Real World Experience

With 1.5 billion youths globally, they are unable to transit into their first career that is aligned with their preferred company and industry. This transitional gap between post education and first career is largely due to the following factors:

• Outdated curriculum - 70% of students feel a lack of relevance in their learning at school to the real world
• Lack of career exposure - 80% of matriculants enter college undecided on a major and 50% change majors at some point during their enrollment
• Unequal access - Low-income students cannot afford 95% of colleges

OWN Academy is providing early career education by exposing youths to various industries in our Real World Challenge programme, to bridge the gap for today's youth.

Sources: McKinsey Education to Employment Survey, NASFAA Report, Forbes Education to Employment: Boost Skills, Bridge the Gap, NACADA Journal: Decided and Undecided Students, Gallup State of the Workplace Global Report

OWN Academy is an early career education platform to youth (age 15-24) as they take on their first career. This journey includes 3 stages:

1) discovering yourself 2) real world experiences and challenge, and 3) a career match for youth with their desired companies and recommendation of further training with e-learning platforms, incorporating the use of AI.

We focus on 2 stakeholders: Youth and Corporates.

Youth: Early career education is needed for today's youth as they are heavily academic focus. They have limited opportunities to know and get first hand information on what it is like to work in their desired industry. OWN Academy is bridging this gap.

Corporates: The value proposition for corporates is a 4 in 1 solution: employer branding, employee engagement, talent sourcing and talent recruitment. We achieve that by helping companies build their corporate academy, an interactive content library to showcase the purpose and vision of the company, various key job roles, and live webinar on career coaching with youths. In order for youths to know more about the companies and real working experience, they will be invited to join the Real World Challenge (RWC).

Through Real World Challenge (RWC) youths will be exposed to the insights and overview of sample problems / objectives of top industries companies, and learn through a real scenario case study based challenge/assignment. Youths will not be alone working on the challenge, instead, they will received model answers upon completion of the challenge provided by employee of the corporation. In addition to that, an explainer video on how to derive to the model answers is prepared to help youths understand the HOW in getting to the answers of the challenge. This way, they understand the industries better, which will help them better make known decisions for a) the suitable university faculty to join, and b) the right skills to pick up for their preferred industry as future career.

With above business model, OWN Academy gain revenue from below channels: a) Learners (users) access for free; b) Corporate pays for production of corporate academy; c) Premium version of RWC, which is Real World Experience (RWX), school pays for guided group teaching on early career education to their students; d) Sponsorship for annual virtual career fair - OWN Future Fair (OFF) .

OWN Academy is serving a population of 1.5 billion youths globally.

We are starting with the APAC region where there is an overly-emphasized on academic result that will determine they youth's career path. However, not everyone has an equal opportunity to great education and they are destined for a below average career opportunity as they step into corporate world. 

Our solution is to decentralize education, with a focus beyond academic results, and to create an early exposure for youths to their preferred industries. In addition, we integrate soft skills accreditation, to provide a broader perspective to employers who would give equal opportunity for the underserved. We also actively engage ourselves with NGOs that works with underserved youths. 

The founder has had a diverse career experience, starting as a corporate consultant at Deloitte then moved into education, working as a teacher, with a master degree specialized in Designing Powerful Learning Environments, having spent the past decade in Education. She is also an avid adventure seeker and pursued being a film producer. Today she leverages her breadth of career and life experiences to design transformational experiences for young people. 

The chief of staff came from an e-commerce background, having worked in companies like Red Cross, Groupon, Lazada, Payoneer, and Decathlon, she brings a wealth of enterprise sales and scaling know-how. 

The marketing manager was in the brand and content marketing for 8 years and she leads our thought leadership as an education innovation company to reach youth and corporates and bring them into our eco-system. 

The programs associate was in charge of WWF's educational programs and is now in charge of all our programs management and activation, ensuring the quality of experiences and in iterative mode to improve.  

The Sales and Marketing assistant has been with the company since 2020 and is currently the longest standing employee. 

Our India associate has been an education start up founder herself and she is on the ground recruiting for partnerships with NGOs and underserved youths. 

The current team is diverse from the countries where the focus of expansion are, Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, India. The team consists not just of the core team, but of all the industry professionals and companies  that are our partners

Furthermore, we work with youth across socio economic spectrum, and have been identified as a Diversity and Inclusion partner for Soho House and Apple Today. 

We also have an ambassador program engaging directly with 20 youth from 8 countries around the world we meet on a bi-weekly basis to seek feedback and on board them as part of our beta testers. The ambassadors keep us up to date and grounded for the work we do. 

Product / Service Distribution - The network of MIT would be valuable for the eco-system building of students and corporates to further our impact. 

Public relation - Gaining visibility / traction globally, and create a renown brand name via MIT.

Financial - introducing to a wider VC community, an opportunity to pitch to investors who are ESG focused.

Education has definitely set the right standard of learning and equip youths with the ability to accomplish task that contributes back to the society, economics, the world in one way or another, in an academic manner. 

With the academic knowledge, it is critical to infuse the real world exposure and technical skills to make it whole. To make it whole, meaning that youth will be well-informed and well-equipped for their desired roles. OWN Academy is here to provide that solution as a journey for youths from learning about themselves to understanding the different industries by participating in our Real World Challenge (who includes speaking to real professionals), and finally to guiding them into their desired career after receiving more insights through our programme.  

OWN Academy is considered to enable broader positive impacts in the education/career space via early career education.

Next year: 

• 100,000 users in 5 key markets
• 20 companies on board from sectors of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity 
• Defining our core product - Corporate Academy - to get into career that they wouldn't have otherwise 

Achieve through digital marketing, partnership with school unions, partnership with educators, partnership with student ambassadors, online/offline events.

Next 3 years

• Place 10% of them in jobs they wouldn't otherwise been able to access. 
• for 100 corporates to be signed up and help companies hire a more diverse pool of talent 

Achieve through active inside sales and networking for leads, and closing with increased number of outbound sales. 

Next 5 years: 

• Reach 1 million users globally on board on our platform
• for 200 corporates to be signed up and help companies hire a more diverse pool of talent 

With the goals mentioned above:

100k users - Targeting 10k user growth each month.

5 markets - Connecting ourselves with education groups with global presence. Targeting 1 new market every 2 months.

20 corporates - 3 new corporates each month.

In OWN Academy, we are commit on a journey with the youths in assisting them to know their strengths and weaknesses --> to experience a wider variety of industries through leading companies --> to finally leading them to start their dream career. In this journey, we will incorporate AI to identify user's personal strength and weakness, and increase accuracy on career match.

1. Website

We can reach out to youths who will benefit early career education on our platform directly, instead of going through schools or other institutions/agency.

With everything done online, we could
a) faster and wider reach to youths via digital marketing
b) help youths without them paying for the programme, while the cost is covered by corporates who will gain branding and potential candidates by featuring with OWN Academy. This makes it way easier to gain a wider user base.

2. AI

We will incorporate AI to identify user's personal strength and weakness, and increase accuracy on career match.

3. NFT

Micro-credentials for anyone that comes through our platform.

OWN Academy is an D&I company, where we celebrate diversity, much visible in terms of culture, age, educational background, race, and geographical locations.

We are proud to say that our team makes up of amazing talents from Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, India and we continuously seek for people from a diverse background. Our JD looks for people who are kind regardless of their socio economic statuses with the heart to make an impact. Our work arrangement is flexible to accommodate different individual/family's needs. 

With D&I dna within us, it is natural for us to connect with international schools as our clients, and we use the profit we make to fund the underserved population. We work with companies that see us as their D&I arm and actively engage with youth from NGOs. 

OWN Academy is an early career education platform to youth (age 15-24) as they take on their first career. This journey includes 3 stages:

1) discovering yourself
2) real world experiences and challenge, and
3) a career match for youth with their desired companies and recommendation of further training with e-learning platforms, incorporating the use of AI.

We focus on 2 stakeholders: Youth and Corporates.

Youth:
Early career education is needed for today's youth as they are heavily academic focus. They have limited opportunities to know and get first hand information on what it is like to work in their desired industry. OWN Academy is bridging this gap.

Corporates:
The value proposition for corporates is a 4 in 1 solution: employer branding, employee engagement, talent sourcing and talent recruitment. We achieve that by helping companies build their corporate academy, an interactive content library to showcase the purpose and vision of the company, various key job roles, and live webinar on career coaching with youths. In order for youths to know more about the companies and real working experience, they will be invited to join the Real World Challenge (RWC).

Through Real World Challenge (RWC) youths will be exposed to the insights and overview of sample problems / objectives of top industries companies, and learn through a real scenario case study based challenge/assignment. Youths will not be alone working on the challenge, instead, they will received model answers upon completion of the challenge provided by employee of the corporation. In addition to that, an explainer video on how to derive to the model answers is prepared to help youths understand the HOW in getting to the answers of the challenge. This way, they understand the industries better, which will help them better make known decisions for a) the suitable university faculty to join, and b) the right skills to pick up for their preferred industry as future career.

With above business model, OWN Academy gain revenue from below channels:
a) Learners (users) access for free;
b) Corporate pays for production of corporate academy;
c) Premium version of RWC, which is Real World Experience (RWX), school pays for guided group teaching on early career education to their students;
d) Sponsorship for annual virtual career fair - OWN Future Fair (OFF) .

We keep our margins at at around 80%, where 10 - 20% is the cost, including our fees to professionals for teaching students at our RWX programs or the production fee for RWC.

RWX is our premium product for international high schools and we want to pay our professionals well to work with us on a long term basis

RWC is the recurring revenue product, the 20% would only be incurred as a one off fee with production, as the subsequent years will be a subscription model to keep the RWC on our platform, so the margin there besides the platform fee would be 100%

OWN Academy was established and started operation in 2016. 2016 - 2019 has been R&D on product development and iteration on product market fit, the offering was mainly offline. We have always wanted to move online and thanks to Covid, 2020 is the digital transformation, where we began the expansion across APAC

Key revenue generating program:
- Real World Experience (RWX) B2B2C. Premium career taster programs charged through international schools - 2016 to present
- OWN Future Fair (OFF) - 2016 to present
- Real World Challenge (RWC) paid by corporates and free for learners - will be launched Q3, 2022

Till date, an estimation of 14,000 + youths has benefited from our early career programs and events.

We are actively in search for investors at this stage.