Bloc: AI Career Coaching for the Historically Marginalized

Automation to Empower, Rather than Displace, Young Workers

Bloc aims to address two key challenges facing Low-Income, Minority and First Generation (LIMFG) college students:

•  the digitalization divide, which is more than a wage gap. LIMFG students are frequently tracked into low paying, non-sustainable, professions; and

• high college dropout rates. They have a dropout rate that is three times as high as their peers and typically take on more than $37,000 in student debt and, if they drop out, gain no long term salary advantage if they are unable to complete their degrees

In the "Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them" Public Agenda and the Gates Foundation found that over 50% of students who left school before graduating cited difficulty balancing work and school as their primary barrier to graduating (an even larger barrier than tuition costs). LIMFG are particularly vulnerable to dropping out due to having to work part-time or full time in low wage industries during school, driving graduation rates as low as 41% for Native American and black college students (The Education Trust 2016 https://edtrust.org/resource/fast-fact-college-graduation-rates/).

Despite the fact that students rate effective career advising as the top non-legislative intervention that would help them stay in school, the average ratio of career advisers to colleges students is 1 to 1720.  This shortage is particularly devastating for students of color. “Nearly two-thirds of black graduates who visited a career center at least once reported being employed full-time, compared to 54 percent who did not visit." (Gallup-Purdue 2016).

We license software to organizations that do career development for LIMFG students. Our software, called Bloc portals, gives students access to career tools powered by artificial intelligence that can help them find professional opportunities during school that better match their needs. In two minutes, administrators can register for Bloc and create their own portal with personalized branding. Throughout on-boarding, customers can select the design of their portal, select career tools that are a best for their students (ie smart resume template, resume reviewer, cover letter generator) and leverage our integrations with Jopwell, Indeed and The Muse.

We are currently using AI in our portals in two ways:

1. Recommendations: We are leveraging an AI recommendation technique, collaborative filtering, to connect students with resources related to their identities. Users are connected to resources view or like, allowing them to receive recommendations on resources that can advance their careers.

2. Matching with Career Outlooks: After students complete their profile quizzes, they are taken to their dashboard where they have access to our smart tools (ie resume builder, resume reviewer, cover letter generator) but also have access to salary snapshots. We utilize Naive Bayes classification to match students’ responses for their dream career with career information from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s database.

Bloc innovates by utilizing emerging technologies, particularly natural language processing and collaborative filtering, to connect marginalized communities with culturally sensitive and personalize career support. Bloc uses automation to empower, rather than displace at-risk professionals. Bloc's first focus in on automating the application process and salary negotiation process for marginalized workers, using smart templates and score cards to help users build strong resumes and covers letters and by using classification algorithms to help users access salary insights about their dream careers, and by using recommendation algorithms to help aspiring professionals find opportunities. 

Bloc utilizes technology to digitize and democratize career coaching. Our primary product, AI career coaching portals, leverage natural language processing, collaborative filtering and classification algorithms to provide users with digitally optimized resources (ie. resumes, cover letters, matches with opportunities). 

Organization and school leaders can also access their own digital dashboards to track student success, export information, adjust the design of their portals, and upload customize resources. 

As we grow, we will continue to use data to help users connect with the resources they need throughout career moments in their career (ie. salary negotiations, performance reviews, promotions). 

Over the next 12 months, we aim to reach 100,000 students with digitial career coaching resources. We will do this by reaching 1,000 academic departments and career development organizations with access to the initial version of our career platforms. 

To achieve this work, we will be hiring two new engineers, one specializing in software development and the other in AI research. We will also be building out our business development team and campus ambassador program. 

In the next two years, we will reach over one million people within the United States with tools that help them pursue sustainable careers. By working with organizations and universities, we hope to not only sharpen our tools to grow our impact, but also to scale to places outside of the United States. Geographic areas that will make the most sense seem to be India, the African Continent, and Latin America. Matching skills with opportunities will be particularly challenging in emerging economies like those. 

Our solution will be deployed through organizations that are currently working on career development for students from marginalized communities. Our B2B model is crucial for our venture’s success. It ensures that every person that uses our product has a mentor or coach there to guide them through its use. It also allows us to scale without adapting too much to changes in location. 

We are currently not launching our product until Fall 2018. We have spent the last 18 months refining our approach by working with different universities across Atlanta and New York City. We've reached ~2000 students over the course of this time period and will reach more when officially launch.

In 12 months, we expect to be serving approximately 100,000 students through our relationships with partner organizations. And in 3 years, we hope to working with over 1 million students across the United States. Our technology is critical for this goal because it allows us to customize across geographic preferences and relationships.

Our team is uniquely positioned to make an impact because of our experiences as end-users and customers of this product. Outside of our technical capabilities--with folks who were trained at Google, Accenture, and Facebook-- we are more acutely attuned to the challenge we're solving. It's not simply an intellectual exercise, it's personal.

We have a SaaS revenue model, allowing organizations to pay anywhere from $199 a month to $2999 a month--based on the size of their student pool-- for portal access on behalf of theirs students/aspiring workers. 

Solve can help us reach our goal of connecting with 100,000 aspiring professionals over the next 12 months. We believe that feedback from Solve's judges and the broader Solve community provides us with access to critical information on our technology strategy which will allow us to democratize access to personalized career coaching. 

Key barriers that exist are finding the right contacts at universities and institutional stakeholders to build relationships with on the partnership side.  On the technology side, MIT would be helpful in connecting us to resources to help us be very intentional about mitigating algorithm bias.