Pathways to Sustainable Employment

While refugees bring a variety of skills and experience to the workforce, they often find themselves in precarious survival jobs that are increasingly at risk of disappearing. Because of language barriers, differences in labour market dynamics, and a lack of formally recognized qualifications, refugees are often underemployed and unable to access employment opportunities that offer greater potential for upward mobility, higher wages and benefits. 

SkillLab uses award-winning skill profiling technology to support organizations serving refugee jobseekers by matching their skills to professions, highlighting skill gaps and linking jobseekers directly to upskilling opportunities based on their actual. Together with global humanitarian and refugee resettlement agency HIAS, we will integrate our award-winning software into employment and digital literacy programs to improve employment outcomes for refugees. 

Integrated into refugee support networks globally, our solution has the potential to improve livelihoods for a growing population of 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world.

Refugees often struggle to express their skills and relate them to professions in their new country. Past job titles fail to describe specific abilities or highlight transferable skills. Language barriers and a lack of formally recognized credentials exacerbate the challenge. As a result, refugee jobseekers are often placed in hourly, minimum-wage jobs - for which they are often overqualified - putting them on pathways with few opportunities for upskilling and career advancement.

Employment outcomes for refugee workers are poor when compared with native-born workers, particularly during times of recession. In Europe, for example, it takes approximately 20 years on average for refugees to obtain employment rates similar to native-born populations, despite being likelier to be overqualified than other migrants (OECD). In the US, while refugees generally have high labor force participation rates - which rival those of native-born rates within four years after arrival in the US - underemployment remains a significant challenge and is more than double among refugees compared to the native-born population (Urban Institute).  

Our solution seeks to ensure that refugees are better equipped to identify and gain the skills they need to pursue higher quality jobs and adapt to a changing workforce.

Our solution is based on the SkillMap - a multi-platform software application that uses artificial intelligence algorithms and structured competency frameworks to capture a person’s skills and knowledge in granular detail, and winner of the Google AI Impact Challenge. Our solution seeks to build on this software by providing direct links to e-learning courses that address identified skill gaps. 

During the pilot, we will integrate the SkillLab app into HIAS’ Digital Literacy program, which aims to increase the digital skills of refugee jobseekers and help them access resources online. HIAS will invite jobseekers to register on the SkillLab platform using a mobile device and create a Skill Profile. Using the application in his/her native language, the user performs a series of intuitive, automated interviews with an artificial intelligence engine. The AI explores the user’s experiences using an underlying database of over 13,000 skills to capture and document their unique skillset and map it to nearly 3,000 standard professions in any language.

The resulting skills profile details how the user’s skills relate to various sectors, industries, and professions, highlighting transferable skills and specific skill gaps, and then directing the user to specific online training courses based on those skill gaps.

Our solution seeks to improve skill-based job placement and training services for refugees - the vast majority of whom are facing unemployment due to COVID-19 and are at risk of falling further behind in an increasingly technology-driven economy. The proposed pilot will focus on refugees in the US who are enrolled in HIAS’ employment and digital literacy programs. By targeting these programs, our solution builds on existing programming that is designed to be responsive and adaptable to the needs of refugees, and encourages them to design their own learning pathways. 

By partnering with HIAS, SkillLab will help refugee jobseekers find employment opportunities commensurate with their skills, and directly link them to online education courses. Our solution will help to facilitate job placement that looks beyond the immediate survival job and skill building towards more sustainable career pathways.

With user-centered design at the heart of our solution, SkillLab works closely with refugees and job counselors using our platform to generate and incorporate insights for the improvement of our solution. In addition to on-the-ground insights and user-centered activities, we continuously monitor software usage data that helps us understand how users derive value from our approach and offers insights for improvements.

Our proposed solution directly addresses challenges related to the future of work, including widespread job insecurity and unemployment by empowering a particularly marginalized group of workers (refugees) to improve their digital literacy and gain durable skills through targeted upskilling. Our solution equips them with relevant skills, resources and networks they need to adapt to a changing workforce and pursue more sustainable career pathways. A solution that both captures their skills, and links them directly to digital education offerings for upskilling addresses the challenge in question by connecting workers, employment services, and online education providers through a universal currency of skills.

The core innovation of our solution is the use of technology to connect workers to labour markets and education providers on the basis of skills rather than titles. At a general level, the vast majority of existing solutions connecting workers to training, education, and employment are based on high-level descriptors in resumes such as job titles and diplomas which are meant to infer experiences and abilities. This approach is proving inadequate in transferring skills from old jobs to new ones in increasingly volatile labour markets. In contrast, our innovation uses skills as labour currency, rather than titles.

Furthermore, our technology-driven approach distinguishes itself from other solutions that attempt to address the problem in a number of ways:

• Scalability - where the abundance of skill assessment services rely on in-person interviews, paper examinations, and specialized content, our solution combines automated processes with international skills frameworks and multi-lingual interfaces to enable us to reach millions of people at low marginal costs.

• Quality - Both the granularity and structure of career insights that our solution generates by using frameworks of thousands of skills and professions distinguish our solution from those that are either too specialized to provide broad impact, or are too general to provide deep impact for individuals (such as psychometric tests)

• Adaptability - Our solution is designed to be embedded into and adapted by local partners to the reality on the ground, enabling us to provide value to a broad range of target communities around the same core value proposition.

The core technology that powers SkillMap is an Artificial Intelligence based “Skill Assessment Engine” that helps a user to capture and document his or her skills in granular detail, regardless of language, demographics, or level of formal professional or educational experience (assuming only a base level of literacy). The assessment engine connects to a series of other components, which together comprise a new application of artificial intelligence technology for skill-based career guidance.

1. Underlying Skill Framework: A taxonomy of skills and occupations that the AI assessment engine continuously analyzes to capture a user’s skill set

2. Mobile web-app with which job seekers can create skill profiles, explore professional personal career pathways, and directly access digital course offerings

3. Desktop web-app for administrators which enables services providers to analyze users’ skill profiles, adapt occupations visible to job-seekers to local contexts, and embed locally available course offerings

The AI engine and other components are all microservices that communicate with one another via API, allowing for maximum adaptability. For example, the AI engine could run on a skills framework other than the standard framework Skilllab currently uses, which is the European Skills, Competencies and Qualifications (ESCO) framework.

The technology is designed to be integrated into existing employment services provided to refugee workers by direct service organizations, such as our partner HIAS.

*User-facing interfaces are built as progressive web applications in React. Back end system architecture is based on Ruby on Rails, hosted on Google Cloud Platform, while the AI engine is based on Python.

Since its founding, SkillLab’s team has focused rigorous development and testing to iterate on the technology to ensure that it not only functions as intended, but also that users from the global refugee community are able to use it as intended. SkillLab’s core technology (AI to capture a person’s skills) is already being utilized by public, private, and nonprofit organizations across three continents to support inclusive career service provision to refugees and other marginalized groups.

In Europe, multiple partner organisations in the Netherlands, Finland, and Greece are actively using Skilllab’s technology to provide improved career services and job matching to refugees and other marginalized groups following a series of demonstration pilots across the continent with several stakeholders.

In the MENA region, the International Labour Organization is distributing SkillLab’s technology to partner organisations such as the Alexandria Business Association on the ground in Egypt and Jordan as part of the PROSPECTS project supporting host communities and displaced persons.

In Latin America, HIAS country offices in Peru, Panama, and Ecuador are piloting the use of the technology as part of their livelihoods program for refugees.

A link to a 15-minute product demo including an introduction to the concept of Skill Profiling can be found here: .

Please note that in this product demo the direct access to online education courses is not yet active, as this is a feature that we intend to implement and pilot within the context of the proposed project in this application.

Our Theory of Change is centered around the rationale that improved skill-based career orientation of refugee workers leads to more sustainable livelihoods by connecting workers to targeted upskilling opportunities.

Activities: Skill-Based Profiling and Career Planning

By using the SkillMap app to generate detailed Skill Profiles, both the refugee jobseeker and his/her job counselor establish an extensive understanding of what skills the person has acquired during their past work, education, and informal experiences. They also generate a broad understanding of how his/her skill set fits within the labour market across sectors, industries, and roles. By using the app, they can visualize how closely his/her skill set aligns to specific occupations and identify remaining skill gaps. These activities establish a baseline for developing a highly personalized career and learning plan that targets both intermediary jobs and e-learning courses that provide the specific, durable skills that the jobseeker needs to obtain sustainable, long-term employment.

Outcomes: Access to E-Learning, Training, and Work Opportunities for Upskilling

Equipped with a detailed understanding of a person’s skills and how they relate to different professions, both job seeker and job counselor can use SkillMap’s matching functions to enroll a person in specific e-learning courses or identify relevant intermediary jobs - both of which provide opportunities to gain the specific skills they need (including digital literacy skills) to pursue careers that more closely align with their skill set and career interests. By integrating SkillMap into HIAS’ employment and digital literacy programs, our holistic approach ensures that refugee job seekers will be equipped with the digital skills they need to effectively use digital platforms and pursue employment that may have basic requirements for digital literacy.

Impact: Sustainable Livelihoods and Greater Job Security

Ultimately, better informed job seekers with access to digital literacy and job skills training will be able to look beyond survival jobs and effectively plan and execute learning pathways towards more sustainable jobs with greater job security, growth potential, and benefits.

Through continuous product testing embedded in a series of pilot projects, Skilllab’s skill assessment technology and services have reached approximately 500 marginalized refugees across Europe. 

By growing within and expanding our network of partners, Skilllab plans to reach 3,000 refugees by the end of 2020 and will continue to extend our reach and impact. 

Within 5 years, our goal is to serve 2 million marginalized workers worldwide. Those career orientations should result in the majority of cases in targeted educational choices and employment (see theory of change). The economic, societal, health and public safety benefits indirectly expand to a much larger group of beneficiaries. 

Embedding direct access to e-learning courses into the platform - the new value proposition which we are proposing to pilot with our partner HIAS - will initially reach a small sample of refugee jobseekers enrolled in HIAS’ digital literacy and employment programs. After the new feature is tested and refined, our aim is to expand to other HIAS operations (such as those we already partner with in Latin America) while systematically embedding the same feature and value proposition across our broader partner network to reach the intended number of beneficiaries outlined above.

Our immediate goal within the next year is to both integrate and prove the use-case of embedding e-learning offerings at no cost to refugees in the SkillMap app. By embedding digital course offerings from online course providers who offer free content to our target group, we want to expand the value of our skill profiling software to include access to education directly to refugee jobseekers using our solution. Working through SkillLab and HIAS’ partner network which includes online education service providers such as:

• Accenture (Skills to Succeed Learning Exchange)

• Coursera (Coursera for refugees)

We intend to realize the transformative potential of online learning for refugees by directly linking refugee job seekers to relevant course offerings that match their skills and lead to sustainable employment.

Within the next 12 months, SkillLab also aims to raise 3-5 million USD in blended finance and revenue to invest in a scalable approach to integrating online education service providers into our core application to expand global partnerships and offer access to localized training content for refugees.

Within the next 5 years, SkillLab’s goals include:

• Expanding our partnerships with HIAS and others direct service providers to expand the global reach of skill-based career orientation

• Partner with employers to directly embed localized job opportunities and opportunities to fast track refugees on pathways to sustainable employment

• Support improved career orientation, upskilling and job placement for at least 2 million refugees globally

One challenge that we face is the cost of adding languages to our solution. While the 27 currently available languages cover many geographical use-cases, integrating new languages in high demand such as Dari and Pashto carry significant up-front costs which are best shared across stakeholders serving communities speaking those languages and are rarely willing to be borne by a single stakeholder. This challenge is also exacerbated by the languages of the course offerings made available by e-learning platforms.

Another challenge that we face in scaling our solution to support more people who need skill-based career orientation is integrating SkillLab’s Software as a Service business model in the operations of publicly-funded initiatives which are accustomed to purchasing custom software, or insist on premises software hosting and ownership of the “purchased” solution and the intellectual property contained within.

Another barrier that we face in common with others is adapting to and conducting both business and operations under COVID-19 conditions. With great economic uncertainty volatility, and volatility on the horizon, both investors and implementing partners may be reticent to invest money, time and operational resources in promising, yet ultimately new technologies and approaches that our solution represents.

To address the issue of translation costs to adapt our solution to accommodate a broader range of target communities, we will begin piloting our new value proposition within communities fluent in the languages we currently support, while both seeing to allocate portions of grant funding received specifically to expand our value proposition by integrating additional languages in high demand in the communities that we work. With regards to e-learning solutions, SkillLab will design and implement a content management system that enables our partners like HIAS to easily include course offerings across content providers so that our partners are not limited to the courses and languages offered only by content providers with whom formal partnerships are in place.

To better serve organizations accustomed to purchasing and owning custom software, Skilllab is developing a perpetuity licensing model, allowing organizations (such as public employment agencies) to purchase unlimited licenses in perpetuity to our software for at a fixed fee with an associated maintenance fee, ensuring that such stakeholders will have guaranteed access to the solution without fear of uncontrollable runaway costs associated with purchasing additional licenses for the service.

With regards to COVID-19 - on the financial side of things, SkillLab intends to raise blended funds specifically from investors, donors, and direct customers who’s mission and strategy are focused on the mitigation of the effects of the global pandemic. Operationally, SkillLab has already managed to expand partnerships by positioning the solution as one particularly suited for remote service delivery through purely digital channels.

Our solution team is a consortium of partners led by SkillLab in partnership with HIAS. SkillLab is the primary technology solution provider, whereas HIAS serves as the primary implementer integrating the technology into refugee livelihoods programming, including the provision of free online education to refugees through education service and workforce development partners, such as Coursera and Accenture.

SkillLab is a for-profit company based in the Netherlands. HIAS is a 501(c)3 registered nonprofit organization based in the United States of America.

SkillLab:

SkillLab’s full team is comprised of 10 Full time staff, 2 Part time staff, 1 intern, and 2 Advisers, all of whom work specifically on the continuous development and delivery of the software solution described. For the purposes of the pilot described in this proposal in partnership with HIAS, SkillLab’s solution team consists of:

• 5 Full Time Staff - 1 Product Manager, 2 Software Engineers, 1 Key Account Manager, 1 Customer Support Specialist

• 1 Part Time Staff - 1 UI Designer

• 1 Intern -  1 User Experience Associate

HIAS:

3 Full-time staff

With two and a half years of experience specialized in designing and delivering skill profiling technology for refugee employment programmes, SkillLab’s team is committed to delivering the highest quality software that delivers impact for our partners working with refugees and other marginalized workers. Our team is purpose-built to deliver software for the described purpose while optimizing for impact. The team brings a mixture of experience to our work that covers all key aspects of software development in the social impact space, including:

• Social entrepreneurship

• Product management

• Software Design & Engineering

• Human-centered design

• International development

With over 130 years of experience in refugee resettlement, HIAS has proven a sustained ability to deliver high quality programs for refugees around the world. In the U.S., HIAS has strong institutional knowledge and technical expertise managing economic integration programs, including employment and career services. HIAS’ Digital Literacy program builds upon high-quality employment programming and a solid infrastructure of experienced staff, partners and volunteers. The program was designed and is currently managed by Tiana Gonzalez, Employment Program Manager on the US Programs team at HIAS with seven years of experience in refugee employment and workforce development programs. Alicia Wrenn, Senior Director of Resettlement and Integration, provides oversight and guidance on the overall strategic direction of HIAS’ US Programs. Alicia is also an active member of the AI Working Group of NetHope, a consortium of nearly 60 leading global nonprofits working in partnership with the technology sector to develop innovative, technology- based solutions to humanitarian challenges.

• International Labour Organization (ILO). A client of SkillLab’s and leading technical expert in international competency frameworks and skills for employment programmes. Currently utilizing SkillLab’s skill profiling technology to provide employment support services to 1,500 refugee and host community job-seekers in Egypt and Jordan.

• Google (multiple entities). Skilllab is a grantee of Google.org having been selected as a winner of Google.org’s AI for  Impact Challenge and is receiving mentoring support. SkillLab is also a selected startup participating in Google’s SDG Accelerator programme, focused on mentorship to deliver impact through partnership for the Sustainable Development Goals.

• MISTI (MIT). Each summer, Skilllab takes an intern on a scholarship from the MIT computer science department.

• Coursera. Skilllab and Coursera mapped the Skill taxonomy into their content catalogue. As a result, Skilllab is poised to embed coursera’s course offerings (provided at no cost to our partners at HIAS) and recommend coursera courses to job seekers on the basis of a skill gap to their desired occupations. 

• Green River. Software implementation partner to take care of any customisation work around our core tool.

Skilllab operates a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. We provide licences at cost to our partners based on the amount of end-users who use the product to create skill profiles to find learning and employment opportunities..

We address different customer segments: Public organisations (e.g. governments, municipalities or international organisations), private employment agencies, and nonprofits - all of whom provide career and education services to marginalized communities seeking career support.

Our pricing is divided into three tiers: a basic version, allowing the use of the software; a whitelabel solution, allowing for individual branding within the app and generated documents; a custom solution, allowing customised distribution and API access. Our service is always provided free of cost to the end-user (e.g. refugee worker)

Through our business model, Skilllab has been so far boot strapped and so far has a very viable direct path to profitability without external investment. However, as we believe in the transformative power of the tool we are building, we are planning to raise significant capital in 2020. 

Currently working on a spending strategy for the next 3 years that covers 5-8 million USD raised through revenue, equity investment, debt and grants. At the end of these 3 years, Skilllab will be a profitable and organically growing social business that developed a matured and transformative tool. This financial position will enable us to focus on our core mission of showing pathways to employment to those that are marginalized. 

Our team is applying to Solve to improve our capacity to partner with organizations to make educational resources for upskilling and sustainable employment more accessible to our target communities. As a world-renowned educational institution itself we hope that accessing the MIT Solve network will enable us to establish partnerships within the ed-Tech community to access platforms, content, know-how, and business models that enable us to scalably integrate the wealth of digital learning content into our core business of providing Skill-Based career orientation to marginalized workers.

Our primary need with regards to partnership is with educational content providers (particularly e-learning platforms). While we have established preliminary partnerships with organizations, such as Coursera and Accenture, course content and language availability limits the scope of value that we can bring to the world’s 70 million forcibly displaced people. We would like to leverage the Solve Network to expand and establish greater partnerships across greater varieties of providers to facilitate access to a more global ecosystem of learning, in a scalable way. This highlights another area where we hope to leverage technical experience of the network to help design a highly scalable technical approach to sourcing e-learning content across providers and scraping and categorizing offerings so that they may link directly to skill profiles that our solution generates from target beneficiaries.

Our team is seeking partnership with global online education service providers. Skilllab wants to partner and link to the educational content of all high quality online education providers. Winning the Good Jobs & Inclusive Entrepreneurship challenge will help us to approach these partners, which include MITx and explore models for cooperation that may expand free access to content for marginalized job workers. The work that SkillLab is piloting with HIAS, and expected partners Coursera and Accenture, would form the blueprint of this approach.

Our team is also interested in accessing faculty and organizations both leading thought and operations in expanding training and education to underserved communities such as refugees globally. Organizations working on the ground to expand access to adult education for employment through digital learning initiatives are ideal partners.

Our solution is designed to advance the economic and financial inclusion of refugees by bridging the skills gap and lowering the barriers that refugees face in pursuing higher quality jobs and more sustainable career pathways. By embedding our solution into HIAS’ Digital Literacy Program, refugee job seekers will learn how to safely access and use digital tools in addition to SkillMap, such as language learning software, job search engines, online banking, virtual education platforms and HIAS’ new financial literacy training app - all of which have been created or curated for refugee beneficiaries. Our comprehensive approach seeks to ensure that refugees are better equipped to achieve self-sufficiency and successfully integrate into their new communities.

In the context of COVID-19, our solution provides valuable opportunities for refugees – many of whom are facing unemployment and extreme social isolation – to stay engaged and continue developing critical skills for employment while they are out of work. Together in partnership, we can ensure refugee job seekers have access to the tools and resources they need to build their resilience and navigate the longer-term impacts of this crisis. 

If awarded, our team will use prize funding to support localizing (e.g., translating) the SkillLab application for target communities that HIAS serves and to support on-the-ground implementation. This will enable us to extend our reach and impact to specific target communities and ensure that programming and resources are culturally and linguistically appropriate for the people we serve.

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the critical importance of women’s work both in the formal and informal economies, as well as in the household. Even more so, it has exposed the extent to which that work is undervalued as evidenced through labour market inequities from access to employment to gender pay gaps. Any effort to address such labour market inequalities must begin by recognizing and promoting the value of the work of women.

Our approach to AI-based Skill Profiling to support upskilling and employment outcomes is particularly designed to empower marginalized people who’s skills and abilities are often overlooked by employers and other labour market actors, including women. By capturing and highlighting the transferable nature of skills acquired through work - whether formal or informal, such as domestic work - we bring to the forefront the value of the work that women do beyond the formal labour market, and clearly demonstrate how those skills are valuable to employers and can be built upon in formal employment.

Current participants of HIAS’ digital literacy pilot program are 90% women, demonstrating both a demand and commitment to empowering women. If selected, our team will use prize funding to focus on embedding scalable Skill-Based upskilling and employment programme models into gender-specific use cases across HIAS’ operations in the US, through the Digital Literacy Program, and look to scale beyond the US to other regional pilots.

By incorporating the SkillLab app into HIAS’ Digital Literacy Program, our solution will be part of a broader effort to help refugee job seekers gain the knowledge and skills they need to navigate digital platforms, protect themselves online and access online education opportunities for upskilling. As part of the program, refugee job seekers receive pre-programmed tablets with mobile data management software and a suite of mobile applications specifically designed to enhance digital literacy and economic integration. In partnership with local affiliates, HIAS provides digital literacy education through bi-monthly virtual classes and one-on-one virtual mentorship. By focusing on the fundamental skills that will increase their digital competency and confidence with technology, our aim is to narrow the digital divide and achieve digital inclusion for refugees. 

If selected as an awardee of the Gulbekian Award for Adult Literacy, our team will use the award to replicate the operational model of the SkillLab-supported Digital Literacy program across new target communities through HIAS local affiliates. In addition to expanding the reach of our model in the US, our team will seek to pilot the same approach with local stakeholders in Portugal. By building the technical infrastructure to include direct links to course offerings in SkillLab’s application as described, we will be in a position to integrate locally relevant education offerings from, for example, the Institute of Employment and Professional Training of Portugal to expand our value proposition of Portuguese affiliates.

The core technological innovation at the center of our approach to skill profiling is the use of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science to create an entirely novel model of the global labour market that has practical applications to fundamentally change the way we value humans’ ability to contribute to society through work. Our technology removes static, hierarchical structures that deterministically define how different skills and knowledge relate to one another based on theoretical expert knowledge. Instead, our learning model utilizes continuously updated real user data from actual people to continuously refine a model of how tens of thousands of skills relate to one another. In practical applications, this technology enables us to quickly generate a picture of a person’s skills by efficiently navigating their individual skill space in the model. Ultimately, this allows our partners serving marginalized workers for whom outdated models of resume descriptors, titles, and degrees do not apply to capture, document, and provide upskilling and career services to workers on the basis of a common currency of skills. For this application of AI, SkillLab was recognized by Google.org as a winner of the 2019 AI for Impact Challenge.

If selected, SkillLab would use funds from the prize not only to refine the existing model, to work towards gathering more data through our scaling operations and make publicly available an expanding data set of skills data to allow for academic and policy analysis.