My Skills Labs

Save time, money and effort by trying a career/profession before you fully commit.

THE PROBLEM

The nature of work is constantly changing due to technology improvements. As a result, people in Australia, and in other countries are losing their job due to these new technologies at the mature age. These people would now need to re-skill or up-skill in order to stay relevant in the job market. However, since people are living longer due to various reasons like great health services in Australia, Japan, Germany and Canada or because they are better educated about maintaining a healthy life, governments around the world are increasing the retirement age to at least 70 in the next few years. Since it's becoming increasingly expensive to retire, people are expected to work more in order to sustain themselves comfortably when they retire.

THE SOLUTION

Currently, Americans change careers at least 7 times in their lifetime. With the constant change in the nature of work, the number of times an American change careers will likely increase. This is why it is important that we create a platform that will enable re-skilllers/ up-skillers or even young adults to easily re-skill and up skill as per the 21st century. We can achieve this with My Skills Labs.

My Skills Labs: HOW DOES IT WORK

MySkillsLabs aims to change the way current education works by allowing users to try out a course before they fully commit to it. My skills labs aims to make re-skilling or choosing a career easier by allowing our users to complete modular programs (crash courses on current local job roles) and gain practical experience through mentorships from real people in the industry and also, to learn from their peers. Combining all of this concept will allow our target market to learn more about a particular profession before they fully commit to it saving them time, money and effort. In Australia, the outstanding Tertiary Education debt is at $50 billion dollars. Many students change their career option after studying at least a year at University. Using My Skills Labs would help save a typical Australian at least $10,000 plus time and effort.

At the moment, current online learning facilities do not employ the My Skills Labs triad of modular learning, on-demand mentorships and peer-to-peer learning. This is what makes My Skills Labs innovative.

Technology is integral to our platform as it is our tool to enable users to find mentorships on-demand, learn from their peers through messaging and forum,

For Q3 of 2018:

Develop a UI/UX Prototype and Native Prototype

Establish partnership with Canberra Institute of Technology and University of Canberra to create a modular course through our platform

Create a community of Industry Leaders as per profession

Create a community of students for peer-to-peer learning

For Q4 of 2018: 

Go to China to understand the Chinese Market Needs

Potentially pitch to investors

Create a working beta as per the feedback

For Q1 of 2019:

Conduct a Pilot Study

For Q2 of 2019:

Change requirements and functionalities of the platform as per the feedback

Look for avenues for funding to Market, Create more modular programs and Scale

Michael: Experience Designer and UI Designer, Stakeholder Engagement, Marketing, Public Speaker

Luke: Software / Product Engineer

Education and making re-skilling easy is a difficult problem to solve however MIT has the capabilities, network and resources to make it possible. The technical expertise and network of MIT is sure to help us implement and advance our solution that is also scalable. In addition, My Skills Labs is applying to Solve because we have a solution that fits the Future of Work Challenge.

Fully establishing the core features of the platform though would require a great deal of work. 

In order for My Skills Labs to succeed, we would need to capture the Value that we want to offer to our users and customers, and to do that, we would need to tap into a vast network of educational institutions and industry leaders. I believe that Solve's vast network would help us deliver the value we aim to provide. MIT Solve also has a large pool of mentors that can assist My Skills Labs in growing, scaling and bettering the platform.