find good talents to work on this project and also retain them. As we are unable to rival tech talents like those working for big companies like Alibaba or Tencent, we will need to find innovative ways to obtain talent to work on our project.

The next hurdle is to manage compliance of censorship in our platform. Given that we are operating in China which we need to be careful on what is posted in the portal.

1. We are actively fundraising and we understand that fundraising cycles typically will take 6 months. Thus it means that during each round of fundraise, we will estimate that we have sufficient funds to tide us across the next round of fundraising. As long we are able to pull through to 2023, based on the business model, we will be profitable and by then we will not need to further fundraising.

2. In order to get good talents in the company, there is a need to create a positive employer branding culture. This will ultimately lead to overall branding of the product and thus allow us to spread via word of mouth.

3. At the current stage, we are able to conduct manual monitoring of communication posted in our platform. However as we scale, we will need to use technology like NLP of A.I. to help to monitor and quickly detect and stop malicious or political messages before it impacts the reputation of Careershe.

Not relavant

We have currently 10 persons working on this startup. We have 1 CEO, 1 COO, 1 Senior Education Manager, 1 Business development, 2 Content personnel and 4 product development. All of the staffs are currently working on full time.

At the same time, we have advisors on business strategy by a senior executive and career content expert advisor who are in our advisory board.

Our largest strengths is that both myself and COO do not come from an education or career counselling background but an industrial background and we exactly know what is important for students to know in the aspect of careers. We are also complimented with a senior education research expert who has a lot of experience on the high school and university admission process and requirements.

However, we are also cognizant that we need more talents to be part of the team. We will like to have a systems architect (also potential CTO) so that we can start to develop our big data and AI systems in our platform. Secondly, we will like to have a Chief of Product who is in charge of user engagements and user design to help improve the user experience of the product. Lastly, we will like to have a psychometric expert to help us to develop our own psychometric assessment based on our data inputs that we have gathered.

Careershe is an incubatee company of Oxford University Innovation (OUI) software incubator program. OUI is currently a shareholder of Careershe and is helping us on R&D of big data and AI and also establishing the joint-research between Department of education in Oxford and a local Chinese university (to be determined)

We are also part of TusPark incubator program and they have over 100 offices across China that allows us to access to different startup support and also has historical relationship with some of the top universities in China.

On corporate partnership, we are working with BestTop consulting who can help us to provide guidance to students whom are interested in studying overseas from China and increase their working exposure internationally.

Our commercialization model as of now is to charge 180 RMB (USD 25) per user for an annual access to our premium information about careers. This is priced according to the cost of a textbook in high school and also through our surveys the users in general are open to spend about 200RMB per year for career guidance related products. In terms of market size, we estimate the market to be 10 billion RMB (1.5b USD) and our obtainable market of about 0.5 billion RMB (80m USD). As our product builds further, we will be able to grow auxiliary services like personalised counselling, industry placements, referrals to skills training providers / private education institutions and employer branding etc. The reason that we like to work with these partners is because that it will provide more options for students who may not be performing well academically but have a specific direction that he/she might want to strive for. 

We are a for profit organisation and expected to turn profitability by 2023 based on our business projections. Currently we have already funded for 0.5 million USD and will need a further funding of 5 million USD for the next 3 years due to loss making years. By 2025, we aim to reach 80 million USD in terms of revenue and positive EBITDA which will able to sustain the business on its own. 

We are applying to solve because we believe our solution is able to transform how the world looks at career guidance and recognise its importance in the whole education journey. This will allow more emphasis on better curriculum building and also give hopes to youths of all income level on their futures at their choice. Fundraising is one part to achieve this goals.

For Product/service distribution - we hope that we will be able to pilot more schools in China.

For Funding and revenue model, we will like to have mentors who can guide as to obtain funding and also navigating the negotiation process.

For Talent recruitment, we hope that the mentors are able to provide resources to recruit good talent for the startup. On the other hand, as our business model requires us to speak to career experts and if mentors are able to make referrals, it will be operationally effective.

For Board members & advisors, we will need to set up a proper board process in order to honour the shareholder agreement signed with OUI but also it is important to have adequate check & balances.

For marketing and PR, it is definitely useful as it will allow us to have more exposure to different stakeholders and to scale.

We would like to partner with leading institutions that works on the skills framework of future of work and also the ability to introduce our solution to the senior education ministerial level in China. We strongly believe that we will need to focus on doing well first in China and before we start expanding our solution outside of China into Asia Pacific and developing countries. 

Although we are currently focused on high school students, our product can actually be useful for early careers between 22 years old to 30 years old as they go through the phases of career transition and significant learning on the ways of work. By providing a transparent source of career information, these early career youths are able to determine if what they are doing are based on their passion and interest and measurable to the incomes and future income potential. Most importantly, Careershe will list down the critical skills required in the jobs and also provide an avenue to look for reputable training providers of these skills. This is especially helpful as the world of work will hasten its space of change and would update quicker than in the past. We will be able to keep up to speed on the changes in the careers and provide the most up to date platform for the early career youths. Lastly, the early career youths will also be able to store their achievements and qualifications into our platform so that they can easily gain trust from employers.

In general, Careershe product uplifts the entire education spectrum as our focus on helping all students and youth to find a dream career should resonate well with everyone across different income backgrounds. We strongly believe that if we are able to help our users to establish their end goal in mind, they will know what is important to focus on and thus improve their learning ability. In fact, we discovered through hundreds of interviews that the critical success factor in career advancement is the mastery of foreign language especially in English. Thus we have always highlighted in our career videos that the importance of such a language skill. More importantly, as our solution is mostly in smartphone app in both video and text format and with significant amount of content in text, we hope that when there is mass adoption of users of our product, it creates an incentive for users to try to understand what is being mentioned in the text. Our videos always comes with subtitles that will allow viewers who are illiterate to first listen to the content but eventually pick up key words from the subtitles to improve their language capability.  

Artificial intelligence has been a cornerstone for Careershe since day one when we startup our journey. We strongly believe that AI will allow us to connect a lot of unstructured data and help us to draw correlations and insights between an individual characteristic to their academic related information to the different types of careers. We are trying to break down and classify the information that surrounds these three fields so that we can effectively understand the factors that influence in this journey through the students pathway. Through AI, we will be able to analyse on a large population what actually matters for a career success and on humanity level help to allocate resources efficiently according to people's passion and also desired careers. It will also gives a reflection to employers and societies to make changes to compensation levels on macro level given the demand and supply situation of careers in the world. One can imagine the amount of social cost being optimised if we are able to prevent less employment turnovers, higher job satisfaction and potential increase in productivity when the masses have the opportunity to know what they want to work in. 

Careershe solution has always a strong sense for profitability even though it may not be extremely lucrative but it has always focused on the mass market and helping middle class and poor to have a equal playing field as the elites who have access to these information and networks. As mentioned above in AI Humanity Prize description, we strongly believe that we are able to bring major impact to the society as it gives an evidence based methodology on what are the potential career outcomes and gives everyone a chance to know how to work towards their goals. The implicit impact would lead to majority of people to work harder as they have an end goal in mind and would not waste too much of their effort and hard work in area that does not make sense or resonate with their life purpose in the end. Of course, the users are always able to try something new and using our solution they will be able to identify and move towards what they like to try more effectively and allows the society to converse and optimise its resources.