MARi Workforce Accelerator

Current one-page resumes and one-page job descriptions are inadequate for the realities of the Network Economy’s rapidly changing marketplace. 85% of jobs that today’s college students will have in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. Unless we can, in real time, show learners exactly what skills are needed for in-demand jobs as jobs are changing, learners will be hard-pressed to make informed decisions about which jobs best suit them at any given time.

MARi’s whole-person, lifelong, personal attribute translational model matches people’s granular profiles with granular job descriptions, recommends the pathways and next steps to take to reach their desired destinations (even as destinations change), and connects them into a “community of support” that can use MARi to provide additional and ongoing guidance.

When scaled, MARi illuminates never-before-contemplated pathways resulting in more opportunities for all, especially underserved and minority populations who tend to be the most heavily impacted as economies shift.

MARi enables learners to make informed decisions about which pathways and jobs best suit them, including promoting the benefits of non-degree pathways to employment.

Employers currently use college degrees and “years of experience” as proxies for skills. The only way we can truly reimagine employment pathways, for the 73% of people who do not hold a college degree (and even those who do), is to understand the actionable and granular competencies required for successful job performance.

If employers can clearly communicate to learners the whole-person competencies and attributes that “equal” the two-word requirement: “college degree,” learners can decide the best way to gain those competencies, which may be via non-traditional pathways.

What if we could connect individuals to in-demand jobs without them having college degrees? And what if we could attract employers to rural areas with a ready workforce?

MARi is an AI SaaS platform for academic and workplace skills. MARi (short for Mariana Trench and pronounced “mar + ee”) matches people to jobs, visualizes the gaps they need to overcome, and recommends actions they can take to be job-ready.

You’ll likely see many tools that match learners to occupations and careers. We’re different.

MARi is a solution for both employers and job seekers creating a mutually beneficial relationship. Employers use MARi to recruit, upskill, and reskill their workforce. Job descriptions in MARi are broken down into detailed “personal attributes” allowing MARi to predict how competencies from one domain will translate to competencies in another. Employers gain clarity on how to best to keep their workforce job-ready as markets and skill requirements change.

Employers publish these deep job profiles to MARi, allowing individuals to match their own deep competency profile against real jobs. Anyone in the community can match to any job and discover the multiple pathways to become qualified.

The mutually beneficial ecosystem of a detailed job description combined with the always-changing individual skill profile allows learners to change course in real time as jobs shift, to find new opportunities or new ways of gaining necessary skills.

Since 2014, MARi has supported 30,000 students. MARi is currently in paid use by two rural K-12 public school districts. The student bodies consist of 52% underrepresented minorities and 62% qualify for free and reduced lunch.

We connect with our customers weekly, meeting with superintendents, principals, counselors, teachers, and students to understand how we can help learners maximize their potential.

We hear that the biggest challenges in these rural, economically depressed communities, are motivating students and connecting them with meaningful employment in the region.

To solve this problem, MARi has developed an employer solution that works in tandem with our school system solution. When students can see in-demand, real-world jobs and multiple pathways to get there, their interest in learning increases. Likewise, when employers can feel confident that the workforce that is primed to suit their needs, they are more likely to land and expand in a geographic region.

Our employer solution allows employers to fill their pipelines with qualified people and develop their employees through time, as their workforce needs change. Our AI platform is ideal for in-demand jobs that are constantly changing due to technology and market shifts.

While our solution addresses more than one dimension, our Challenge focus is enabling learners to connect with well-suited pathways. MARi creates a direct alignment between employers and educators to connect learners with the fastest growing jobs and key required skills in a rapidly changing economy. To be successful, our ecosystem must benefit both learners and employers, with deep job profiles that change as jobs change and deep personal profiles that predict job/employee fit. In addition, we illuminate non-traditional pathways to become qualified for jobs, potentially reducing student debt and time wasted in non-competency-based education.

MARi has fifteen people on its team, consisting of data scientists, developers, UI/UX designers, strategy, and marketing experts. In 2021, we plan to expand our team to include a full-time product manager, client success manager, and additional engineers, designers and data scientists.

In addition to our in-house team, MARi partners with a variety of research institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University and George Mason University who conduct research using our tool to gain a better understanding of learning sciences.

MARi also has an advisory board that consists of leaders in the education, employer and workforce development realms that inform our trajectory.

As a social enterprise, MARi is committed to creating solutions that help to dismantle the deep roots of social injustices that remain in schools, organizations, communities, and the world. As we develop our product, we are committed to empowering those individuals and organizations that have traditionally been underserved and marginalized.

We believe that different perspectives and backgrounds are what makes a company flourish. Mari values diversity . . . diversity of thought, backgrounds, ideas, experiences, nationality, ethnicity, socioeconomic, race, geography, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, skills, abilities, and knowledge. Our work requires us to remain as diverse as the people we serve, and it is a critical component of who we are.

We actively seek to bring diversity into our team and take extra time to find candidates that are reflective of the communities we serve.

There are many career aptitude and assessment instruments. Career One Stop, Strong Interest Inventory, O*Net’s Career Interest Profiler, Naviance’s Career Cluster Finder, and Career Key are just a few. While these instruments show learners potential career pathways they might enjoy, they don’t actually reveal the exact set of qualifications people need to have, nor do they show multiple pathways to get to the destination.

Likewise, these other tools are based on a moment in time, rather than on longitudinal data that’s tracking trends through a person’s lifetime. These tools are not able to predict the likelihood of a real fit in the job over time, as student preferences and circumstances change.

Take, for example, the classic story of a biology teacher who sparks a student’s interest in becoming a doctor. As soon as MARi recognizes the student’s new passion, through ongoing assessments, questionnaires, and student outcome data, it presents new career opportunities to the student that align with these interests and aptitudes.  

Perhaps the biggest benefit of MARi compared to its competitors, though, is that MARi is driven by real-world, real-time jobs that are entered by employers. As industries shift and job requirements change, students can see exactly where they need to make adjustments to reach their destinations. Not only that, but MARi directs them to a matrix of third-party content providers that can help them learn what they need to know, many times through low-cost, non-traditional pathways.

MARi’s infrastructure is built on serverless technology that is scalable to US and global markets.

Our tech stack includes Google Dataflow, Python, Typescript, NodeJS, Google App Engine, and Apache Beam. Our platform uses artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing and machine learning incorporated into a Python-based platform. We are able to tap into third party tools like Student Information Systems, Standardized Testing Scores, content providers, and training partners through API access so that we can automatically feed the student’s whole-person profile.  

All of these data sources feed our predictive and prescriptive algorithms, which, over time, create a very accurate assessment of predictions, like how a student will perform on standardized testing or what a student’s individual decay curve is on any given competency.

MARi’s patent for “One-way and Two-way Data Flow Systems and Methods,” allows for secure storage of a user’s data while allowing authorized third-party access to portions of the data with the user’s privacy intact. This allows individuals to keep their data and share it with the research community throughout their lifetime while incorporating and complying with ever-changing privacy regulations.

MARi is currently pursuing its Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certification, which is the government standard for secure cloud services. This certification will allow us to not only provide a more secure environment for our students, but also allows us to use MARi at federal agencies, which could result in thousands of government employers adding jobs.

MARi utilizes widely accepted data engineering and analysis methodologies, but we’ve applied them in a different manner to get a much more accurate understanding of skill gaps. An example of this is the Data Cabinet. The Data Cabinet is a MARi module developed in collaboration with K-12 administrators and teachers and is heavily used by our K-12 schools. 

The Data Cabinet provides a way to focus just as much on the importance of whole-person, meta-academic attributes of a student as their academic performance. In 2016, G. J. “Russ” Whitehurst, the former director of the US Institute of Education Sciences and chair of Education at Brookings Institution, argued for the importance of measuring and developing “personal qualities, other than formal academic knowledge transmitted by schools, that affect student adjustment” – in K-12 education. MARi can build custom data pipelines to connect into any source of digital data relevant to students’ academic and career success. 

A 2019 study investigated whether strictly meta-academic data improved a model’s ability to predict whether or not students passed their mathematics state standardized test outcomes for the current 2018-2019 school year. Logistic regression (with L1 regularization for feature selection) and random forest classifiers were applied using (1) only the academic predictor variables, (2) all whole-person predictor variables, (3) all whole-person predictor variables and intervention data.

For both classifier types, the models that included the whole person predictor variables performed better than the model that did not, and the model that additionally included intervention data performed best.

https://3gqyoh3yyou816te523ymkrd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/Predicting-Student-Outcomes-on-Standardized-Tests.pdf 

The common refrain we hear and read is that people are resistant to change. And yet, people initiate change all the time throughout their lives as they get jobs, change jobs, move to a new location, possibly get married, have children – and the list goes on. When change is initiated by the individual, it is more likely to be successful than when imposed by a parent, school, or employer. The MARi theory of change centers itself around empowering student agency with transparency and guidance – while providing a way for people in a “community of support” to provide insights, observations, and assistance.   

Initiating change or a new direction is better enabled when it is self-directed, but this is by no means a guarantee of success.  Many whole-person factors come into play, including family life, family support, along with basic needs like nutrition, clothing, access to learning, and emotional well-being. 

At MARi, we believe that the whole person must be taken into account or risk that any analysis or guidance will miss what’s relevant and/or important. No other system currently available has the potential do this at scale.    

Since MARi is free to the individual for life, a student will be able to privately and securely continue to build their deep whole-person profile after they leave school and throughout their career. 

Our ultimate long-term goal is to maximize human potential. We believe there is untapped potential resting inside all human beings. Our aim is to create an ecosystem that allows everyone to flourish. 

To achieve this vision, MARi creates technology-enabled insights, pathways, and action steps that drive individual achievement, organizational performance, and economic prosperity. 

Activities: deep job profiles, predictive performance, multiple clear pathways to success 

Outputs: greater visibility into what it takes to excel in any given career at any given time 

Short-term outcomes: more engaged students, better matched employees 

Mid-term outcomes: individual achievement and organizational performance 

Long-term outcomes: economic prosperity (at the individual, organizational and community levels) 

We envision generations of individuals as well as small and multinational organizations using MARi to foster lifelong learning and self-actualization. Eventually, MARi will replace the one page job description and resume, seamlessly connecting the educational system, job seekers and employers. Most importantly, MARi will give individuals a deep understanding of who they are at their core so whatever their aspirations, they can find ways to flourish.

In 2021, we will expand our K-12 market and move into the employer marketplace with a focus on apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships, and internships.

We plan to onboard employers using a fremium model. Once they see the value of MARi for their workforce, they will begin to pay per employee per month. For each employee membership, MARi will donate one public school student membership to a regional school in the name of the employer. This builds affinity to local employers and strong connections between K-12 and employers. Employers with apprenticeship and internship programs will more easily source students to fill those positions.

Next year, we will launch our MARi community member program, where any individual can log into MARi. As a community member, an individual can build their profile and connect into jobs shared by MARi-enabled companies. As a person moves through their career, they take MARi and their data with them, which is free for life.

 Hurdles to Innovation Acceptance

A mindset shift about training. Traditional methods are linear and sequential. Our competency-based methods do not rely on time spent in training to predict mastery. Instead, they tie into in-session data collected by a third party systems to generate personalized pathways for individual development. Most people will gain mastery in less time. Customers will need to buy into competency-based training and believe that mastery can be achieved in a non-linear, individualized, and more efficient manner. As competency-based training becomes more of the norm, this will shift from a barrier to a benefit.

Investment in building detailed competency frameworks. MARi technology allows for a full dissection of what it means to be fully competent. We know that the ability to gain mastery over any given task is much more than just the technical knowledge and experience someone brings to the job. It is also dependent on personality traits such as orientation to risk, locus of control, and relationship to authority. Building an in-depth profile of the hard and soft micro-competencies it takes to do a job well will take an up-front commitment by our customers, but we believe the end result of better alignment and employee engagement will far outweigh the costs.

1.   Partnering with Content Providers We’re in active discussions with content providers who already have a foothold in both the workplace and educational markets. As these types of companies make their content adaptive and AI-driven, MARi can be the ecosystem that drives users to these content platforms. As partners see their content become more effective with the MARi technology behind it, they will bundle MARi with their content offerings. As content becomes more competency-driven, MARi’s competency-based tracking becomes more valuable.

2.   Workforce Development Boards will be helpful partners for connecting with regional employers. We are currently developing a pilot with the Alexandria and Arlington regional workforce development board. Once we prove our value in connecting job seekers with employers, we hope to expand to other national workforce development boards.

3.   Competency Modeling Services As organizations buy MARi, they may need support translating their roles into well-defined micro competencies. Job descriptions will be re-written in a way that describes exactly which skills are necessary for job success. MARi’s services arm will support organizations through this transition. For early adopters, we will help them create their first five deep job profiles for free.

4.   Individuals as Influencers Our patent allows individuals to take their intelligent learning record with them. We believe MARi will become the new digital transcript, a portable, data-driven record of the whole person. As MARi members recognize the value of MARi in the workplace, they will introduce MARi to their employers.

The MARi Learning Sciences SuiteTM will allow any approved researcher to collect anonymized data to run studies to gain a better understanding of how people learn and what interventions create outsized outcomes.

We are working with a researcher to design a study around the impact of K-12 meta-cognitive assessments on student agency and purposeful achievement. Being able to collect psychosocial data, and understand its impact on learning, will allow us to build more effective interventions for learners of all ages.

We have applied for funding to measure the impact of introducing computational thinking into all core curriculum in grades 9-12. Our aim is to help all students, not just those with a natural interest in computer science, gain skills they will need to compete in the Network Economy. This project would allow us to collect data on the percentages of students who enter STEM pathways before and after the program.

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For over 26 years, Team Carney has been providing “performance at the speed of need” services for its corporate and government customers. Along the way they encountered obstacle after obstacle that slowed down or blocked this vision. The MARi platform and analytics design evolved by solving the repeated barriers to rapid skilling and re-skilling encountered over the last two decades while at the same time leveraging advances in AI, ML, and cloud-based scale. MARi continues to benefit from its Team Carney roots with a focus on 508 accessibility, data privacy, and an open system architecture that allows for secure API connections to and from relevant data sources and learning management systems.

MARi’s Founder grew up in a diverse rural community in central North Carolina. It had a wonderful quality of life but with an economy that was steadily degrading. Many people left after graduation or commuted long distances to find jobs. For those that could not leave, they were left with plant closings and/or underemployment with no clear pathways to success.

Through MARi’s K-12 work, John has spent a significant amount of time in rural, economically depressed areas of Virginia re-discovering the challenges learners have in navigating their futures. Many don’t have career role models and find it hard to believe they can follow a pathway that leads to real upward mobility. Access to internships and apprenticeships is low, so they don’t have opportunities to “try on” jobs. We are changing all of that and changing lives in the process.

Through the years, we have developed a research community to ensure that MARi is a research-based offering. Higher education research partners include Carnegie Mellon University, George Mason University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ohio State University, NC State University, Florida State University, and Virginia Tech. Our non-profit partners include Virginia Micro Electronics Consortium, Virginia Ed Strategies.

Our assessment, content, and data partners allow us API access to pull data in from their systems into the MARi ecosystem and/or our prescriptive algorithms point to their content. Assessment Partners: PowerSchool, Virginia Department of Education, Virginia CareerExplorer, O*Net, CareerOneStop, Scholastic Reading Inventory. Content partners: i-Ready, StarMath, Virginia CareerExplorer, and ISTE. Data Partners: O*Net, PowerSchool, Cinglevue, CareerOneStop, IPEDS

Our business partners include Aptima, IBM Watson, TutorGen, and Boeing. Finally, the Alexandria Workforce Development board will be helping us to connect into employers through our 2021 pilot there.

We are illuminating career pathways to drive individual, organizational, and community prosperity.

Our impact measures are improved student outcomes, a higher number of job placements, a higher number of in-demand pathways followed, percent of filled positions in in-demand jobs, and a higher number of employers landing/expanding in the community.

Our customers are school districts; employers; community and four-year colleges; and workforce development boards.

People who benefit are students; individual job seekers, especially those who need to upskill or re-skill; employees; and communities at large.

Our revenue comes from subscriptions and services associated with on-boarding and customization.

Our channels are content partners who have a foothold in schools and employer organizations as well as workforce development boards.

In addition to our sister company, Team Carney’s, ongoing financial investment, our key resources are our deep connections in the federal government, our strong research community, and our advisory board.

In the short term, we will continue to pursue grant opportunities and continue to receive funding from Team Carney. In 2021, we have anticipated project-based (services) work with from government agencies and employers, including Department of Education, Department of Labor, US Air Force, Department of Veterans Affairs, and The Boeing Company.

As our subscriber base and services work increase, that will cover more expenses, which will allow us to become self-sustaining.

MARi is in paid subscription agreements with two rural Virginia school districts.

To-date, MARi has been largely funded by its sister company, Team Carney. Since our inception in 2011, this funding has supported an average of ten full-time positions. In addition to these funds and customer revenue, MARi was awarded:

Federal Funding

• $50,000 in an AFWERX SBIR Phase I for “Longitudinal & Predictive Analytics” in December 2019
• $225,000 in an NSF STTR Phase I to accelerate child literacy

Non-federal Funding

• $25,000 as a Top Five Finalist in the White House “Reach Higher” Career App Challenge
• $25,000 as a Finalist in the Robin Hood Foundation “You Can Do It College Champion” competition

In addition to continued support from Team Carney, we plan to raise State, Federal, and Private grant funding to expand our platform and grow our client base. Once we have a significant number of paying clients, we will seek private equity funds to scale our product development as well as expand our sales and marketing efforts.

In 2021, we are targeting $1M in additional grant funding, planning to perform $500,000 in services work, and increase our subscriptions sales. In early 2022, we will seek funding from outside investors in order to rapidly scale the platform.

Proprietary

While we have focused our application on enabling learners to identify new pathways to employment, MARi is also an ideal platform to rapidly re-skill displaced workers.

The realities of COVID have accelerated the need to re-skill significant populations. America’s workforce, whether it be young people graduating from high school or older people displaced from the retail, hospitality, or travel industries needs to be ready for the post-COVID economy.

Workforce Boards can connect us with employers who have pressing needs to fill positions. With a warm introduction to the power of MARi, we will have a greater likelihood of overcoming the barrier of getting employers to break their job descriptions down to the micro-competency level.

Workforce Boards can also help us onboard job seekers. Once in MARi, individuals will complete a skills and attributes inventory. Our predictive modeling shows how the individual’s current competencies can be translated into competencies needed at in-demand jobs, even when the career fields are vastly different.

Take for example, a displaced baggage handler. If our models show the individual is particularly adept at solving puzzles, our algorithms can predict that person might be well-suited for a job in cybersecurity.

We notice that Hampton Roads Workforce Council was selected to be one of the pilot programs. Hampton Roads would be a great fit for our rural Virginia schools. With the Council’s support, we could launch a robust employer program for our current school districts (including internship and apprenticeship programs) while also accelerating placement of displaced workers.

We are looking to partner with

• Innovative employers who need to fill in-demand, mission critical jobs
• Workforce Boards in regions that need to rapidly re-skill the workforce
• Funding sources that understand the long-term nature of ed- and career-tech
• Content partners who are, or will transition to competency-based learning 
• Non-profit leaders in the fields of education, talent management, and underserved populations
• School districts that want to innovate their career pathway development
• Researchers who want to tap into our Learning Sciences Suite

All of these partnerships will help MARi grow into the mature, vibrant support ecosystem we envision.

Innovative Employers willing and able to create pilot projects with MARi.

Workforce Board connections enabling expansion nation-wide expansion.

Funders focused on ed-tech and career-tech as long-play investments.

Content Partners with machine-readable access and performance data like

• Khan Academy
• 180 Skills
• General Assembly

Non-profit organizations leading efforts to re-skill workers with a focus on underserved populations

• US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management Initiative
• National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering
• Women in Technology
• Society for Human Resource Management
• Jobs for the Future
• Great Schools Partnership

School Districts with diverse populations and a high percentage of free and reduced lunch students interested in competency-based pathways as a part of a graduation requirement.

Researchers that focus on motivation, engagement, and enabling a growth mindset.