CareerVillage.org: Democratizing Access

Young people are 3x more likely to be un/underemployed than adults and over the next ten years, an estimated 1B young people will enter the labor market [1]. Our competitive, rapidly advancing digital economy combined with pandemic setbacks creates major challenges for students in preparing for the future of work and those already navigating a depressed economy. This challenge disproportionately impacts marginalized communities who often lack access to career guidance services. CareerVillage is a comprehensive solution to this problem, democratizing access to a wide range of resources and support needed to achieve successful career outcomes, not just for youth, but also for adult learners and job seekers. Our technology and powerful, expanding partnerships allow for impact at a massive scale: the opportunity for hundreds of millions of youth to feel supported in their pathways to employment. 

[1] https://plan-international.org...

We are focused on youth un/underemployment and in particular, the growing divide between youth from low income or marginalized communities as compared to more economically advantaged peers as they navigate the job market. This discrepancy is exacerbated by COVID-19 and it is crucial that we establish interventions and preventative measures to ensure an equitable future economy, where all youth know the options they have to succeed and how to achieve them. In the US alone, there are 500 students to 1 guidance counselor [1]. Students are completing their education or dropping out unsupported and unprepared to successfully enter the labor market. Learners are unaware of the options available to them, the steps they can take to recognize these options, and how to set themselves up for success. There is a lack of guidance for 1 billion students - our future workforce, facing a pandemic-era depression, racial injustice, and an advancing digital economy and we aim to fill this gap.

[1] Tate E: Student-to-Counselor Ratios are Dangerously High. Here’s How Two Districts Are Tackling It. EdSurge. 2019.

CareerVillage.org is an online platform and community using the power of crowdsourcing to democratize access to personalized career advice for underserved students at a massive scale. We created a program that is designed to build the muscle of career preparation. We have three user types: Students, Professionals, and Educators. Our model nudges students to get in the habit of taking micro-actions towards their career throughout their education journey in three main ways: by asking career questions, creating career plans or To Do Lists, and setting career goals. On CareerVillage.org, students can get the answer to any question from any career from a real working professional or educator, one of our +70,000 volunteers, in under 24 hours on average. Students routinely receive suggestions on their career plans and are encouraged to set career goals. The technology is designed to empower student agency in their career journey and instill a sense of belief in their ability to achieve their dreams. The result has been higher career engagement, self-efficacy, and career maturity for CareerVillage students with an ultimate goal of helping students to achieve gainful employment within 6 months of completing their education.

Every day thousands of students and adult workers visit CareerVillage.org seeking career advice. Our target population is marginalized youth from communities of color, low-income individuals, women, and first generation immigrants or college students. Our organizations’ growth is informed by interactions observed on the platform and through direct conversations with underrepresented workers and students. We believe it is important that those we are serving have an ongoing seat at the decision table. Prioritizing student voices is a large part of why our platform has been so successful in addressing their need for career guidance. Here are just a few examples of how we incorporate student input:  

1. Each week our Community Team reviews all user interactions including support tickets, content moderation queue, and user activity statistics. This kickstarts the week’s strategic focus informed directly by student users.

2. We regularly receive feedback from our students regarding how to improve advice they receive. This information is communicated to our volunteers in their onboarding experience.

3. During COVID we contacted every user on CareerVillage to see how they were and what resources would be helpful. This resulted in the creation of numerous newsletters, compiling job resources, and resume support. 

Our solution fits into the dimension focused on helping learners make informed decisions. We believe in order to address this challenge, we must leverage innovation and technology. In facilitating interaction between students, employers, and educators one of our goals is to bridge the information gap many learners face. In essence, CareerVillage is a massive career information hub. The website is entirely public, which means students not only ask questions, but also read what others are asking and learn from their peers. This helps minimize the divide between marginalized communities and their wealthier peers in addition to providing insightful industry data.

Our team is composed of 6 full time staff members, 4 contract workers, and 2 part-time interns.

Staff Directory: 

• Jared Chung, Executive Director

• YoonJi Kim, Director of Operations

• Rebecca Gitomer, Special Projects Manager 

• Natalie Dunn, Partner Success Manager

• Jordan Rivera, Senior Community Manager

• Gurpreet Lally, Community Manager

• Alex Carpenter, Community Management Associate

• Abby Lupi, Community Intern 

• Contracted Engineers: Federico Roda, Juan Abbona, Gabriela Golmar, Matías Caporale.

It truly takes a village to keep our community thriving.

At CareerVillage, we are committed to establishing a diverse and inclusive organization as we hire new staff and grow our community. Our team is +67% female and +67% people of color. Additionally, we have a diverse set of professional backgrounds from political science to education to finance, which contributes to our impression of the value in diversity. As we expand our team and operations, we know that maintaining a diverse pool of perspectives is crucial to our success. This is something we take extremely seriously and with significant care. We are always looking for ways to be more inclusive, such as adding preferred gendered pronouns to zoom calls and email signatures. Our philosophy here boils down to wanting to be an example for the change we’d like to see at a macro level. 

CareerVillage is the first ever crowdsourced career advising platform and only one of its kind. Our model uses crowdsourcing to make career advice open for free, to everyone in the world. It is more scalable, effective, and cost-effective than alternative solutions:

(a) Mentorship and career training programs: These programs are expensive, harder to scale, and try to solve individual problems with one-size-fits-all solutions.

(b) K-12 guidance counselors: With almost 500 students for every school counselor, they are overburdened and under-resourced.

(c) Static internet content: Current online searches or web articles are not personalized or comprehensive, and ineffective at driving students to take action. 

Another aspect of innovation is our approach to data collection. This grant will provide us necessary means to expand our program and cement our strategic priorities as we look into the future. One of these priorities is sharpening our data collection and analysis. The millions of interactions on our site means CareerVillage hosts a tremendous amount of insights on the labor market from both student/worker and employer perspectives. A few examples of how this is useful: extracting data on job seekers, employee satisfaction, and employers’ needs to better understand the supply and demand. Our data can help guide the future workforce, allow employers to understand current and future employees needs, and align economic development. To conclude, our innovation extends beyond the functionality of our technology into important economic insights into who we can partner with to maximize this information.

CareerVillage.org technology provides personalized career advice at a massive scale, without sacrificing quality for quantity. We achieve that through crowdsourcing (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow). 

On CareerVillage.org student users have access to three core activities: (1) asking career questions (2) creating To Do Lists or career plans (3) setting career goals. Here is a more detailed way on how each functions

1. Students ask a question on CareerVillage and this is sent out and matched using AI to our +70,000 volunteers or experts in their fields. Students will receive a response, likely several to allow for multiple perspectives, within 24 hours on average. 

2. Students can create unlimited to do lists on CareerVillage, both for their future careers, schoolwork, or personal life. This feature is intended to help students get in the habit of taking steps towards achieving their goals. Professionals add suggestions to student To Do Lists, making it the first and only crowdsourced to do list. 

3. Students are encouraged to add a career goal statement to their profile, which gives them a clearer direction and allows for more personalized advice targeted around a goal. 

Everything on CareerVillage is public, which allows students to get inspiration from peers’ questions and site activity. We have robust chat features that connect students to our staff for hands-on help in crafting questions, goals, or any other site features a student is struggling with. Furthermore, it is our commitment to high quality technology that will prove essential for our future data collecting ambitions. 

BY THE NUMBERS:

• Statistically significant proven increase in career self-efficacy and maturity with effects persisting for +3 months following just one 40-minute intervention. 

• Crowdsourcing Effectiveness: 98% answered rate, average question receives 5 answers, +70,000 volunteers. 

• Scale: 4.5M served, +8,000 career topics

AT THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL: 

• “Being a first-gen US citizen, it’s hard finding people with experience to steer you in the right direction. However CareerVillage has provided me with the guidance to make smart decisions concerning my career. After reading my advice, I began researching prerequisites for finance jobs and to explore my interests through more extracurriculars.” - Armani L. (Boston, MA)
• “All the advice I received made me feel more confident and reassured. I realized that the professionals have been in my shoes before and I can make it through as well. CareerVillage shaped where I am today and where I want to be tomorrow.” - Victoria G. (Simpsonville, SC)
• “When I listened to the advice that was given and it landed me my first job I was really excited to be pursuing my passion.” - Devetra C. (Jacksonville, FL)

FOR WORKFORCE BOARDS: 

• “At the Berkshire Workforce Board, we’ve promoted CareerVillage as an innovative online resource for our young people even before COVID-19 - but after lockdowns hit, it became a go-to-program for us. As a rural region, access to tens of thousands of vetted community professionals is monumental for our students. I’d strongly recommend other workforce boards look into it.” – Kat, Masshire Berkshire Workforce Board

PRODUCT DEMO

THEORY OF CHANGE

Individual Outcome: Youth attain financially-sustainable post-graduation employment

Outputs:

1. Career Self Efficacy: Belief in one's ability

2. Career Goals: Set and iterate on career goal statements

3. Career Plans: Develop a strategy for achieving goals

4. Habit of Action: Thousands of routine, smaller actions

Inputs and activities: Students will ask career questions and get career advice, encouragement, and suggestions from over 70,000 working professionals. 

Systems Change Outcome: Re-center the student in career planning. 

HOW WE KNOW THIS THEORY OF CHANGE WORKS

1. Academic Research:

   1. Professor Andreas Hirschi’s Career Engagement Scale defined as “proactive career behaviors” that connect workplace identity to career self-efficacy and ultimately job satisfaction and retention. In other words Career Engagement measures career development behaviors. Results of this study prove the correlation between agency, sense of identity, and career success. [1]

   2. Dr. Albert Bandura’s theory of Self Efficacy, which proves correlation between believing in one’s abilities to the successful embrace of adulthood responsibilities. [2]

   3. Dr. Mark Savickas’ Career Adaptability Theory is defined as the enhanced ability to prepare for work, adjust to unpredictable changes, and transition into new work roles. [3]

2. Lived Experience: Through the millions of interactions we monitored on CareerVillage, we’ve directly observed that our students follow this progression. In particular, we’ve learned to emphasize career engagement especially as its correlated to student success on CareerVillage and in the real world. 

CITATIONS

[1] Hirschi A, Freund P. A., Herrman A: The Career Engagement Scale: Development and Validation of a Measure of Proactive Career Behaviors. Journal of Career Assessment. 2013. 

[2] Bandura, A: Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review. 1977.

[3] Savickas, M. L., Brown, S. D., Lent, R. W: The theory and practice of career construction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2005.

Looking forward, our 3 year strategic plan has three major priorities: engaging student networks, scaling our operations, and gathering data and informing research.

1. Student Networks: Building and unlocking networks including all of our work with educators (Curriculum + District fee-for-service model), place-based campaigns (“Big Ask”), and expanding activity in “D&I groups”

2. Scaling Operations: Volunteer recruiting, expanding coaching and moderation, investing in our platform and technology.

3. Data and Measurement: Conducting independent research and building partnerships with major researchers, gathering and publishing insights on career readiness and labor market, exposing findings that either validate or improve relevant programs’ methodology, expose gaps between student goals and the systems they’re subjected to.

At a high level and into the future, we’d like to see billions of youth receive career advice through CareerVillage and become the gold standard for career information. Our strategic priorities map to this ambition. By engaging student networks such as educators, parents, alumni, local employers, city officials, etc. we will have a natural growth in our operations. This will be combined with other initiatives to directly scale including expanding our partnerships at the district level, with Workforce Boards, and higher education institutions (both community colleges and public and private universities). Additionally, our dedication to data and measurement includes implementing robust quality analysis technologies directly into our system to improve and scale our content moderation. 

Like any solution with ambitious goals, there are major challenges on the path to execution. Here are a few barriers we may face in the future: 

1. Technology: As we scale our operations, we will need to ensure we have the technological infrastructure to support new users. This will require hiring full time engineers, onboarding them to our team, and expanding our yearly budget to support new technical staff members. Expanding our operations are primarily contingent on our ability to hire the right people and maintain lofty fundraising goals to support their continuation on our team. 

2. Legal: This is less a barrier than it is an area for caution as we generate data and publish market insights from our platform. We take user information seriously and want to make sure we maintain our high standard as we grow our program. 

3. Data: We face barriers in tracking user activity after they have left the platform to confirm outcomes and long term impacts. 

4. Market: There is no consensus on how career readiness and engagement is assessed, at what stage in the education journey such interventions should occur, and how to implement the most effective programming. For our solution to be as comprehensive and effective as possible, we must prove our philosophy, approach, and methodology to the labor market. With so many divergent opinions on what matters in this space and an overall lack of funding in career preparation, we face a major challenge in unifying leaders and major stakeholders. 

1. Technology Barrier: We are confident in the existing relationships and network we’ve established in the technology space to help guide us through our envisioned expansion. Our approach to solving this barrier has three components: (1) increasing our fundraising efforts to expand our yearly budget, (2) leveraging our network of technology experts and (3) building new partnerships in the field to make sure we are comparing notes to the latest advances in the field. 

2. Legal Barrier: We plan to address this barrier through forming strong partnerships and relationships with research leaders and data-gathering experts. This will be done through building upon our existing relationships with organizations such as WestEd and forming new relationships with academic researchers and legal experts. We believe this grant will open new doors in this regard. 

3. Data Barrier: Investing in data scientists, data-gathering experts, and technology infrastructure will help us overcome this barrier. 

4. Market Barrier: Overcoming this barrier will be accomplished through better establishing CareerVillage as an expert in the field of career readiness and workforce development - a component of our third strategic priority: Data and Measurement. This will be done through publishing research papers, authoring blog posts and books, speaking with other industry experts in panels, forming external partnerships to generate goodwill throughout the field.

Given the massive amount of students CareerVillage impacts, it is difficult to track employment outcomes and successes over time. The major challenge we have been working to solve revolves around the significant portion of students who visit CareerVillage without creating an account. Instead they come to CareerVillage.org to read posted advice and other students' questions. The upside of our public-facing content is this ability to reach more students and have a wider impact (in other words: you don’t need to create an account to receive career advice). However, the downside is that we have less data on who those non-registered individuals are. In the future, we’d like to establish a way of keeping up with all of our students to better understand how career guidance, goal setting, and planning translates into employment outcomes over time. 

The CareerVillage team has many years of experience working with and listening to students, forming relationships with industry stakeholders, and collaborating with educators and like-minded non-profits. We are a team of driven professionals with an overflowing toolbox of skills to help young workers find quality jobs and ongoing success. Our team’s diverse background is united by our dedication to the CareerVillage mission: to democratize access to career advice for underserved communities. We all have a passion and empathy for marginalized youth, both from direct personal experience and lifelong activism. 

We are dedicated to incorporating the voices of our students and those we serve at our decision-making table. Our direct channel to students seeking career guidance is fundamental to solving this challenge. This interaction is embedded in our workflow: we incorporate their feedback to constantly iterate on our solution and understand how our advice is being translated into concrete action and results. 

Furthermore, as our platform is 100% digital, we are experienced in using data-driven decision making. We’ve also had a long track-record of opening up our data for external use and benefit. On top of building a massive platform and technological infrastructure for career advice, we have deployed countless machine learning models into our production and partnered with many outside data scientists.  

We are enthusiastic about the prospect of connecting with more industry leaders in technology, education, and workforce development as a result of this grant and know our years of partnership experience will allow us to maximize this opportunity. 

We work with a variety of organizations including educators, districts, non-profits, Workforce Boards, and corporations. The following are a few examples of organizations we work with: 

Workforce Boards: We work with MassHire Berkshire Workforce Board, the most rural County in Massachusetts, to enhance and expand their career readiness programming. Schools in this County integrate CareerVillage into their classrooms and local employers are mobilized to sign up on CareerVillage to give advice to students in the area. The group feature on CareerVillage was utilized to facilitate this connection between students, educators, and regional employers. In the future we hope to expand our partnership to feed localized labor market insights on supply and demand. 

Non-Profits: We are a direct channel for Year Up to connect their cohorts to alumni and employers they partner with. We've been working with Year Up’s placement leaders around the country to help them maximize CareerVillage as a resource for their students. In the EdTech space, we also partner with Hats & Ladders where we’ve built custom modules for their world class user interface. Our goals in partnering with nonprofits are to add value to their core programming and attract new, diverse audiences to join CareerVillage.

Districts: We have a district partnership with SFUSD, where high school-level educators will use our CareerVillage in Class curriculum with hundreds of students. 

Corporations: One of our Corporate Partners is IBM. We have also partnered with their P-TECH program to integrate CareerVillage on their user interface as a space for career exploration. 

Our key beneficiaries are students, educators, and professionals. 

Students are provided high quality, personalized, on-demand career advice to fill the gaps in information and guidance they otherwise experience from unjust systems. The way we measure impact for students is through their engagement and utilization rates of the platform. Outcomes are measured through self-efficacy (or belief in themselves) and financially-stable employment. 

We provide educators with a new tool for their classroom instruction with CareerVillage classroom, dashboard, and assignment features allowing them to easily onboard their students onto the platform and track their progress. We also have custom curricula available to integrate into their existing syllabi. For educators we measure our impact on educators in terms of utilization and engagement with CareerVillage (including classroom size and assignments created) and interactions with our staff for 1:1 assistance. Outcomes are measured through retention, students reached, and direct feedback from educator surveys. 

We provide our employer beneficiaries with robust virtual volunteer programming and impact measurement. Our corporate partners’ priority (typically CSR executives)  is to establish a volunteer program that engages their employees in community service at an increasing rate over time. Therefore, we measure impact by total employee engagement and deliver these insights to our corporate partners in monthly or quarterly reports. Outcomes and revenue are tracked through the renewal rate of our corporate partnerships (currently at +90%) in addition to noting opportunities that wish to expand their volunteer program and increase their monetary contributions as compared to the prior year.

Our corporate volunteer program provides steady earned income that will allow us to sustain this work. Our largest corporate partners include PwC, AT&T, Verizon, Cisco, and are our main source of financial health. With our new Development Team, we have been strategizing and executing on plans to engage more traditional foundation funding. We are hopeful to expand these endeavors into the future. Additionally, through working with Workforce Boards we plan to engage local employers to help fund our work and regional impact. If awarded, this grant will be used alongside other corporate partners, ambitious fundraising goals, and local supporters to bring our visions to life. We’ll be able to continue growing this program and WIB partnership model to have strongholds in every city around the country.

The majority of our revenue comes from earned income, and the remainder from philanthropy. Our earned income is large enough to sustain our core operations, so we use philanthropy to fund expansion and R&D. 

As our proposed solution is expanding CareerVillage programming and operations, we have been raising funds and generating revenue over the past 9 years. For the past 3 years, our annual budget was just below $1M. Our corporate partners comprise the majority of our current funding, with the exception of some innovation challenge wins and individual major gifts. We’re quickly expanding our corporate partner roster -- in the past 12 months we’ve almost doubled the number of companies participating. Our funders have asked us to seek permission from them before releasing the amount of their grants. We would be more than happy to get authorization if required. 

Our funders include PwC, AT&T, IBM, Verizon, Cisco, NewSchools Venture Fund, and Google.org.

To meet our ambitious goals, we are embarking on a major expansion of our budget and fundraising efforts. Over the next 3 years we hope to raise a total of $6M in the form of grants. We will be raising this capital in two tranches each with equal amounts: 1/1/2021 - 6/30/2022 and 7/1/2022 - 12/31/2023. 

This year we formed a Development Team with the goal of expanding our funding sources to foundations, corporate philanthropy, and grant challenges such as this one. We seek grant funding in order to support our general operating expenses and to expand CareerVillage into a more powerful resource for students, educators, Workforce Boards, and more.

Without increasing expenses for 2021, our quarterly expenses equal ~$170,000 making our operating budget just under $700,000. However, our goal for 2021 is to double our expenses. We’d like to raise enough money so that our expense budget for 2021 is $1.3M.

This grant challenge is an incredible opportunity to be recognized by major institutional leaders in the space of workforce development. As mentioned in the barriers section of this grant application, one of the goals we’d like to achieve as a precedent to our growth is gaining credibility in the field. We have been long admirers of the work New Profit, MIT Solve, and other Challenge partners have accomplished towards economic equity and we want to earn our ranking among them. This was how we were originally drawn to apply.  

At CareerVillage, collaboration is at the core of what we do. We understand the opportunities that become available to winners of this grant and are excited about the prospect of capitalizing on each one of them. In particular, we look forward to expanding our partnerships with Workforce Boards. The success of our program with MassHire Berkshire Workforce Board helps us realize our potential not only with other WIBs in Massachusetts, but all other boards listed. There are a lot of untapped possibilities in these collaborations and if selected as a winner, we would hope to work with all WIB partners involved. 

We also hope to capitalize on the IBM cloud credits and expertise to help further our technology goals and support the scaling up of our operations. 

Our primary goal is to serve more students and impact the lives of young learners from marginalized communities. We want to make sure we are prioritizing partnerships that will directly impact the lives of students and open possibilities for expanding our reach. Ideal partnerships include WIBs, community colleges, research professionals, data scientists, legal advisors, non-profits, districts, and other higher education institutions. 

If selected as a winner of this grant, we’d hope to leverage this recognition as an opportunity to spread awareness of CareerVillage as a resource for students and educators. We believe there is significant momentum following receipt of such grant challenges and we are driven by this potential. We are aware of each Challenge partner’s vast network and will also make it a goal to become integrated into these ecosystems.

The CareerVillage team is ready to embrace partnerships with any organization that helps increase our impact, expands our reach to new diverse communities, and furthers are three strategic priorities: engaging student networks, scaling our operations, and data analysis/measurement. This could be as minimal as sharing notes or spreading awareness and as complex as joint programming or co-authored publications. Our priority partnerships are with Workforce Boards, Community Colleges, and Research Institutions.