KadaKareer

KadaKareer is a community-driven, low-bandwidth platform that empowers young Filipinos to launch digital careers.

Young Filipinos face immense career pressure due to the vicious cycle of intergenerational poverty in the Philippines. In 2019, the World Economic Forum ranked the Philippines as 61st out of 82 countries in terms of social mobility. In fact, over half of Filipinos indicate that they are earning only the same or even less than their fathers did. Since the Philippine youth unemployment rate has hovered around 15-17% since 2005, the pressure to land a job is high.

One of the core reasons for these career inequities is the lack of school-to-employment resources and support for students. In a survey we conducted with 1,600+ respondents, young workers were 3x more likely to blame unemployment on a lack of career resources and support than any other reason. Even more shockingly, only 8% of all students claimed to have any mentor or coach to guide them in their career journey.

KadaKareer aims to support underserved youth in the Philippines to launch and sustain digital careers. We provide with the "3 C's": content, coaching and community.

Our services are: (1) "Career Explorer" -- database with bite-sized resources about various digital careers, (2) "Coach Connector" -- matching students with professionals within specific digital industries who engage with them on career advice and support, (3) skill-building workshops and webinars on various topics, and (4) community messaging boards for peer support and information exchange.

Through these services, we leverage the power of technology and community to empower students to launch their digital careers.

In the Philippines, social mobility disproportionately affects Filipinos in non-urban areas, where youth earn 50% less and are 1.5 times more likely to be underemployed compared to their urban peers, even though tertiary education attainment is roughly the same (World Bank, 2020). This continues to occur despite the fact that technology has opened up more opportunities for online work in rural areas, with the Philippines named the world’s 6th fastest growing market for freelancers (Payoneer, 2019 Global Gig Economy Index).

At KadaKareer, we believe that a lack of school-to-employment resources and support for low-income, non-urban students is one of the core reasons for these career inequities. The 10 million Filipino students who fit this description receive 4.3 hours less of personalized help per year from career counsellors, and only 22% of them claim to have access to proper career information (Asian Development Bank, 2017). Even more shockingly, only 8% of all students claimed to have any mentor or coach in their career journey (KadaKareer Survey, 2020).

We have broken the problem down into three root causes:

1. Exposure Gap: Students do not have access to the proper information and resources they need to make proper career decisions.

2. Network Gap: Students do not have individuals in their network who will provide insight and advice into the job recruitment process, or advocate for them for opportunities.

3. Skill Gap: Students are not being trained and prepared appropriately by universities with work-ready skills that are sought after by employers.

Our target population consists of low-income high school and college students in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of the Philippines, aged 15 to 24 years old, whose schools have limited school-to-employment resources and opportunities and who companies seeking work-ready talent are not able to successfully reach.

After completing 40 interviews and surveying 1,600 students in our first two months as an organization, we learned the following:

1. Filipino students are incredibly digitally savvy, but lack access to computers/laptops and high-bandwith internet infrastructure
2. In the career navigation process, students' aspirations are limited to what they see in their communities or have been exposed to through media 
3. Students often turn to their peers and elder classmates for advice and support in their career navigation process, but their network is limited

Taking all of the above into account, we have built our product to be mobile-friendly and low-bandwidth to remain accessible despite limited digital infrastructure. Additionally, because students often to turn to their peers for advice, we have built our organization in a way that keeps COMMUNITY at the center -- leveraging networks and peer support. We have also differentiated ourselves by being uniquely Filipino and Gen Z in our branding and communications.

To ensure we are continuously connected to our target population, we have a group of 40 student ambassadors and 20 "mission specialists" all over the country who we engage in user interviews and focus group discussions for feedback on any products or services we offer.

There are 4 key reasons they our solution matches the Challenge:

1. While KadaKareer focuses on career development, which is not a typical form of "learning", career preparation and planning is an inevitable part of every student experience and is also important to consider in promoting access and democratization of information/resources. 

2. As seen in our research on the problem, gaps and inequities exist in the school-to-employment transition, and these problems are much more pronounced for students in lower socioeconomic levels and who are living outside of the city centers. According to our research, there are 10.2 million Filipino youth between the ages of 15 and 24 who fit this description.

3. Our solution leverages increasing internet and mobile penetration in the Philippines to offer our services. We have already built two products on our low-bandwidth, mobile-friendly platform -- which are open for anyone -- and hope to continue to build similar products in the future that consider connectivity and bandwidth.

4. In the future, our products will evolve to encompass more than just our Coach Connector (coaching, networking) and our Career Explorer (information and resources). In 2022, we plan to build self-directed short courses and virtual apprenticeships, which will also be delivered in a low-bandwidth way and will add to our suite of career development services. We hope all of these interventions, in collective, will help address the exposure, network and skill gaps!

Michi Ferreol is one of the co-founders of KadaKareer and currently the Strategy and Operations Lead. She will be the Team Lead.

At our organization's inception, we did an analysis of market offerings in the education and career development space. From that, we surmised that our offering could be innovative by:

Covering the End-to-End Career Journey -- No one player in the Philippine career development space currently spans the entire career lifecycle (see exhibit below). In contrast, we hope to build KadaKareer to first address the Exploration space then grow to fill the entire end-to-end journey and follow our students as they enter each stage of their career progression. 

Centering on Community -- Existing solutions to this problem focus on either platforms (online job marketplaces) or programs (skill bootcamps) but do not leverage people. However, KadaKareer aims to uniquely leverage human connections and especially a community alongside a dynamic and engaging platform, which no other player has yet done.

Providing a more accessible, scalable solution -- Existing solutions were either not built to cater to students in under-resourced environments, or not built to scale (i.e. bootcamps, workshops, etc.). In contrast, KadaKareer hopes to build a platform that is not only accessible but also provides products that are scalable!

During the beta period of our platform last April to May, we had 67 users register on our platform for a trial run. From these users, there were 72 coach connections and 34 booked coaching sessions. 100% of Kadets who attended a coaching session said that it was either "very helpful" or "extremely helpful". Those same Kadets gave an average rating of 9.7 out of 10 when asked how satisfied they were with their Coaching session.

One student said about her experience: "I would like to thank KadaKareer for creating this platform. I myself didn't know that I could get this kind of opportunity. I never knew that I could have a chance to talk with Coaches that could really help me in my career. Thank you, KadaKareer."

Our organization provides the following two products: (1) a "Career Explorer" database with bite-sized resources about different digital careers, (2) a "Coach Connector" featuring professionals and experts within specific digital industries, who students can engage with for short coaching sessions on career advice and support. Both of these products run on a web app which can be easily accessed at www.app.kadakareer.com

Instead of telling you about these, you can view a walkthrough of these two products here:

• Coach Connector: 
• Career Explorer: 

In addition to the two products above, we also run a Facebook Group and a Discord Server which students can freely join, where they can ask any and all questions related to their career!

We intend to focus on increasing engagement with our products, to maximize the chances that students receive the support that they need. We therefore plan to track the following:

• Number of registered students and coaches

• Number of coaching requests made

• Number of coaching conversations held

• Number of repeat coaching conversations held

• Number of videos for different professions in database

• Number of videos watched in full

• Number of visitors to the database

With high levels of student engagement, we hope to see concrete positive effects on several career-related outcomes, both in the short-term and long-term. These outcomes center around confidence, career satisfaction, job acquisition, time-to-hire, job preparedness, job retention, promotion rates, salary levels, etc. These are captured in the quadrant below.

For coaches, we similarly want to imagine positive effects in both the short-term and long-term. These outcomes, however, will be more focused on self-reported metrics around satisfaction and fulfillment, professional and personal development, and applicability of learned skills to the workplace.

We hope to see our intended impact on both an individual level and a societal level. On the individual level, we hope that the underprivileged young professionals that use our products will be:

• Easier to find jobs that they are interested in

• Happier and more satisfied with their jobs

• Performing more effectively and productively in their roles

• Getting promoted at quicker rates

• Earning at higher levels

• More able to change their family’s socioeconomic status

• More able to see purpose and value in their jobs

• More engaged members of their communities

On the societal level, we hope to see change that reflects:

• A paradigm shift in how and where companies hire

• A paradigm shift in how schools approach career exploration and development

• A narrowing job-skills mismatch

• A more productive workforce

• Equal opportunities for all kinds of students to apply for and acquire jobs

• Poverty alleviation and increased mobility

Read more about our Theory of Change.

As mentioned in our Theory of Change, we focus on both self-reported and objective measures of success, both in the short-term or long-term. These outcomes center around confidence, career satisfaction, job acquisition, time-to-hire, job preparedness, job retention, promotion rates, salary levels, etc. These are captured in the quadrant below.

Over the next 12 months, we plan to build out three final products that will round out our suite of offerings: (1) our on-platform community messaging boards, (2) our virtual apprenticeships program and (3) digital skill-building courses. All of these products will tackle the the aforementioned Exposure Gap by providing students with relevant information and answers to key questions, bite-sized projects and hands-on application tasks that provide insight into a specific role or industry. They will also tackle the Skill Gap by providing students with an accessible, practical way to develop their skills and build their portfolios. 

The way we plan to have these products and services reach more students is through more partnerships with student organizations, other non-profits and universities. We currently have 37 student org / non-profit partners already secured, and have 7 partners with universities in the pipeline. With these partnerships, we hope to increase the usage of our platform to 50,000+ Monthly Active Users.

We then plan to track students who have engaged with KadaKareer over the next few years and determine whether the following is true for them in comparison to our baseline:

• Shorter time to getting hired

• Easier to find jobs that they are interested in

• Happier and more satisfied with their jobs

• Performing more effectively and productively in their roles

• Getting promoted at quicker rates

• Earning at higher levels

• More able to change their family’s socioeconomic status

• More able to see purpose and value in their jobs

• More engaged members of their communities

Financial -- As a non-profit organization, we currently rely on the generosity of our donors and grants to keep operations running. While we have been able to operate for the last year with a purely volunteer staff and only ~7,000 USD in expenditures (software licenses, hosting, etc.), we are eager to find more sustainable revenue streams, especially to carry us through 2022.

Technological -- With data bundles still quite expensive in the Philippines and with our competing priorities in the usage of this data, we still face challenges in getting our app to be accessible to as many students as possible. For this, we are hoping to partner with key telco providers in the Philippines to provide usage of our app for free to all students.

A little over a year ago, I published a thought piece on Medium entitled “5 Predictions for the Future of Education in the Philippines”. At the bottom of that article, I wrote a short (rather inconspicuous) note about an idea for a socio-emotional learning program. I dropped my email at the end, thinking I’d be lucky and maybe get a response or two.

Less than a week later, five people had reached out to me, each citing their own interest in getting involved. I had known only two of them before. Every single one of us simply wanted to contribute to the education landscape in the Philippines.

Then, exactly a year ago today, we held our first meeting on Zoom and kickstarted our crazy journey together as a team. And while all of us have never been together in the same physical space, we have been meeting every single weekend since.

Blame it on the pandemic or call it fate — either way, what began as one small paragraph in a Medium post has now blossomed into a 3,000+ person community, a 24-person team, and an unexpected, mind-blowing year.

You can read more about our genesis and first year here!

Our team currently consists of 11 Team Leads and 30 Mission Specialists. Everyone on the team is a volunteer!

Our team is a group of young, eager, and talented Filipino innovators passionate about the future of education in the Philippines. We are currently located across the world – from the Philippines to the U.S. to Canada – and have a variety of personalities and backgrounds: from an autonomous vehicle software engineer to an environmental sustainability advocate to a former startup chief of staff. All of us have grown up in the Philippines and have attended local schools for elementary and high school, exposing us to the lack of career-related resources at these institutions.

But while we transcend geographic and professional lines, we have two things that unify us: (1) Our love for the Philippines and (2) Our belief and hope that education can unlock and empower young Filipinos across the country!

Here are examples of some of our profiles:

Profile #1

Profile #3

Education: Harvard Business School (MBA), Harvard College

Professional Experience: Bain, African Leadership University, CA Inc.

Skills: Learning Design, Education Management, Team Management

Team Role: Business Lead & Content Lead

Education: Harvard Business School (MS/MBA), University of the Philippines

Professional Experience: Growsari, Uber, Procter and Gamble

Skills: Product Design, User Experience, Customer Marketing and Success

Team Role: Design Lead

Education: University of Michigan

Professional Experience: Uber, Esri, Asian Development Bank

Skills: Software Development, Product Management 

Team Role: Technology Lead

Michi has led the founding and execution of all KadaKareer operations and services over the last year. Particularly, she brought the team together and set the culture and pace, such that we have been able to operate for the last year with a fully remote, geographically dispersed, all part-time volunteer team. 

Despite these difficult constraints, we have built our social media following to over 4,000 followers, increased our website visits to 5k unique page views per month (since April), have built two tech products (the Coach Connector and the Career Explorer), delivered 20+ webinars and workshops engaging 40,000+ people, and have officialized partnerships with 35+ student organizations or non-profits.

Before KadaKareer, Michi also founded and launched College Admissions Mentors for Peers in the Philippines, a college admissions non-profit that helps Filipinos access international education opportunities. CAMP Philippines has now been operating for close to a decade, and has sent over 300 students to universities overseas with close to 5M USD in collective financial aid. She was also on the founding team of ALX(connected to the African Leadership group), a 6-month workforce readiness program for recent college graduates in Kenya.

KadaKareer currently has 37 partners, a mix of student organizations and other non-profits. We work with these partners in three ways: (1) To raise awareness within their communities about the free services that KadaKareer offers, including holding workshops and webinars for the organizations on key topics, (2) To learn more about what is wanted/needed by the students in terms of career-related support (often through surveys and focus groups), and (3) To test and refine our services by experimenting and gathering feedback with our partners' members.

You can see a list of our current partners here.

There are three reasons why we would like to work with the Octava Foundation:

1. IMPACT + SUSTAINABILITY: The key challenge we are facing today as an organization is how to balance driving towards impact vs. financial sustainability. We are seeking guidance on how to offer our services to the students we want to reach whilst also building for potential revenue streams down the line. While we currently have ideas for how to monetize and which business model to adopt, we need specific mentorship on how to do this in a way that stays true to our impact goals. 

2. IMPACT DESIGN + EVALUATION: Given that we are trying to build an all-inclusive career development platform, we hope for more guidance around how to design our products in a way that is truly accessible to the most underserved student, especially given the lack of internet infrastructure in the environments in which our students are from. We also would like help in evaluating our impact and ensuring that we are accomplishing what we have set out to accomplish.

3. SCALE: Now that we have built two ready-made products, we hope for more guidance on how to scale the implementation of these solutions and truly prepare to reach students all over the Philippines and also Southeast Asia. For this, we need a partner who is well-versed in the space and in the region, which we believe the Octava Foundation is a perfect fit.