Skilio

Skilio is an AI-powered, digital soft skills portfolio for individuals to better articulate & showcase soft skill competencies

HR professionals have highlighted soft skills as the top concern in the future of recruiting and HR (LinkedIn Business, 2019). This suggests that soft skill competencies are increasingly in demand. The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought about uncertainty and volatility in the workplace landscape, necessitating a greater focus on soft skills development to better prepare our generation for the future of work. Yet at the same time, current schooling systems do not prepare students adequately with the soft skills needed for the future workplace.

Hence, we propose Skilio, a digital soft skills portfolio which helps high school students capture, track, develop, and showcase soft skills development. Skilio serves as a one-stop centralised platform for students to document their soft skills development through their school experiences. It is a platform designed to facilitate experiential learning and reflective practice, and generates personalised, data-driven insights for all users which are rooted in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and psychological research. 

Scaling Skilio to the above-mentioned countries could plug the gap in the documentation and assessing of soft skills development in Southeast Asia. Skilio offers an inexpensive, easily accessible platform for students and educators, even those who are disadvantaged and/or lack digital proficiency, to document their reflections and peers’ feedback from past experiences and convert them into work competencies sought after by employers. This bolsters employment prospects especially for new graduates and first-time job seekers who face the challenge of being unable to articulate these work competencies when applying for their first job.

We recognise that there lies a gap between soft skills development and workplace readiness and employability. While governments have sought to incorporate 21st century skills curriculum in their education systems, they are struggling to carry it out adequately (Octova, 2021). This is exacerbated by the economic woes and school closures brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic which has disproportionately affected students from lower-income households; studies have highlighted the pandemic’s far-reaching consequences that would perpetuate the cycle of poverty among Southeast Asian youth (Abaid et al, 2021; Lee, 2021). In this light, Skilio presents an inexpensive EdTech solution which is affordable and user-friendly to students across the socio-economic spectrum and provides an alternative means for students to showcase their merits even as they are severely affected by protracted school closures. Skilio improves the delivery of 21st Century skills as it provides an avenue for students to document their soft skills development in a longitudinal way and present soft skills competencies in a way that reflects their employability in desired jobs. Skilio’s ability to present students’ soft skill competencies complement delivery of 21st century skills by allowing educators to give personalised feedback at scale to students and more effectively guide them towards appropriate opportunities for students to develop and prepare themselves for the workplace.

Our solution aims to serve grade 9-12 students looking to transit into the workplace or their next educational institution. In 2017, there are 213 million youth (ages 15-34) in ASEAN, and is expected to grow to 220 million within the next 20 years (ASEAN, 2017). While improving standards of living in these countries have increased demand for EdTech solutions, current 21st century education programmes are once-off and not tied to outcomes which adequately prepare students for employment. Given the rise in the importance of soft skills in the region, there is also a lack of digital portfolio platforms which have a soft skills focus, track soft skills development over time and are based in Southeast Asia. Therefore, Skilio allows students and youth in these above-mentioned countries to document and showcase their soft skill development over time, in light of job-seeking as they enter the job market. We believe that our solution will increase the equity of students in the above-mentioned countries in accessing opportunities to showcase their skill sets and development in a diverse fashion, beyond academic grades and technical skills. Currently, Skilio’s platform is mainly used in Singaporean and Indonesian institutions, as we continually scale our solution to better capture the soft skills displayed by our users. So far, the Skilio team is conducting pilots with high school students in Indonesia mainly Binus School Serpong and Binus School Bekasi. Furthermore, we are in talks with other high schools in the Philippines like Xavier School.

Octava is set up with empowerment and equity of opportunities for the children in mind, as seen in its vision to “empower children and youth, so they have equitable opportunities to excel as citizens and contribute to a better world, irrespective of their socio-economic background.” We believe that Skilio is strongly aligned with the Challenge’s goals. As mentioned, there is a lack of emphasis in soft skills development and its presentation in a way that contributes to students’ and youths’ workplace readiness. Moreover, the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have disproportionately affected students from lower-income households and could have near- and long-term consequences on their career prospects and other life outcomes. In light of these problems, Skilio as a soft skills platform encourages equitable opportunities as it offers children and youth, even those less well-off, to showcase their merits through soft skills development beyond academic grades which may unevenly advantage more affluent families. Our solution addresses the dimension of improving the delivery of 21st Century Skills as most interventions are once-off and lack relevance to requisite workplace skills. Skilio, by providing personalised guidance based on their soft skill insights and desired opportunities, allows educators and students alike to better build on their specific soft skill competencies to target relevant opportunities which bolster future career opportunities as they enter the labour market. 

Felix Tan - Founder and CEO

Skilio provides a improved approach to highlighting soft skill development among students. Skilio is the only soft-skill focused depository based in Southeast Asia. Skilio’s innovative edge lies in our use of our qualitative text analysis - we help students better make connections about the soft skills they have with the actions they have displayed in certain school activities or programmes. In evaluating applicants’ soft skills, employers may read through applicants’ portfolios and/or use behavioural interviewing assessment techniques. More established platforms like LinkedIn is designed with a bias towards hard skills and professional achievements, which disadvantages many first-time job seekers as it is difficult for them to showcase relevant experiences for their desired jobs. Other digital portfolio platforms like Portfolium and Pathbrite allow students to upload learning artefacts but they do not help their users make connections between their experience with the relevant skills they have for the workplace. Our solution provides a significantly improved approach to these gaps by presenting longitudinal data, measurements and analysis on soft skills development. Furthermore, instead of merely listing soft skills as in other existing platforms, we overcome the difficulties in measuring soft skills development by using an AI-driven, qualitative text analysis to measure soft skills based on behavioural competencies exhibited by users. We improve the job-seeking process for students and first-time job-seekers as Skilio allows them to showcase soft skill competencies, demonstrate their soft skill growth, and how these soft skills fit into the job positions that they are applying for.

We validate our NLP methodology by conducting human inter-rater exercises to supervise the predictive validity of our AI models, built after rounds of literature reviews and factor analysis. We piloted this approach by running focus group discussions with key stakeholders like teachers and their students to understand how they are using our product and how this can help them articulate their soft skills competencies better. We also maintain high touch points with our stakeholders through biweekly check-ins with them, and gather user feedback from our user base of over 2000 students from secondary schools, junior colleges, and Institutions of Higher Learning (IHLs) such as universities and polytechnics.

A core and unique technology that powers our solution lies in Natural Language Processing, used to measure soft skills. Skilio breaks down soft skills into behavioural competencies based on established behavioural theories. We use these theories to build our taxonomy, which will in turn be used to train our AI model. We then run through users’ reflections and feedback with our AI model, which identifies key behaviours which align with the behavioural competencies recognised by the AI model. From there, our platform will present graphical representations of the user’s soft skill competencies in the various soft skills.

Our activities centre around establishing a platform in which students from high schools can use to better document their soft skills development and receive personalised feedback which can aid in their job search as they enter the labour market. On our platform, students will input their qualitative self-reflections and receive feedback from their peers or mentors. From students’ input, our AI model detects the soft skill competencies presented, and presents the development of their soft skill competencies.

Over time, a record of students’ soft skill development would be recorded over time. Therefore, when students prepare for applications and interviews, they can use Skilio to generate a soft skills report that helps to present their experiences and soft skill competencies which match the opportunities which they are applying for.

In the short run, we believe that our solution can help to craft more comprehensive applications, CVs, and resumes that highlights students’ merits beyond traditional indicators of abilities such as grades and technical hard skills. Based on the Knowledge, Skills and Abilities competency framework, the Skilio platform can serve as a bridge between students’ abilities, which is their capacity to perform, and quantifying these abilities in the form of skills (Reh, 2019). As our platform compares students’ soft skill competencies with the soft skills most required in the workplace, we believe that our solution will add value to a students’ job search as it allows students to see where their strong suit lies and how to better align their soft skills competencies with their desired opportunities.

Our expected long-term outcome will be that Skilio would increase students’ level of confidence in securing opportunities with their soft skills. As we would like our platform to empower students’ self-development in the long run, we would expect that using Skilio would increase students’ awareness of their soft skill competencies when they seek out opportunities as they can present a wider range of skill-sets beyond academic achievements and take pride in the soft skills that they have honed through their experiences.

We are measuring our progress towards our impact goals in the following ways:

1) Efficacy: Increase in awareness of students’ soft skills competencies based on their ability to connect their behavioural actions to a soft skill - this will be measured through a pre- & post-survey to understand the change in awareness. 

2) Efficacy: Increase in their ability to articulate about their soft skills competencies - this will be measured through conducting pre- and post-surveys about the abilities of the student to articulate their soft skills from their Skilio portfolio. Furthermore, we will also be conducting focus group discussions with students to understand the change in their ability to share about their soft skills competencies. 

3) Efficacy: Increase in willingness among students to proactively develop their soft skills through the use of Skilio. This will be tracked through the student's active usage of Skilio in their educational journey. Correlating this data point with data points from outcome 1 and 2, this will allow us to demonstrate student's proactiveness in developing their soft skills. 

4) Equity: Increase the user base of Skilio to lower-income and disadvantaged student populations. This will be tracked by looking at the number of schools that we have onboarded onto our platform that are from poorer neighbourhoods and also the profile of our user base.

Our goal is to expand our userbase and collect feedback to further improve our platform. We are achieving these goals by reaching out to a range of organisations such as student groups, training organisations, and educational institutions both locally and in above-mentioned countries. We have implemented the Skilio Portfolio in close to 30 organisations for 2500 users and plan to scale the impact of our solution to other countries in the region. This would allow us to gain a critical mass of users to seek feedback to further improve our product. Next 3 years, our impact goal is to shorten the time to create their portfolio, increase their capabilities to file applications and get through interviews for their desired opportunities and increase their awareness of their soft skill competencies. We would continue building on the impact goals previously to continually gather feedback and improve our platform such that we can capture as much soft skills development as possible to more comprehensively showcase our users’ soft skill competencies.

In coming five years, our current users would be entering the workforce. This means that our current user base will transition from being students to being working adults. Our impact goal is to be a lifelong digital portfolio for Gen Zs to showcase their transferable soft skills across different phases of their lives. To do so, we would pivot Skilio to not only be used in an educational context but to also serve as a tool for professional development in our users’ careers.

The barriers we face hinge on our ability to establish a foothold in other countries in Southeast Asia to further implement our impact goals. In light of this, our barriers lie mainly in the access to talent, cultural, and financing aspects. As Southeast Asia is culturally diverse, to implement and scale our solution in the region we would need to adapt it to the respective countries’ markets in several ways, for example, modifying our platform and algorithms to work with other primary languages. For it to happen, we would need to enlist the services of employees who could understand local contexts better and localise our platforms to capture soft skills development in non-English languages. That said, we are striving to overcome these barriers by seeking out partnerships with international schools in Indonesia and Thailand as they possess both an understanding of the local markets and conduct lessons in English, which allows us to implement our solution in a manageable context and gain a better understanding of other markets in the region. Partnering with international schools in the region also raises our visibility in these institutions where we could tap on potential talents who are bilingual and are based in their respective host countries and therefore could add value to Skilio by localising Skilio to the respective Southeast Asian countries. As we are a young startup, we seek to bolster our finances by exploring freemium models with both our B2B and B2C business models, and apply for funding such as this.

Skilio was officially incorporated in December 2019. The motivation behind starting Skilio revolved around the lack of emphasis on soft skills development which disadvantages fresh graduates when they enter the labour market. We are dissatisfied with the inadequacy of our education institutions in preparing students with the skill-sets, given the increasing trend of companies hiring for skills instead of academic qualifications. With about 60% of jobs becoming soft skills-intensive by 2030, the jobs that our young people will go into will heavily depend on their soft skills competencies. Yet at the same time, only 1 in 3 youth surveyed felt equipped with the necessary skills for the future of work.   

Furthermore, we have faced the challenge of being unable to secure our first internship due to a lack of relevant work experience. However, when we started going for more interviews, we started to realize that employers were actually looking more for our soft skills and this is usually one of the determining factors for a successful hire. After speaking to about 200 students, they also highlighted the challenge of getting their first job due to their inexperience and the inability to customize their personal experiences into application or interview responses for different companies that they are applying for. Therefore, we believe that helping first-time job-seekers like students translate their past experiences into relevant soft skill-sets for a job is needed for the users we work with to better match them to their desired positions in the labour market.

3 founders, 3 full-time staff, 10 part-time staff.

Felix and Zhi Hui are certified youth soft skills trainers, each with more than 3 years of experience equipping youth with soft skills competencies like teamwork and leadership. Whereas Dody helps out with tech and software development to translate the idea into reality. Supporting us are mentors and advisors with years of experience in organisational psychology as well as youth training and development. Dody taught himself programming since he was 18 despite having a national examination coming up. Zhi Hui is a StrengthsFinder certified youth trainer since she was 18, and brings expertise in psychology and education. All 3 of the founders came together because of our common vision in making the transition from education to the workplace better for youth and have bootstrapped on Skilio for 2.5 years while still studying in university.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the three of us orchestrated a ground-up initiative to help match students who got displaced from their summer internships or overseas exchange to local companies offering project-based work. We did this as a way to give back to the student community and also as a test-bed to test our very first prototype with more target users. We were thankful to be able to match 225 students with local employers. Recently, we even heard from some of the students we matched that they were able to obtain subsequent employment and/or internship offers because they had prior experience through the initiative we have started.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-skilio-equipped-225-students-employability-skills-felix-tan/

We are partnering with youth training organisations and schools to use our software. We adopt a freemium strategy as a top-down approach to gain entry to the schools we work with. For youth training organisations, we combine the use of the Skilio software into the educational programmes that they run in their local schools - to help us disseminate the benefits of Skilio into those schools. As of now, more than 10 secondary and tertiary educational institutions have implemented Skilio in their programmes. Since January 2021, Skilio has gained almost an eightfold increase in new users and we currently have over 2000 users across Singapore, India, and Indonesia. As part of scaling our solution, we are currently seeking partnerships with more schools in other Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. 

Skilio was created with the vision to broaden the definition of success regardless of one’s background, academic attainment or qualifications. We believe with the right skills, any learner can rightfully gain employment. This can be done by creating a tech solution which has the potential of scaling its impact in an affordable and accessible way, while equipping educators with the tools and capabilities to support their students in developing these core skills. In particular, Skilio envisions itself as the key player that can facilitate the delivery of 21st century skills at scale to build a future ready workforce globally. With this vision, the Skilio team sees alignment with the Octova Social Innovation Challenge in being able to collectively advance this vision of ours and support more underserved learners out there. We wish for the Octova Social Innovation Challenge to help us set foot into the communities which are in need of our solution, especially so for our solution which aims to facilitate continual development of employability skills even in a remote learning environment. 

The Skilio team is currently facing a cultural barrier in scaling up our solution to reach the underserved market in the region. We wish to establish partnerships with Octava and MIT Solve to get in touch with ecosystem partners (educators, youth organisations, schools) who are aligned with our vision to empower youth with the skills to succeed in the workplace. This allows us to have a targeted approach in identifying beneficiaries who can also give the Skilio team a better understanding of the implementation community regionally. This can also allow us to rapidly scale the impact of our solution by establishing distribution channels globally.