The Pro-Found Playbook

A mobile application that assists early-stage professionals in relationship building by providing personalized prompts and conversation suggestions using natural language processing.

The “Network Gap” that young people (age 16-24) are facing that is contributing to high unemployment/underemployment. Where you grow up, where you went to school, and where you work are key factors in determining your access to opportunity. We are looking to create an app that will empower youth with the agency to build meaningful and productive professional connections through relationship-building and soft-skill strategies.

One in nine, or 4.4 million young people aged 16-24 were disconnected from work, education, and public service prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This disruption leads to people engaging through computer screens, with that the loss of human engagement and development. Furthermore, Black and Brown “Opportunity Youth”(Youth aged 16-24 who are neither in school or working) faced further challenges as these communities faced double-digit rates of disconnection. 

With the current age demographic representing Gen-Z, this generation has been trained to prepare for a work environment that no longer exists and requires greater self-reliance and soft skills. 

82% of Generation Z said they have never worked in an in-person office environment full-time. Of that percentage, nearly all (92%) said they feel like they are missing out on traditional workplace experiences, and 85% said they worry that they are at a disadvantage when it comes to learning professional “soft skills” due to never working in a more traditional full-time role.

As we move towards more remote/hybrid models of work, growing concerns for early-stage professionals include loneliness, difficulty with collaboration with working, and career advancement in a tech-driven world. 52% of employees felt “less connected” to their coworkers after shifting to remote work, 45% said career growth was more difficult for remote workers to achieve. 

The need for meaningful professional relationships is crucial not only for progressing in your career but also for building a support system that helps marginalized communities achieve upward mobility. 

Our solution would enable the next generation of professionals to articulate their professional goals and build connections by using strategic conversation tactics to network with a purpose. Generating professional relationships can lead to finding your next job, getting a letter of recommendation to your dream school, a referral that helps you acquire a client or a friend that shares similar passions.

Our application would be built on a foundation of human-centered design, user experience, and cultural competency. The onboarding process would require the user to create a profile with demographic information (Age, Gender, Racial/Ethnic Background, Disability,  Location). From there, we would ask the user to self-assess their soft skills (Communication, Problem-Solving, Time Management) so that we can get baseline data. Finally, the user would be prompted to provide information on their current professional experience as well as career goals that can inform the application on how to best support the user as they use the application.

In order to achieve a personalized experience that caters to the needs of the user, the onboarding process should capture key data that can be tracked over time but can also aid the algorithm in providing relevant conversation prompts that are based on industry research and communication studies. 

A key feature that the app would include would be camera access to scan business cards and LinkedIn QR codes. This information would be recorded and the application would provide suggestions through a “Game Plan” on how to follow up with that connection based on their role, affiliation to the user, and alignment with the user's career goals.   

This solution is aimed at supporting youth (16-24) in the U.S. and abroad that will be initiating their professional careers. This population will represent  27% of the workforce in OCED countries by 2025. Close to 20% of that population represent Black and Brown identities. 

This solution will help youth get their foot in the door academically and professionally. It will also help organizations improve their culture by equipping their members in building meaningful and productive connections in a technologically driven workplace. We aspire for our users to have an increase in self-confidence, greater human connection, and internal fulfillment.

We would be one of the first solutions out in the world that addresses professional relationship building while aligning inner fulfillment. Along with that, we would be one of the few solutions that's led by a Latinx Gen-Z with direct experience of being unemployed for a significant amount of time. 

I’m well equipped to solve this solution because I myself went through the challenges of building a career in the new age of work. Having graduated right at the pandemic, I was forced to adapt quickly to a different way of not only living but growing a career virtually. Despite having professional work experience and a college degree, I found myself unable to find a full-time role for 6 months. After spending some time volunteering for a local non-profit and taking online certificates, I was finally able to land my current role. 

Although working remotely gave me plenty of flexibility and I felt that I was at a disadvantage because I had no mentorship on how to build a career in a remote context, getting to connect and learn from my more experienced colleagues was something that became challenging as I would see them about once a quarter at most.

I also have direct experience working with youth as a college and career advisor, helping support diverse high school students in Oakland in their educational and career goals. My passion for helping others develop their self-efficacy stems from my upbringing and lack of social capital growing up. Having to go to speech therapy early in my life presented significant challenges in my educational and social development. This lifelong battle with my identity and how I communicate with others drove me to build out a social impact career that had an impact on people’s lives. 

I also have the support of Ben Weeda as a Business Advisor with who I work closely on a biweekly basis focusing on business strategy and innovation. Ben is the current CEO of Balenceo, where he works closely with founders and executives, helping them build work/life balance and strong relationships that help them live their lives work. He’s also the sitting Secretary board of the City of Denver Office of Strategic Partnerships. He understands the issue directly and helps facilitate community engagement in many social impact organizations that serve youth. 

I have done extensive research through user interviews that include conversations with CEO’s, Start-up founders, Tech professionals, mental health professionals, academics, and early-stage young professionals. 

I have done research personally in trying to understand this issue as it’s one that I’ve gone through, with the purpose of trying to support others in helping them develop their own careers. 

Currently, I have a social impact consulting company where I work with organizations on training their early-stage professionals on building out their careers in the age of work.

Our solution is innovative because it prioritizes human connection through strategy. A key objective that we have for this project is for people to learn about the person their meeting through the work and experience that they have. This platform would use named entity recognition to tag key phrases or terms when scanning a business card or filling in a profile for a connection that you made. These key terms can help the algorithm develop an automatic summarization of the connection and help inform the user of the next steps in building that relationship.

We would like to continue our user research that’s conducted through trials, user interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Our next step would be to have a working prototype so that we can beta test and secure pilots with organizations that align with our mission of supporting youth in developing their careers. We would like to test our product with at least 1000 users. 

The core technology that’s powering our solution is software and natural language processing, specifically named entity recognition and automatic summerization.

I have secured a partnership with RepresentEd Leadership, a non-profit based in Oakland CA that focuses on workforce development for underrepresented communities. They have programs that they develop with educational institutions and corporations in the bay area with the goal of leveling the playing field for BIPOC early professionals in achieving their career goals. 

I will be delivering training for their program participants on how to build a career in the new age of work. I have a verbal agreement with them on piloting the product to their program participants. I will be supporting 8 programs that serve about 100 diverse early-stage professionals, giving me a sample size of about 800 individuals that I can test the prototype with and gain user feedback by the end of the year. 

Some of the barriers that exist are our limited knowledge and perspective on how to develop and execute building the technology. I have coded before as well as have some experience in data analysis enough to hold a conversation, however, I have never built a tech product of any kind at all from start to finish. We would need support in going from concept to prototype. 

I have connections to firms that do app development and help launch mobile applications. Although there are benefits to building an app using this option, I would prefer to build the product in-house and be a part of the development process from start to finish. I would be very interested in bringing on a technical co-founder, ideally someone that’s knowledgable in implementing AI onto mobile applications and represents a historically marginalized identity. I am not selfish with the work that I do and I would want to share my vision with others to create the impact that I want to make in the world. Bringing on a co-founder with proven technical expertise would bring diversity in experience and perspective that can help the development of the prototype to be more comprehensive and inclusive to our target population. 

Getting academic validation by executing clinical trials and research focus groups would be another key area where we would need plenty of support in.

Lastly, finding the capital necessary to build the technology and down the line market the product to our customers is something that we would want advising with the goal of generating a capital plan.  

I have secured a partnership with RepresentEd Leadership, a non-profit based in Oakland CA that focuses on workforce development for underrepresented communities. They have programs that they develop with educational institutions and corporations in the bay area with the goal of leveling the playing field for BIPOC early professionals in achieving their career goals. 

I will already be participating in their programming as I will be delivering training on how to build a career in the new age of work. I have a verbal agreement with them on piloting the product to their program participants. I will be supporting 8 programs that serve about 100 diverse early-stage professionals, giving me a sample size of about 800 individuals that I can test the prototype with and gain user feedback. 

We would like to make this product accessible to as many people as possible. However, we understand that we would need to beta-test the platform and ideate further after doing a couple of pilots.

Building a product that’s human-centered, social impact-focused, and has concrete academic validation, we would want to first focus on getting buy-in from the product from Educational institutions, Companies, Non-Profits, and other organizations that have our target population. We would like to engage with these entities as they would have the resources and the structure in place to offer a beta version of the product. 

Once we have a working product that’s generating revenue, we can explore the possibility of seeking equity investments(Angel, VC, etc) with partners that can help expand our impact and develop the product further. From there, we can begin to expand our model to include direct-to-consumer and use the capital raised to market the product to our target population across the world. 

We also see the value in generating research based on user engagement. The opportunity to be a thought leader in the space has tremendous opportunities. Research publications, White papers, social media content, podcasts, and lobbying for policies that support early-stage professionals are some examples of how we can move beyond selling a product, to make significant changes globally to address the issues in all aspects of society. The potential to be a thought leader in the industry and contribute to knowledge on how to best support youth and early-stage professionals in achieving their professional goals can lead to our education system being better prepared in career advising, employers being able to support the growth of their remote/hybrid employees, and for developing nations to deploy this technology to help generate economic mobility for their communities. 

Our path to financial sustainability is developing the product with as many grants as possible at the beginning. Building partnerships with academics, developing clinical trials with psychologists, and engaging with other key stakeholders would provide us with the necessary validation to produce comprehensive grant proposals and seek funding from government and private institutions. 

From there, we can seek to engage with companies, educational institutions, and non-profits where we can provide a beta version of our platform. If these prospective clients are interested and want to engage further, we can enter into contractual agreements that can provide us with a stable cash flow and allow us the capacity to continue to innovate the product further so that we can launch directly to the consumer. 

Having prior experience doing college and career advising work, I can secure partnerships with educational institutions to pilot the product to high school and college students. 

Lastly, with my current role, I’ve been able to build relationships with CEO’s and Founders of multi-million dollar companies. Many of these enterprises have personnel that meets our target population. We can pilot our product to companies that align with our mission which can lead to further business opportunities.