Skilio

A digital soft skills portfolio that helps first-time job seekers to be recognised for their non-academic abilities.

Skilio is digital soft skills portfolio that 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. Backed by psychological research, these insights show whether and by how much did users develop their soft skills, giving users a clear focus on what to improve on.

Besides giving them a direction, we have industry Pathway Programmes which comprise of activities and scenario-based problems that are related to common fresh graduates roles such as Business Development and Marketing. Student use the Skilio Portfolio to document the completion of these Pathway Programmes as a way to acquire these skills and showcase them to prospective employers

Additionally, we are partnering with employers to create more employment opportunities for users by recommending their Skilio profiles to these employers. We believe that this strategy will incentivise students to play a more active role in detailing their experiences on Skilio platform, and be responsible for their soft skill growth. Some of the over 50 employers we have partnered with include KPMG, Reactor School and ShopBack. 

We aim to bridge the gap between soft skills development and workplace readiness and boost job prospects among youths. While governments have sought to incorporate 21st century skills curriculum in their education systems, they are struggling to carry it out adequately. 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.

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. 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 and track soft skills development over time. 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 accessing opportunities to showcase their skill sets and development in a diverse fashion, beyond academic grades and technical skills.

We are constantly researching the needs of our target groups and sourcing for new target groups. Our Product team does regular interviews and focus groups with our current user base to gather feedback on our platform and we deploy a user-centric design thinking framework to design our product.

Additionally, we gather testimonials from participants who have used our product for enrichment programmes, competitions or other events. Using their testimonials, our Growth team also designs new programmes and initiatives to match our product with users’ needs. For instance, we launched a Marketing Pathway Programme and Business Development Pathway Programme which introduce a series of job-related activities and scenarios for users to try on in order to have a glimpse of that job function. This was developed based on our research of the popular roles students venture to. 

Till date, we have about 2500 users on the Skilio Platform. We are currently in 3 Indonesian schools, 16 Singapore schools and 1 school in India. Out of the 20 schools, 16 are running a paid pilot with us. Furthermore, out of the 16 schools, 7 of them have been using Skilio for almost a year now. We believe that the demand for our solution is robust. So far for every 10 demo calls we have conducted on Skilio, 3.5 schools will agree to implement Skilio in their schools. These metrics are indicative that schools see value in our solution. 

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 soft skills taxonomy, which is used to train our AI model. We then run through actual users’ reflections and feedback with our AI model, which will identify 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. 

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.

Till date, we have implemented the use of the Skilio Portfolio in close to more than 10 educational institutions, 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 whom we can tap on to scale our solution and seek feedback to further improve our product.

For the next year, our goal is to expand our user base and collect feedback to further improvements on our platform. This is done by engaging with our current user base and it will be an iterative process. By having a large user base, we hope to gather the sentiments, identify the pain points and common problems users face with our platform and with applications,  and improve accordingly.  

Additionally, we plan to target new markets and gather their sentiments on Skilio. Some of these markets are student clubs, training organisations, and educational institutions both locally in Singapore and in countries like the United States, Australia and Thailand. This is done by deploying various email marketing strategies to these institutions and pitch our ideas, recommending existing users to refer our product to others, and by participating in various out-of-house conferences, talks and masterclasses. Some recent invitations are from NUS Overseas College, Enterprise Singapore’s Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH) 2021, and AIESEC. 

In the next three years, we aim to shorten the time students need to create their portfolio, increase their capabilities to ace applications and interviews, and increase their awareness of their soft skill competencies. This is done by finding low-cost solutions and automating operations to free up manpower and time for more time-consuming and high-impact tasks such as user interviews and client engagement. Currently, we are in the testing phase for one potential product: automating personalised reports from raw data to users’ email without any human intervention required.  

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.

In general, 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.  

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.

We are partnering 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 their 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.  

We have participated in incubator programmes like the NUS Enterprise incubator which is a university entrepreneurship incubator, and the government-funded ACE BaceCamp Incubator. They helped us with grant funding and support to get Skilio off the ground. We have also participated in international accelerators like the Transcend Fellowship W21 conducted by Transcend Network for early-stage founders building the future of learning & work and the UNDP Springboard Accelerator Programme where they support founders working on solutions surrounding the UN SDGs.