ArcLab

ArcLab's vision is to Upskill the World's Deskless Workforce. 

Many current market solutions attempt to promote worker upskilling. Their outreach centres at marketing to the worker, who is already stressed for finances and has so little time. This makes impact harder to achieve.

ArcLab works with employers, who are our customers instead of the workers. Businesses use ArcLab's Nano Learning SaaS - which helps employing organisations to onboard, train and upskill deskless, rank-and-file workforces - sent directly to workers' mobile phones. Training & Upskilling can now be done anytime, anywhere, in any language.

This achieves win-wins: A more productive organisation, enabling them to pay better salaries, to improve worker livelihoods and lives. We expand on it here: https://arclab.io/blog/higher-...

With 2.7 billion deskless workforce globally, we would love to fit ArcLab into ServiceNow workflows, and scale our impact.

Seeing is believing: Experience an ArcLab module: https://b.arclab.io/ml 
(aka dogfooding)

Helping to Upskill the World's 2.7 billion Deskless Workforce.

Blue-collar training is hard. When we were ideating for ArcLab, we spoke to 50 companies we knew and centred on a few learning points:

1. Training is important, but individuals find it hard to commit time & funds
2. Businesses find that training made staff spend too much time away, reducing productive time and topline
3. Trainees find it hard to pay attention for extended periods. They were also on their phones most of the time.
4. Refreshing training content can be expensive and time-consuming for companies.

This meant a better way is needed to solve the upskilling problem.

ArcLab approaches blue-collar workforce upskilling in 2 different ways from the market:

1. Working with employers (B2B approach) rather than the the worker (B2C approach which can work for white-collar jobs who have the luxury of time & space, but is not effective for lower-educated, blue-collar workforces)

2. Reducing the time needed for employers to easily create, distribute and track training

Businesses use ArcLab’s Nano Learning SaaS platform to easily create, deliver Nano Learning - targeted bite-sized training modules and digital SOPs to employees on-demand, through mobile - improving work performance.

What we end up with is Nano Learning: continuous, bite-sized training, delivered in the flow of work. This reduces time spent away from the work premises (a boon for businesses), and increases contextual understanding and improves productivity for workers.

Experience Nano Learning for yourself: https://b.arclab.io/ml

Our work has been recognised by Holon IQ, who have featured ArcLab in their inaugural Southeast Asia Ed Tech 50: https://b.arclab.io/et50

We seek to serve 2.7 billion Deskless Workers globally, through working with their Employers.

Without the right skills, workers' productivity are low, and are unable to command higher wages. This is perfectly rational for the business.

Our work involves continuously learning from the employers of this  workforce. Through this process, we have created an ever-expanding library of training & digital SOP templates - ArcLab Discover: https://builder.arclab.io/disc...

Training templates reduces the time needed to create training, and can be crafted in any language.

ArcLab's Nano Learning SaaS platform allows employing businesses to craft all the company's knowledge into bite-sized training modules and Digital Standard Operating Procedures (D-SOPs) to their workforce on-demand, through mobile.

This improves workforce productivity, enabling workers to produce more and contribute more to the organisation's business outcomes. 

Improved business performance allows companies to pay their workers more for better productivity, starting a virtuous cycle of improved livelihoods and lives for the worker, contributing more to better performing businesses.

Training is a continuous process. We would love to fit ArcLab's solution into ServiceNow workflows to create this flywheel.

ArcLab's solution is developed and in the market serving customer organisations.

Our customers are currently concentrated in Southeast Asia. Some customer stories are found here: https://arclab.io/news

Highlighting this in particular: https://adriantan.com.sg/fei-s...

Delivering Nano Learning to blue-collar workforces without needing an app.

The fuss-free delivery of our solution enables training and digital SOP modules to be distributed quickly and efficiently to deskless workers, many of whom are not highly-educated and not tech-saavy.

Our inclusive approach has been covered in press articles such as:

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/fei-...

and

https://adriantan.com.sg/fei-s...

ArcLab's most visible technology pieces — a MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) web application running on AWS and Twilio — are hardly novel. The software infrastructure allows us to rapidly deliver a scalable and reliable service, but the same could be same for most other modern web applications.

What sets ArcLab's technology offering apart is our focus on user experience. This comes across in various aspects from the simple authoring interface to invisible logins that just work to fun assessments like our “unscramble” screen. A fair number of our blue-collar learners, being less tech-savvy, also have older mobile phones, and we have to make sure that their learning experience does not suffer.

The web technologies we rely on are widely used by modern web applications and hardly worth talking about here.

Instead, we will leave you with a product demo that we believe exemplifies the best aspects of our user experience: https://youtu.be/2kwORXjBF5Q

The main risk would be privacy and security. The content of some of the training materials could be company trade secrets, and learners' scores could also be sensitive. We mitigate these risks through the adoption of sensible industry-standard security practices such as encryption of data at rest and in transit. Users also have the flexibility to geofence ArcLab modules such that these can only be accessed at the workplace, eliminating risk of unauthorised access. We also do not store passwords or credit card information, leaving this to services from Google and Stripe.

Our unit economics centres on business organisations, each employing 1-2000 deskless workers on average.

Number of business organisations using ArcLab:

Current: 19

1 year (projected): 50-100

5 years (projected): At least 2000

Within 5 years, we are working to help up at least 2000 business organisations employing deskless workers to upskill their workforce effectively, creating win-win outcomes for the business (better productivity and topline) and workers (better skills and salaries).

Our north start metric is the number of Learning Sessions.

We also track pre-post training worker performance (guided by our Advisory Board Member Professor Karin of Singapore Institute of Technology)

5 Full Time

2 Interns

ArcLab is a small and dynamic team of educators, designers and technologists with a desire to impact the world through lifelong learning.

CEO James & CTO Steven have both worked in the public & private sector. Our goal is to imbibe a public-sector-orignated desire to do good and create impact into a commercially-sustainable venture. We've punched above our weight, bringing ArcLab to market with a very small team who are equally passionate about serving the underserved and upskilling the world's deskless workforce. Please meet the ArcLab team: https://arclab.io/team

(Thought we should mention that Steven is an MIT-alum)

We are race and demographic blind. Our team is as yet young and small, but we endeavour to build ArcLab into an organisation that is diverse and inclusive.

Before ArcLab was officially-incorporated, I wrote a short company thesis (https://arclab.io/blog/how-to-...) that envisions the impact ArcLab could have.

Fundamentally, I have a heart for the underserved. I believe we can use good design and simple technology to help solve the skills problem, focussing primarily at blue-collar, deskless workers who are not well-served by the current market offerings.

MIT Solve | ServiceNow's 2021 Digital Workforce Challenge speaks greatly to this original vision of ArcLab, especially your 1st bullet point: "Preparing those entering, re-entering, or who are already in the workforce for the future of work through affordable and equitable digital skills, training, and employment opportunities".

Singapore: Already delivering ArcLab's Nano Learning SaaS to customers

Our goal is to amplify our distribution, to serve even more businesses to upskill their deskless workforces.

We would love to be connected to worktech platforms, vocational schools and importantly - channels to the businesses that we can serve.

Currently, the focus industries that we would need help in reaching are:

1. F&B businesses

2. Construction businesess

These are large employers of deskless, blue-collar workers who are often lowly-educated and not tech-saavy.

ArcLab's Nano Learning solution can make these workers more productive, and contribute to better business outcomes, enabling businesses to pay these workers more and improve their livelihoods and lives.

We would love to work with ServiceNow.

We are in sync with automated workflows for businesses, and believe this can create productivity savings which can then be passed on to the workforce as higher salaries. A higher-paid workforce is happier and more productive, further adding to this virtuous cycle.

A big part of better productivity is better skills. We believe ArcLab's Nano Learning solution lends well to this outcome for deskless, blue-collar workforces and would love to have a deeper conversation with ServiceNow in order to amplify and scale our impact. 

Integrating ArcLab's training workflows would also add to ServiceNow's product offerings to your customers.