SkillLab - Turning Skills into Careers

Marginalized workers face tremendous economic stress and uncertainty amid displacement by technology, outsourcing and the COVID-19 pandemic. The growing number of vulnerable and marginalized workers lack the tools to navigate the labour market and receive insufficient support in translating their skills and competences across fields or retrain for new careers. 

SkillLab provides a scalable solution that empowers workers on the basis of their skills. SkillLab provides career support, based on a skill-recognition system, that is granular, technology-enabled and data-driven. SkillLab supports the worker in building their skill profile and connects their profiles to careers, while incorporating education and upskilling offerings that address any skill gap. This enables workers to translate their skills and competences across fields and retrain for new careers. Workers are enabled to turn their skills into careers and find pathways to sustainable, resilient employment. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused short and long-term economic pain and uncertainty in numerous marginalized communities. The pandemic is likely to have accelerated existing trends of worker displacement by technology and automation. Necessary shutdowns, restrictions and social distancing measures have affected entire sectors of the economy, disproportionately affecting sectors with lower wages. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that approximately 20% of all US employees work in the most exposed sectors. Workers in these sectors have to transition to other sectors and find a pathway to resilient employment. Currently, workers receive little help in navigating this transition. Where available, employment intermediaries struggle to balance personalized career services with the need for impact at scale across a diverse population. Service delivery is impacted by the pandemic as well, as employment intermediaries, community organizations and labor unions had to shift to a remote service delivery model - A transition that has not always been smooth. This has especially affected those most vulnerable, e.g., minorities, refugees or migrants, who, without in-person service delivery, struggle to receive the requisite attention.

SkillLab provides a scalable solution that empowers workers on the basis of their skills. SkillLab provides career support, based on a skill-recognition system with a remote service delivery model, that is granular, data-driven and scalable.

Our software, which can be used on a mobile device, tablet, laptop or personal computer, builds on a skills and occupation taxonomy with 13.485 unique skills and 2942 occupations. SkillLab’s AI-based assessment engine guides the user through an interview process to capture all skills and knowledge used in prior experiences. Through this process, workers and those assisting them gain an understanding of the worker’s skill profile and can explore how their skill set relates to all careers in the labor market. On the basis of the identified career goals and available, resilient careers, workers can understand their skill gap. SkillLab identifies upskilling and education opportunities that address the identified skill gap and make the worker’s goals achievable. SkillLab provides a tool that enables workers to capture their skills, translate their skills and competences across fields, manage difficult transitions in the labor market and retrain for new careers. 

Everyone should have a pathway to employment. We designed our solution specifically to help populations where this pathway is the most opaque. SkillLab started in 2018 with a focus on integrating refugees and migrants into the labor market. Since then, we have found that our approach is useful across a wider population and we have been expanding our mission to support all marginalized workers. Today, our tool is used by:

• Refugees/migrants
• Displaced workers
• Workers from the informal sector
• Everyone who lacks formal qualifications, titles or networks. 

We develop our software with a clear commitment to human-centered-design. Our product team includes a UX-researcher, a Human centred design specialist as well as a UI-Designer who constantly engage with end-users through workshops and sessions. Together with the rest of the team, they constantly refine and evolve our value proposition towards the end-user:

• Capture your skills
• Find the right careers and their upskilling pathways 
• Create tailored application materials and CVs

Our solution is embedded in the workflow of our partner organization, who distribute the tool to the end-user. We aim to partner with employment intermediaries and community organizations that serve and understand the communities we want to reach.

SkillLab enables workers to realize and explore their skills, create a profile and use this information to explore the labor market and education offerings. In addition, SkillLab connects workers to free and accessible education offerings, offered in person or through massive open online courses. Our ambition is to bring transparency into an opaque labor and education market  to better inform workers to choose the career or learning path that suits their profile and ambitions. We aim to address multiple dimensions by adopting a competency-based approach, data-driven insights to provide careers to workers and including targeted education content for career transition.

SkillLab is planning to expand its operations and offer its solution in the United States in 2021. SkillLab had previously pursued two separate projects with partner organizations in the US, however, as these were in the context of refugee and migrant integration and the inflow of refugees to the US has decreased significantly, both due to COVID-19 and political realities, both projects were cancelled. As the SkillLab solution is adaptable, there is no strong preference for any specific US state. The most important condition for successful operation is a strong, committed partner with ties to the marginalized worker community.  

SkillLab currently consists of eleven full time employees, two independent contractors and, currently, two paid interns. We plan to hire three more full time employees by January 2021.  

The core of our solution is workforce inclusion, reducing bias in the labor market and empowering marginalized workers. As a technology company, our young organization is working on improving our gender split. 

We recognize the critical nature of workplace diversity at all levels of the organization and view this as a fundamental priority of our company. Steps that we are currently undertaking to promote gender balance include the following:

- Developing an organizational policy around diversity and inclusion

- Seeking balanced representation within our supervisory board – including individuals with experience building women-led businesses

Despite the ground we clearly aim to make-up with regards to gender balance, our co-founding and shareholding team includes women, and our flat internal decision-making structure ensures that executive decisions are made either by or with input from all co-founders – including key hiring decisions.

The core innovation of our solution is the use of technology to connect an informed worker to labor markets and education providers. At a general level, the vast majority of existing solutions connecting workers to training, education, and employment are based on high-level descriptors in resumes such as job titles and diplomas which are meant to infer experiences and abilities. This approach is proving inadequate in transferring skills from old jobs to new ones in increasingly volatile labour markets. In contrast, our innovation turns skills into careers.

Our data and technology-driven approach distinguishes itself from other solutions that attempt to address the problem in a number of ways:

• Scalability - Where the abundance of skill profiling services rely on in-person interviews, paper examinations, and specialized content, our solution combines automated processes with international skills frameworks and multi-lingual interfaces to enable us to reach millions of people at low marginal costs.

• Quality - Both the granularity and structure of career insights that our solution generates by using frameworks incorporating thousands of skills and professions distinguish our solution from those that are either too specialized to provide broad impact, or are too general to provide deep impact for individuals (such as psychometric tests)

• Adaptability - Our solution is designed to be embedded into and adapted by local partners to the reality on the ground, enabling us to provide value to a broad range of target communities around the same core value proposition.

The core technology is an Artificial Intelligence based “Skill Profiling Engine” that helps a user to capture and document his or her skills in granular detail, regardless of language, demographics, or level of formal professional or educational experience (assuming only a base level of literacy). The assessment engine connects to a series of other components, which together comprise a new application of artificial intelligence technology for skill-based career guidance.

1. Underlying Skill Framework: A taxonomy of skills and occupations that the AI assessment engine continuously analyzes to capture a user’s skill set

2. Mobile web-app with which workers can create skill profiles, explore professional personal career pathways, and directly access digital course offerings

3. Desktop web-app for administrators which enables service providers to analyze users’ skill profiles, adapt career and job titles to local contexts, and embed locally available course offerings

The AI engine and other components are all microservices that communicate with one another via API, allowing for maximum adaptability. For example, the AI engine could run on a skills framework other than the standard framework Skilllab currently uses, which is the European Skills, Competencies and Qualifications (ESCO) framework.

The technology is designed to be integrated into existing employment services provided to workers by direct service organizations, such as our partner HIAS.

*User-facing interfaces are built as progressive web applications in React. Back end system architecture is based on Ruby on Rails, hosted on Google Cloud Platform, while the AI engine is based on Python.

SkillLab’s core technology is being utilized by public, private, and nonprofit organizations across four continents to support inclusive career service provision to refugees and other marginalized groups.

In Europe, multiple partner organisations in the Netherlands, Finland, and Greece are actively using Skilllab’s technology to provide improved career services and job matching to refugees and other marginalized groups following a series of demonstration pilots across the continent with several stakeholders.

In the MENA region, the International Labour Organization is distributing SkillLab’s technology to partner organisations in Egypt and Jordan as part of the PROSPECTS project supporting host communities and displaced persons.

In Latin America, HIAS country offices in Peru, Panama, and Ecuador are using the technology as part of their livelihoods program for refugees and vulnerable host communities.

In Guinea, West Africa, the national employment agency is utilizing our AI-based skill profiling tool with unemployed youth to place them in internships and on-the-job training programmes.

In the United Kingdom, SkillLab is piloting the integration of education recommendations within the application within the context of the NESTA challenge. This involves Coursera’s course catalogue as well as courses provided by local community colleagues. 

A link to a 15-minute product demo including an introduction to the concept of Skill Profiling can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5V_6399fyM. Please note that the demo shows a previous version of the software - the latest version is currently in release and expected to be widely available from November 24th, 2020.

Our Theory of Change is centered around the rationale that quality skill-based career orientation of workers leads to more sustainable livelihoods by connecting workers to careers and targeted education and upskilling opportunities.

Activities: Skill-Based Profiling and Career Planning

By using SkillLab to generate detailed Skill Profiles, both the worker and his/her employment intermediary establish an extensive understanding of what skills the person has acquired during their past work, education, and informal experiences. They also generate a broad understanding of how his/her skill set fits within the labor market across sectors, industries, and roles. By using the app, they can visualize how closely his/her skill set aligns to specific careers and identify remaining skill gaps. These activities establish a baseline for developing a highly personalized career and learning plan that targets both intermediary jobs and online education content that provide the specific, durable skills that the jobseeker needs to obtain sustainable, long-term employment.

Outcomes: Access to Online Education Content, Training, and Work Opportunities for Upskilling

Equipped with a detailed understanding of a worker’s skills and how they relate to different careers, both the worker and employment intermediary can use SkillLab’s matching functions to enroll the workers in specific e-learning courses or identify relevant intermediary jobs - both of which can provide opportunities for the worker to gain the specific skills he/she needs to pursue careers that more closely align with his/her skill set and career interests. By integrating SkillLab with existing organizations serving the marginalized communities, our holistic approach ensures that workers will be equipped with the skills they need to effectively pursue employment.

Impact: Sustainable Livelihoods and Greater Job Security

Ultimately, better informed workers with access to skill-based career orientation, education and  training will be able to look beyond survival jobs and effectively plan and execute learning pathways towards more sustainable employment with greater job security, growth potential, and benefits.

Our goal within the next year is to both integrate and prove the use-case of embedding e-learning offerings at scale as well as to gain traction in the United States. By embedding digital course offerings from online course providers who offer free content to our target group, we want to expand the value of our skill profiling software to directly include access to education for workers using our solution. Working through SkillLab’s partner network which includes online education service providers, e.g., Accenture (Skills to Succeed Learning Exchange and Coursera, as well as potential partners such as MIT (and the MITx e-learning platform), we intend to realize the transformative potential of online learning by directly linking workers to relevant course offerings that match their skills and lead to sustainable employment. Additionally, we want to link to the content of community colleges and local training providers.

Further, we want to expand on the pilot and proof-case projects of 2020 to expand our footprint and provide our solution to as many beneficiaries as possible. We aim to grow our impact exponentially through 2021. 

Within the next 5 years, SkillLab’s goals include:

• Expanding our partnership network to expand the global reach of skill-based career orientation

• Partner with employers to directly embed localized job opportunities and opportunities to fast track marginalized workers on pathways to sustainable employment

• Support improved career orientation, education and job placement for at least 2 million marginalized workers globally

In aiming to expand globally, a challenge we face is the cost of making our solution available in new languages. While the 27 currently available languages cover many geographical use-cases, integrating new languages in high demand, such as Dari and Pashto, carry significant up-front costs which are best shared across stakeholders serving communities speaking those languages. Unfortunately this makes a 'land-and-expand' approach of offering a small pilot project unfeasible. This is similarly a challenge with e-learning platforms, which have limited course offerings available in foreign languages.

Another challenge that we face in scaling our solution is buy-in for our business model in the public sector. Integrating SkillLab's solution in public-sector initiatives has proven difficult in a rigid market where buyers are accustomed to purchasing custom software, or insist on premises software hosting and ownership of the “purchased” solution and the intellectual property contained within. We have made progress in adapting our business model for large, public clients, but selling to governments remains difficult. 

Another barrier that we all face is adapting to and conducting both business and operations under COVID-19 conditions. With great economic uncertainty and volatility, both investors and implementing partners have proven to be reticent to invest money, time and operational resources in new technologies and approaches that our solution represents. However, we anticipate that, as the focus shifts from response to recovery, the need for a solution like ours will become even more apparent. 

In order to address language barriers and adapt our solution to accommodate a broader range of target communities, we will begin piloting our new value proposition within communities that are fluent in the languages that we currently support, and we will allocate grant funding received towards integrating languages in high demand in the communities where we work. With regards to e-learning solutions, SkillLab is designing and implementing a content management system that enables our partners to easily include course offerings across content providers so that they are not limited to the courses and languages offered only by content providers with whom formal partnerships are in place.

To better serve organizations accustomed to purchasing and owning custom software, Skilllab is developing a perpetuity licensing model, allowing organizations (such as public employment agencies) to purchase unlimited licenses in perpetuity to our software at a fixed fee with an associated maintenance fee, ensuring that such stakeholders will have guaranteed access to the solution without fear of uncontrollable runaway costs associated with purchasing additional licenses for the service.

With regards to COVID-19 - on the financial side of things, SkillLab is raising funds from investors, donors, and direct customers whose mission and strategy are focused on the mitigation of the effects of the global pandemic. Operationally, SkillLab has already managed to expand partnerships by positioning the solution as one particularly suited for remote service delivery through digital channels.

Our ultimate goal is to improve the livelihoods of our beneficiaries, and with it, the key metric is: increase in net income over time (10-15 years). While we will never be able to track that variable systematically across of our users, there are a series of steps we will take in 2021 to improve our data collection:

1. Within the first quarter of 2021, we will implement mechanisms in our software to track downstream impact metrics, such as job placement &  education placement.

2. SkillLab is currently offering pro-bono 3-month pilots to non-profits, and asks for case studies and evaluations in return.

3. SkillLab’s objective is to start a randomized control trial with facilitation by J-PAL in 2021. It should be noted that performing a clinical trial would take around 12 months and conclusive and scientific impact validation is thus only expected in 2022.

The SkillLab team is uniquely positioned to address the lack of a scalable solution that empowers marginalized workers. Our team of eleven full time employees are invested in the company and bring rich experience in building startups as well as engineering data-driven products

We built an application that is a working, proven, scalable product, showing our capabilities in engineering, data science and product development. Since April 2020, we have successfully onboarded over 20 clients since and project to be able to provide our product to 1.3 million users by 2022. 

We are a social business with a clear focus on impact and want to make our solution available to those in need. While we are well positioned and have the resources to scale and expand on with our current business model, we have identified areas that need to be strengthened in order to serve workers at scale. We are currently working on addressing these areas, e.g., fully intuitive user onboarding and automated customer support, and are making great progress.

• International Labour Organization (ILO). A client of SkillLab’s and leading technical expert in international competency frameworks and skills for employment programs. Currently utilizing SkillLab’s skill profiling technology to provide employment support services to 1,500 refugee and host community job-seekers in Egypt and Jordan.

• Google (multiple entities). Skilllab is a grantee of Google.org having been selected as a winner of Google.org’s AI for  Impact Challenge and is receiving mentoring support. SkillLab is also a selected startup participating in Google’s SDG Accelerator programme, focused on mentorship to deliver impact through partnership for the Sustainable Development Goals.

• MISTI (MIT). Each summer, Skilllab takes an intern on a scholarship from the MIT computer science department.

• Coursera. Skilllab and Coursera mapped the Skill taxonomy into their content catalogue. As a result, Skilllab is poised to embed Coursera’s course offerings (which are already provided at no cost to HIAS) and recommend Coursera courses to workers on the basis of a skill gap to their desired occupations. 

• Green River. Software implementation partner based in the USA to take care of any customisation work around our core tool. 

Skilllab operates a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. We provide licences at cost to our partners based on the amount of end-users who use the product to create skill profiles to find learning and employment opportunities.

We address different customer segments: Public organisations (e.g. governments, municipalities or international organisations), private employment agencies, and nonprofit organizations - all of whom provide career and education services to marginalized communities seeking career support.

Our pricing is divided into three tiers: a basic version, allowing the use of the software; a whitelabel solution, allowing for individual branding within the app and generated documents; a custom solution, allowing customised distribution and API access. Our service is always provided free of cost to the end-user (e.g. marginalized worker).

We are planning to achieve standalone financial sustainability by 2022. We are currently in the process of closing our Seed fundraising round which will allow us to make the necessary investments to be profitable by 2022. 

SkillLab is in the process of closing its fundraising round of around 2M USD with a prestigious impact investor. We will be able to disclose the details within a few weeks, but it will set SkillLab towards a growth path with a clear impact mission. 

We will close 2020 with about 755k USD in revenue derived from service delivery to employment intermediaries as well as grant financed delivery of impact projects. 

Our budgeted expenses for 2021 are approximately USD 1.9 Million

We believe in reimagining and providing pathways to employment. This challenge is a unique opportunity to bring our solution to the US. In order to do so successfully, we need to understand the particular challenges marginalized workers face in the US labor market and adapt our solution to address these challenges. For us, this means that we need to work with and learn from local implementation partners that understand the labor market and understand the communities we would like to serve. 

Further, we would like to incorporate online and in-person education offerings that are available in the US, as well as the city, county or state in question. We would further like to work with employers, employment intermediaries, job boards and other stakeholders to incorporate local vacancies directly into the solution. 

Beyond helping marginalized workers find pathways to employment, we aim to create a replicable, scalable proof of concept around Skill based career support in the US by placing our tool into the hands of at least 25,000 marginalized workers. We believe that implementing our solution in the US context is especially valuable and addresses marginalized workers that are in need of support. 

Our two main goals for a successful partnership are centered on implementation and monitoring and evaluation. In addition to the public sector partners, i.e., regional and state workforce development boards, we would like to partner with the organizations closest to the marginalized communities who are best able to understand and serve their needs. We realize the necessity for close, mutually beneficial partnerships to serve workers. We also rely on feedback from our partners, as well as their monitoring and evaluation insights to expand and refine our approach and technology. 

The following list is alphabetical and includes organizations where we see a thematic fit as well as organizations that serve marginalized communities in other ways. The list includes: African American Planning Commission (AAPC), American Indigenous Business Leaders, Amplio Recruiting, Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA), Building Skills Partnership, Executive Leadership Council, Goodwill Industries, HIAS, Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement (HACE), Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility (HACR), International Rescue Committe (IRC), International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Jobs for the Future (JFF), Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Council of Negro Women, National Urban League, SEIU, U.S. Black Chambers, YWCA