SkillCat

Today, blue collar workers can’t effectively reskill for new jobs. As automation causes layoffs, community colleges are failing workers transitioning to new industries. This has caused a 20% decline in real blue collar income since the 1970s. 

Even with so many underemployed workers, industrial companies struggle to find talent. 75% cannot find enough qualified skilled trade workers and churn is often over 50%. 

We’re building a virtual simulator to solve this problem. We source workers from other industries and train them through a virtual simulation bootcamp to learn key job skills. Then, we assess their skills in the simulator - replacing the traditional interview with a skills-based hiring process to choose the best candidates. 

As automation disrupts traditional industries, blue collar workers cannot stay in the same industries forever. Our simulator empowers workers to rapidly reskill and get great jobs in the right industry at the right time. 

Today, blue collar workers can’t effectively reskill for new jobs. As automation causes layoffs in industries like manufacturing, community colleges are failing workers transitioning to new industries. This has caused a 20% decline in real blue collar income since the 1970s. 

For laid-off workers the status quo to reskill is an in-person community college or trade school. These work great for a small subset of the population. Most workers 1) cannot afford taking 1-2 years away from the workforce to be a full-time student  and 2) do not want to go back to school. So most workers don’t reskill at all and instead move from a high-skilled trade job to a low-skill retail or labor job after being laid-off. 

To master a skilled trade, you must learn by doing. For years, industrial companies have avoided training and assessing workers digitally because it’s not possible to learn electrical and mechanical skills through a video and it’s not possible to assess these skills through a quiz question. 

Through our years training in oil & gas, we’ve realized that simulation can resolve this problem. Unlike conventional e-learning, simulation allows workers to get hands-on, scenario-based experience in key job skills. Unlike a simple quiz, simulation allows companies to assess worker aptitudes and skills.

Our online simulator enables learning & assessment to go digital - our simulator lets the hiring process for skilled trade workers be just as objective as the hiring process for computer scientists. 

Our solution is simple: workers skill up for free for skilled trade jobs; companies assess top candidates through our simulator. We take a 6% cut of every hire. 

During my senior year of college, I did research on the BP oil spill and realized that ineffective training was a primary cause of the disaster. I started LearnToDrill to introduce edtech to the oil & gas industry. Over the next 4 years, our team built animated training & simulations to train 25,000 oil & gas workers, translating our products to 5 languages in 50 countries across the globe. 

One of our most exciting projects was working with Chevron to build an iPad/iPhone based Drilling Simulator. Workers skill-up in a virtual environment alongside an AI instructor. Companies get automated reports on worker scores & skill levels. 

In March, COVID struck and devastated oil & gas. I started getting emails from talented workers on our platform getting laid off and going to work at grocery stores. Workers did not know what industries to turn to and couldn’t afford 2 years at a community college. We realized our simulator could help these workers more rapidly reskill. 

Faced with these client insights, we decided to repurpose our simulator into a hiring platform to help laid off workers reskill for industries that need their skills. SkillCat was born.

At SkillCat, we're solving the largest social problem of our time: non-college educated workers do not have access to middle class jobs. These jobs do exist - there are many companies facing huge shortages of blue collar workers. We're building a platform to bring these two groups together. 

Through our platform, we make it easier for these workers to access these jobs through a skills based assessment that recommends them the right jobs for their skills, free simulation-based training, and access to employers. We're democratizing the process of switching careers, making it easier and more convenient for everyone.

15 people

We try to keep our company as diverse as possible! On our executive team, we have both racial and gender diversity and, with every hire, we prioritize different perspectives to make our team optimally successful. 

For laid-off workers the status quo to reskill is an in-person community college or trade school. These work great for a small subset of the population. Most workers 1) cannot afford taking 1-2 years away from the workforce to be a full-time student  and 2) do not want to go back to school. So most workers don’t reskill at all and instead move from a high-skilled trade job to a low-skill retail or labor job after being laid-off. 

For companies the status quo is to hire through recruiters & referrals. This is failing due to a massive worker shortage; older workers (Boomers) are retiring without being replaced by young people. Since every worker is in such high demand, many job positions simply remain unfilled. And when companies look outside the industry to source workers from Indeed or LinkedIn, they struggle to assess their abilities correctly, leading to 50% churn.