How She Did It

Powering Myanmar with Women Talent 

Work-life expectancy for women in Myanmar can be so short that it ends as they turn 30 years of age or start a family.  HR practices used by majority of companies in Myanmar focus heavily on the demographic information such as age and gender, rather than talent.  This systematic barrier prevents women from continuing to grow their career or returning to workforce after taking career break to raise a family.  As a result, there are only 50.2% of women participating in the workforce and 5% of women in leadership position.  When studying how this half of the population of women make it to the workforce and somehow thrive professionally, we discover that resources, trainings and mentorship are available to those from upper middle and above socioeconomic status.  For the other half of the women population to join in the workforce, what they actually need are the 21st century work skills, mentorship and connection to guide them back on the career track for growth.  

We solve the issue of women losing their talent in the transition of career changes and career gap with our platform "How She Did It" to redefine 'women and work' through high quality content and community.  Our platform is prototyping career navigator for mid-career women to upskill them for the 21st century workforce, explore career opportunities, set professional goals and connect them to economic opportunities.  We believe that women must be 100% involved in the decision that shape our financial, business and social landscape.  Our platform commits to help women thrive no matter what life stage they are at. 

By focusing on women returning to workforce, we are helping the most vulnerable demographic affected by the changes in technology and economy.  As Myanmar is leapfrogging through the rapid changes in technology, we want to use it as an advantage.  The use of our AI-enabled career navigator will help women continue to thrive and achieve economic independence. This solution has potential to help not only women in Myanmar but also the women from our neighboring countries with similar socioeconomic culture and structure.  According to studies, by 2020 we will have people from five different generations working at the same workplace.  This also applies to Myanmar in about five years because many international companies are coming in.  For the whole country to progress, we need to tap into this hidden pool of talent.  In order to tap into it, How She Did It is preparing women with digital skills and work ethics in order to fill in the skill shortage in Myanmar labor market. 

We build a platform with the contribution of “Global Writers Club” which involves people from around the world to create content for women in Myanmar for their professional development.  The contents are categorized by skills, professional, personal, industry, family and social topics. At our headquarter in Yangon, we have a research team that gives trainings, hosts regular support group and takes surveys to create feedback loop with the community. The feedbacks are for the “Writers Club” to create relevant content and for us to prototype an AI-enabled career navigator which is frequently tested and improved in the community.  

At an early stage, we use chatbot in Facebook Messenger to prototype the career navigator.  This technology helps us reach many users at little to no cost. The data and feedback we collect from conducting trainings and career coaching sessions with women are used in the AI-enabled chatbot to create the conversations and collect informations.  We are improving the system by eventually adding the advises in response to the conversations.

We are learning and trying to reach out to experts in Artificial Intelligence and more advanced technology to help us implement a better version of the career navigator.  

In the next 12 months (August 2019), we have two goals.

1)We aim to reach 1 million community on Facebook and half a million on our platform.  The community is strong matrix for us to measure our success because it shows engagement and addressing the needs of the community.  

2)We will launch our Career Navigator app in Myanmar within the first year. 

Our vision for the next five years is to be able to provide our solutions (Career Navigator app) to Myanmar’s neighboring countries with similar socioeconomic needs, such as Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippine where the countries are opening up but women are marginalized by the fast change. 

The prototype of “CoachBot” was deployed via chatbot into our Facebook community.  Within five months of officially launching our platform, our community has grown into more than 11,000 women. We’re focusing on building the engaging community through high quality content.  We will be building a more engaging community on our website while continuing to build the Facebook community to test and run the solutions we prototype. 

When the app is ready, we can deploy through B2C into our community and B2B through partnership with corporations for their employees.

We are currently serving our community in two ways.

1)We have been giving skill building trainings and transitional life coaching sessions offline for five months. We have transformed the lives of 68 women who are thriving in the professional, personal and social aspects of their lives.

2)We also serve our clients with high quality educational contents that help them with professional and personal development.  Through our educational content, we've built a highly engaging community of 11,000 women in our Facebook community in five months. 

Through our trainings and coaching both online and offline, we expect to reach 10,000 in the next 12 months and 50,000 in the next 3 years. The population we’re serving is women age 25 to 55, who are in career transition and want to continue to build their skills and advance their career, including entrepreneurial venture. We measure the results by them reaching the career goals they set for themselves.

Through our educational content and career navigator, we expect to reach 1 million community on Facebook in the next 12 months and 5 millions in the next 3 years.  

We are a team of five key people

As the CEO/Founder, I take the responsibility to drive the whole organization to the vision. My expertise as transitional life coach help us develop the career navigator.  

Our CTO has 11 years of experience working in IT field and is responsible for the platform and chatbot functions.

Our COO has over 7 years of experience in research and marketing and is responsible for managing the feedback loop, maintaining and analyzing the data for career navigator.

Our two Business Development employee works on partnership with companies to onboard women through 'returnship' programs.

We have three types of revenue models -

1)Our current revenue model is through trainings and coaching sessions online and offline.  

2)As we are growing the community based on content, we will have another stream of income through advertising and affiliate marketing. We don’t plan to charge our community (women) for our content to gain knowledge and skills.  We will charge companies that want to include ads or apply affiliate marketing with us.

3)Once our career navigator is ready for use, we will adopt subscription model (freemium/premium model) to use the app.

Two reasons we apply for Solve -

1)We would like to tap into the community of like-minded innovators, thinkers and experts to help the women community in Myanmar advance their lives.

2)We would like to get mentorship from the Solve community in technology because Myanmar still has very limited resources in advanced technology such as AI, machine learning and data analysis for decision making which is an integral part of our solution.  

The key barrier is the lack of advanced technology and Artificial Intelligence in Myanmar.  We have less than 5 experts in AI subject and very limited access to them to get advices. We hope that through Solve, we get connected to more technology experts to help us gain more knowledge and connections in overcoming this technology barrier.