Guided Compass
The problem that Guided Compass solves is that “work-based learning programs” struggle to scale effectively and efficiently when matching and preparing people for high-wage, high-growth careers.
The solution is Guided Compass, a comprehensive work-based learning technology platform that helps improve the quality of matches, automates the tedious work, and engages industry from career exploration to placement.
Guided Compass could help millions of next generation career-seekers earn a livable wage (and escape generational poverty) within fields that interest them by empowering hundreds of thousands of educators and trainers to do their job more effectively and efficiently. There are 215,000 career and technical education teachers in the U.S, thousands of independent workforce development programs, and 2,400 American Job Centers training career-seekers for the future of work. They often use spreadsheets, email, and basic job posting boards to manage their complicated programs.
The problem that Guided Compass solves exactly matches the final dimension of this challenge: that education providers, workforce development programs, and diverse job seekers struggle to match to current and future employer and industry needs.
Most of the 300,000+ U.S. CTE educational professionals and hundreds of thousands of workforce development personnel are tasked with the extremely difficult job of preparing millions of people for the world of work and placing them into work-based learning opportunities each year. Furthermore, billions of federal, state and local money is being funneled into Career Technical Education (CTE) and work-based learning programs as professionals search for effective solutions to prepare career-seekers for the future of work. Every year, professionals struggle to use these monies to make the case to employers that a non-traditional career-seeker with little experience is a good investment for project work or hire. Further, these professionals inefficiently move candidates from career awareness to career preparedness, keep tabs on industry trends, collect actionable project feedback, and keep all relevant parties informed when preparing candidates for opportunities. The problem is there are too many variables for an organization to reliably track without sophisticated software.
Guided Compass (GC) is a technology platform that helps work-based learning (WBL) programs operate more effectively and efficiently. To do so, career-seekers, educators, administrators, mentors, and employers each have web portals that collectively help onboard and match career-seekers to fulfilling careers. Our functionality around “project” and “work opportunities” are our largest differentiators.
GC’s “project opportunities” (i.e. Problem Platform) functionality allows mentors, employers, and educators to post assignments, case studies, and challenges about real world problems. Career-seekers can submit project solutions to those postings, and industry can provide feedback on those submissions. This is powerful because it allows WBL programs to incorporate the case method: outsourcing project inspiration, grading, and feedback to industry professionals. Challenges have particularly gained popularity, allowing teams to compete to solve problems for cash prizes. Community voting rounds allow employers to only review the top-voted submissions.
GC’s “work opportunities” functionality uses GC Benchmarks to match career-seekers to work opportunities. Benchmarks include the skills, interests, personality, values, certifications, projects, etc.. of the ideal candidate. Benchmarks are defined at the pathway level by WBL programs, but are copied and customized for each work opportunity. When candidates apply, they import self-assessments, GC activity, 3rd party endorsements, and 3rd party assessments.
Although our customers are education providers and workforce development programs, our target population is their beneficiaries: low-income, diverse career-seekers. We think of our core market as individuals typically between 16 - 30 years old from a low-income area. We better understand their needs through weekly meetings with our customers, market research, focus groups, surveys, and zoom calls, and more. We constantly solicit feedback.
We address career-seekers’ needs by curating information, helping helpers help them, and tracking progress. After career-seekers take one career assessment, Guided Compass begins to recommend careers, mentors, events, project opportunities, and work opportunities. The algorithm gets more accurate as it gains information and receives feedback. We help helpers help them by presenting mentors, teachers, and coordinators with relevant information like mock interviews, interests, skills, personality, values, career matches, projects, outstanding applications and more. Because everything exists within one ecosystem, we’re able to track progress from selecting career paths to applying to opportunities to working on opportunities to collecting feedback throughout their program journey.
Just because the program is over doesn’t mean that Guided Compass is. As the labor market changes, Guided Compass recalibrates to career-seekers’ needs for later check-ins as alumni. It helps life-long career-planning.
- Match current and future employer and industry needs with education providers, workforce development programs, and diverse job seekers
Guided Compass’ purpose matches the last challenge dimension perfectly. It is a platform that matches current and future employer and industry needs with education providers, workforce development programs, and diverse job seekers. We use our Benchmarks, our Problem Platform, and market trend APIs to track employer and industry needs. We use this data to power features for education providers, workforce development programs, and diverse job seekers. That said, Guided Compass aligns with all other dimensions as well. It helps career-seekers who are largely people of color explore careers, view competency models (i.e. benchmarks), build skills via projects, and gain resources.
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- California
- Maryland
- Michigan
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- Virginia
- Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several communities, which is poised for further growth
Our core team is one full-time staff and five part-time staff. Creighton Taylor, CFA is the CEO and full-time employee. He is an HBS graduate with 6+ years experience in software development / product management. The five part-time staff are Paul Dawson, Stacey Gordon, Larry Taylor, Anita DeFrantz, and Sebastian De Vivo. Everyone provides deep expertise crucial for our continued progress. Note that Paul is the CTO and is an MIT graduate. We’ve had three interns from our target demographic work on Guided Compass as well.
Our CEO and CTO are both African American; additionally, our team is 100% minorities, 33% women, and 17% LGBT. As a result, we’ve laid the groundwork to build out a deeply diverse organization.
Diversity is very important for us for two reasons. Firstly, we seek to mirror the populations we serve. To empathize with who we serve, it is important that we represent them well within our employee base. Secondly, diversity is hugely important for creativity and innovation. As a technology startup that is looking for new ways to tackle age-old problems, it is important that our team has different backgrounds and perspectives on how they tackle the problem.
- A new application of an existing technology
Although many products place people into jobs, few are custom end-to-end platforms that incorporate intermediaries from career exploration to career launch. Rather than naming each competitor, I will outline the two main differentiating features: our Problem Platform and our Benchmarks.
Our Problem Platform allows mentors, employers, and educators to post assignments, case studies, and challenges about real world problems. Career-seekers can submit project solutions to those postings, and industry can provide feedback on those submissions. This platform allows WBL programs to outsource sourcing project inspiration, grading, and feedback to industry professionals. This platform is innovative because it solves huge problems for both traditional and entrepreneurial pathways. For traditional pathways, it allows employers to test unlimited candidates at a fraction of the cost of alternatives while providing curriculum to intermediaries. For entrepreneurial pathways, it allows career-seekers to develop the problem solving skills necessary to address income inequality issues. Just getting a job will not solve the problem that 50% of the population owns 3% of the wealth; we’re showing career-seekers how to build wealth.
Our Benchmarks give Guided Compass (GC) the ability to reliably match career-seekers to work opportunities and keep program staff updated on employer needs and competency models. Benchmarks include the skills, work preferences, interests, personality, values, certifications, experience, projects, etc.. of ideal candidates. Benchmarks are defined at the pathway level by WBL programs, but copied and customized for each work opportunity. When candidates apply, they import self-assessments, GC activity, 3rd party endorsements, and 3rd party assessments.
Guided Compass (GC) is software built with the Mongo Express React Node (MERN) stack. It has 5 main web portals to coordinate activity amongst different 5 user groups: career-seekers, educators, administrators, mentors, and employers. For a year, it had an iOS and Android app live to accompany the portals, but they are currently hidden so as not to confuse users. We plan to re-launch these in 2021. The architecture to manage the 5 portals took some time to design, so I would consider it a competitive advantage.
We also have server-side algorithms that match career-seekers to mentors, career paths, project opportunities, and work opportunities. The mentor matching is largely for organizations who want to optimize matches based on certain dimensions such as interests, personality, or values. Career paths, project opportunities, and work opportunities are recommended based on career assessments (e.g. work preferences, interests, personality, skills, values), teacher/mentor endorsements, projects, experience, and feedback.
The GC algorithms in production are currently “dumb” algorithms, not machine learning algorithms. That said, we’ve structured the app so that we could easily convert to machine learning algorithms within the next year using our outcomes data as training data. AWS hosts the app, so there are a number of their machine learning services that can be quickly activated once we are confident in their predictive capabilities.
Guided Compass has had live software since June 2018. Thousands of career-seekers use it on a weekly basis. The technology we use is very common for technology startups. It’s a web app using the Mongo Express React Node (NODE) framework. I have created the following video to walk through career-seeker, admin, employer, and mentor portals: For the sake of brevity, I have excluded the teacher and counselor portals, which (as advisors) are similar to the mentor portal.
One of our clients, College to Congress, which provides work-based learning services for low-income college students has created excellent training videos that also serve as evidence that our technology works. This is the video of the student portal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXSOkNLaKZg&feature=emb_logo. This is the video of the mentor portal:
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Lastly, our 17 clients continually pay to use Guided Compass and will vouch that it is incredibly helpful for them. Many of these clients piloted Guided Compass for long periods of time before paying our monthly fees. This proves that it works. The LA Area Chamber of Commerce’s Bixel Exchange program wrote the following letter of recommendation in May 2019: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K3x_ty3i3Jn9tUUk-mCxX8vkgdOQAHOa/view?usp=sharing
, sharing their support and use of the platform. They are still a client today.
- Software and Mobile Applications
Below we describe our theory of change: activities, outputs, and outcomes.
The Guided Compass (GC) career-seeker activities include taking career assessments, receiving teacher/mentor endorsements on specific skills, favoriting career paths and opportunities, RSVPing to career events, submitting projects to case studies and challenges, getting feedback on mock interviews and projects from industry mentors, applying and getting hired for work opportunities, and getting feedback from human resources representatives.
The outputs include career-seekers gain more self-awareness of how their interests, personality, and skills relate to the world, gain clarity on career pathways and problems of interest, gain clarity on how prioritize skills to learn and industries of interest, learn how to value and leverage their time, and learn how to solve real world problems.
The outcomes all relate to increased socioeconomic mobility: including more successful minority entrepreneurs, more minority freelancers earning livable wage, and more minorities placed into high-wage, high-growth careers.
We’ve had a number of pilots that have generated data that support these connections, most notable of which has been a 2-year pilot with the LA Area Chamber of Commerce’s Bixel Exchange program. The pilot upgraded staff from Google Sheets to Guided Compass to train and place 2,000 community college students into technology internships and jobs. 84% of the students surveyed said they feel significantly more prepared to enter the workforce and 76% said they would recommend Guided Compass for a friend. Lastly, 100% of the intermediary staff said that Guided Compass helped them perform their job better.
Lastly, there are a number of 3rd party studies that validate project-based learning (PBL) as a teaching method. This 2017 study found that students who participated in PBL tested 63% higher for social studies and 23% higher for informational reading: https://www.edutopia.org/article/new-study-shows-impact-pbl-student-achievement-nell-duke-anne-lise-halvorsen. This link cites 12 studies that show that when students are taught via PBL, that they have improved academic achievement, 21st century competencies, equity, and motivation: http://pblworks.org/sites/default/files/2019-01/FreeBIE_Research_Summary.pdf?_ga=2.145779133.846694821.1605833058-1001813799.1605833058.
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- Low-Income
- Middle-Income
- Minorities & Previously Excluded Populations
- 81-100%
Not too dissimilar from Solve, Guided Compass (GC) has identified challenges as the key lever to grow our impact to millions of lives. GC Challenges are case studies of real work problems sourced from employer representatives with a cash prize that are tiered by skill level and that span industries. Within the next year, our goal is to grow to hosting 50 featured $1K+ diverse challenges each month (600 / year) and to kickstart 10,000 diverse career-seeker careers (either through placement or entrepreneurship) that require high-growth, high-wage skills . Within the next five years, our goal is to hold 200 challenges a month and to kickstart 500K careers a year.
The reason why Challenges are so central to our goals is because they provide a great pathway to both traditional and entrepreneurial careers. Additionally, it provides an avenue for career-seekers to form teams and showcase relevant skills at scale without employers needing to commit to a full-time salary. Third, by having a community voting round within challenges, employers don’t necessarily need to look at all the submissions, leveraging their time while providing opportunities to showcase real value. Fourth, challenges act as teaching tools for educators, coordinators, and mentors who can guide career-seekers. Lastly, challenges provide an avenue for freelance work and entrepreneurship, a career pathway often overlooked in workforce development programs. This allows career seekers to develop the most important skills according to a number of studies: critical thinking and problem solving.
Below are three major barriers that could limit our impact over both a 1-year and 5-year time horizon.
First, changing employer behavior to actually hire non-traditional career-seekers is a huge barrier. There is a stigma. Many employers of high-wage, high-growth jobs recruit from target schools and specific pipelines that exclude many diverse candidates. Although some employers will accept non-traditional candidates as interns for charity, they often do not hire those candidates. They instead hire someone with a personal connection or a better “culture fit”, regardless if their interests, skills, and values truly align with the role and company.
Secondly, there is a structural pay barrier that is difficult to solve at scale. Although there may be openings at high-growth jobs, the starting salary without benefits is usually at least $50,000. Candidates must show that they exceed this value to the employer. So as workforce organizations, our difficult task is upskill candidates from $5 / hour to $10 / hour to $30+ / hour without providing direct experience. While entrepreneurship and gig economy work are great answers to this, they require skills not easily acquired and ideas from diverse career-seekers face systematic barriers for funding.
Lastly, our target market often lacks basic technology like computers, internet, cell phones, and emails as well as basic digital literacy. This makes it difficult or impossible to distribute Guided Compass to our target audience. Features like RSVPing to career events, participating in virtual challenges, and applying to jobs will not be able to be utilized.
We have three approaches for overcoming the employer behavior barrier. First, we use GC Benchmarks, which allow employers to customize their ideal candidate (skills, interests, values, education, experience, interview…), encouraging employers to objectively re-evaluate their scoring system for hiring entry-level talent while giving workforce organizations a target for preparing candidates. Secondly, we use GC Challenges to show how non-traditional candidates can solve real problems employers have, with minimal monetary investment and at scale. Lastly, we partner with our workforce development clients to highlight success stories.
We’ve used our Problem Platform (which includes GC Challenges) to address structural pay barriers of being hired into high-wage jobs in two main ways. First, each posting on our platform is tagged by estimated difficulty, functional area, industry, skills, and estimated man hours to solve. This allows career-seekers, educators, and coordinators to search, filter, form teams, and construct custom curriculum to improve relevant skills. So, through projects that mimic their target career environment, we methodically increase their value from $5 / hour to $50 / hour so that they land that job. Secondly, we use the Problem Platform for entrepreneurship and freelance pathways like a work-based learning version of MIT Solve. This allows aspiring entrepreneurs to form teams, work on solving real world problems, and get more actionable feedback from mentors and instructors.
Lastly, we work with our partners to provide or share information to career-seekers about shared workspaces to gain access to computers and the internet, as well as digital literacy training.
Guided Compass (GC) would like to know the career satisfaction and Net Promoter Score 3, 5, and 10 years after the start of the program. This longer-time horizon is important for not only traditional career pathways, but also entrepreneurial pathways.
For traditional jobs, many people become disenchanted after 6-12 months in a job. So, they may switch. Part of GC’s goal is to help people find purpose-driven careers in which they thrive. So, we would like to collect data over a long-time horizon to make sure that they are happy with the career path and that GC helped.
For entrepreneurial work like starting a small business or working as a freelancer, it typically takes a number of years for efforts to pay off. GC seeks to be a guiding tool as career-seekers make the arduous, emotionally-volatile path of earning unpredictable income. So, we need longer time horizons here as well.
- For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
The Guided Compass (GC) six-person team is well-positioned to deliver the solution and solve the problem because of our experience, education, and socioeconomic background.
First, our team has a wide range of experience spanning all industries, representing General Motors, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Cox Automotive, RentPath, LA84 Foundation, and Prudential Financial. We have strategy consultants, human resources consultants, education consultants, software developers, and business people represented in our team. The CEO has previously been part of a small team that successfully sold their startup, and has previously worked in product management, software engineering, and marketing at leading technology companies.
Second, our team has a strong educational background, having graduated from MIT, Harvard Business School, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Emory University, Kettering University, and Pepperdine University. In addition to graduating Harvard Business School, our CEO received the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation which helps with analyzing market and labor market trends.
Lastly, our team is 100% Black and Latinx, growing up in low-income areas of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Atlanta. The CEO grew in South-Central Los Angeles, yet went onto Harvard Business School and then learned to code using online classes. We are a team that understands the differences resources can make in young lives.
Guided Compass (GC) has partnered with our workforce development clients, chambers of commerce and National Association of Corporate Directors Pacific Southwest Chapter (NACD-PSW).
Client partners include UNITE-LA, Bixel Exchange, EXP, College to Congress, and Block Knowledge. These organizations all have staff that actively work to place low-income, diverse career-seekers into fulfilling careers. We power their programs with our technology platform. These organizations collectively represent about 60,000 career-seekers in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Kansas City, and Washington D.C. We work with these partners by allowing them to offset costs entirely from common clients (i.e. education institutions and employers) and by regularly meeting with them to improve processes and introduce features to achieve our common goals. In fact, we’ve written the 60-page whitepaper “How to Optimize Work-Based Learning After COVID-19” in partnership with these clients.
Lastly, we are piloting a partnership with chambers of commerce and NACD-PSW. GC has been a partner of Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce for 2 years, which has a workforce development focus. This month, we launched a webinar series hosted by NACD-PSW, of which our team member Larry Taylor is the chair, and the VP of the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE). This series brings in board panelists from Forever 21, Google, Chipotle, Fox, and other organizations to discuss how low-income youth can be better prepared for the future of work. Companies are also asked to commit to interns. The program is planned to be scaled to across the country.
Guided Compass (GC) currently generates $5K / month from independent workforce development programs and educational institutions. The organizations use Department of Labor and Department of Education grants to pay for $10 / career-seeker / year licenses. Teachers, work-based learning coordinators, and administrators within these organizations use GC to more effectively and efficiently prepare career-seekers for high-wage, high-growth careers. For teachers, the major benefit is outsourcing inspiration for project-based learning to industry and getting industry feedback on project submissions. For work-based learning coordinators, we use GC Benchmarks (e.g. career assessments, endorsements) as well as our GC Problem Platform to help them effectively match career-seekers to career paths, career events, projects, and work.
Because our workforce development program clients often act as “outsourced work-based learning coordinators” for educational institutions, our agreements have a clause that allows them to fully offset payments from common clients. This way, programs can then get GC free while improving coordination with their clients.
The benefits to educational institutions are vast and we’re currently piloting below cost at Los Angeles Unified, Detroit Public Schools, and Da Vinci Schools. Additionally, we have piloted with Long Beach City College and Pasadena City College. We anticipate these will lead to large contracts.
While employers are a potential client in the future, we have not charged employers since we are focused on providing value to diverse career-seekers.
We have piloted with LA-based American Job Centers with encouraging results, but we seek to land a contract across centers to effectively implement our solution.
- Organizations (B2B)
Current Guided Compass (GC) revenue is enough to sustain the operation since the CEO is the only full-time employee and maintains the software. The platform is fully operational, generating $5K/month with few maintenance tweaks. We charge programs $10/career-seeker/year with volume discounts. We plan to primarily rely on revenue to fund operations.
We are investing in GC challenges to systematically grow revenue. While GC provides immense benefits to programs as an end-to-end platform, it is tedious to sell the benefits to each program. GC Challenges allow us to allow these programs to be automatically notified of upcoming challenges and pay for licenses so that career-seekers (and their mentors) can participate in them. This new acquisition strategy has received positive responses because of the pervasive adoption of project-based learning as a training model.
We see this as a sustainable acquisition strategy because this is affordable for workforce budgets and because projects allow employers to test candidates without having to commit to a $40K annual investment ($15 minimum wage + benefits) in them. It is also a great path to entrepreneurship and freelance work since people can form teams to solve real problems. Lastly, it allows programs to develop GC “assignments” and “problems” (which have no prize) to prepare for challenges. Our focus is to have monthly featured challenges with modest prizes (e.g. $1K) spanning sectors and functional areas so as to provide workforce development programs ample time to plan accordingly and make training schedules.
We’ve done both. We bootstrapped to generating $5K / month in revenue until this month (November 2020) when we were notified that we won a $25K grant. Each type of funding is broken down below.
For revenue received in the past 12 months, Guided Compass has received $27K is from workforce development organizations and $11K is from education institutions. That said, most of our current annual contracts were signed summer and fall of this year. We would like to use our discretion for sharing the allocation across our clients.
For other types of funding, we’ve signed an agreement to receive a $25K grant this month from Pledge LA + Grid 110 South LA Fund. This grant is for South LA startups helping to improve the South LA (low-income) community. The money also includes acceptance to a 3-month accelerator program that begins January 2021. The accelerator includes being assigned entrepreneur mentors from late-stage startup companies within the same industry.
Although there is not a need to raise funding to scale our solution, Guided Compass does seek the $100K grant as part of this challenge.
We currently do not seek equity or debt funding because our priorities are not aligned. We don’t want investment partners purely focused on the financial return. Guided Compass is in a space that will inevitably take far longer to monetize than your typical startup. Many venture capital firms stay away from education technology companies for these very reasons.
Another reason we aren’t spending tremendous resources seeking funding is that we aren’t in desperate need for capital. Guided Compass is already a tested configurable solution with a diverse client base. Over the last few months, we’ve re-organized the codebase to position it for growth and scaling, including moving our servers to Amazon Web Services (which auto-scales). Additionally, one of our competitive advantages has always been our ability to quickly customize our solution based on client needs despite our lean team. It’s low cost structure means it will likely be a going concern for the foreseeable future.
That said, we open to grant funding and equity funding from partners who deeply understand the problem we are trying to solve. The $100K grant would likely be almost entirely allocated to software development. Much of this would go to Payroll, specifically Paul Dawson who is our African-American MIT-grad CTO. He’s an all-star who could dedicate more time to the project with this grant.
Our expenses will depend on the revenues and grant monies received over the next 12 months. We project that revenue will increase markedly through 2021 due to the pilots completed and partnerships made in 2020. Additionally, we have a $25K grant and we will assume we land a $100K grant from this challenge. Below, I present a conservative case and an aggressive case below.
Conservatively, we estimate that Guided Compass (GC) client revenues will grow from $5K / month to an average of $8K / month in 2021, leading to $96K in 2021 client revenue. We estimate $140K in 2021 expenses in this scenario. We project that we will have two executive salaries @ $60K each, $5K in software tool expenses, $5K in sales & marketing-related costs, and $10K in miscellaneous expenses (e.g. travel, insurance, office supplies, legal).
Aggressively, we estimate that GC client revenues will grow from $5K / month to an average of $20K / month in 2021, leading to $240K in 2021 client revenue. We estimate $280K in 2021 expenses from this scenario. We project that we will have two executive salaries @ $60K each, $10K in software tool expenses, $50K in design costs, $50K in sales & marketing-related costs, $30K in advisory board payroll, and $20K in miscellaneous expenses (e.g. travel, insurance, office supplies, legal).
I am applying to this challenge because the Challenge partners seem like perfect partners for Guided Compass (GC), because we would like to implement our solution with workforce boards across America, and because we seek the grant money to expand our solution.
As CEO, I’ve started four workforce development organizations over the last six years because I wanted to solve the problems laid out as dimensions within this challenge. GC is the latest iteration of a solution, but there is still much work to do. The opportunity within a solution in this space is immense and complicated - connecting individual interests, skills, values, and personalities with ever-changing labor market needs and problems to solve. The designers of this challenge seem to understand the complexities of a great solution. And so I think this is a great opportunity to work with partners to work toward a common goal, and scale our solution. Additionally, MFF’s Student Support Foundation seems like another program that could be a strong partner with Guided Compass.
Additionally, I am applying to this challenge because we would like to implement our solution with workforce boards across America. We are ready to scale our solution, and we think workforce boards are a great way to do so.
Lastly, the grant money will be a huge help for bringing on staff and improving our product offering.
- Product/service distribution
- Board members or advisors
- Marketing, media, and exposure
For board members, we could use people with strong workforce development board expertise and connections to join the Guided Compass board. Their understanding of the market and operations under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act will prove helpful as we seek to improve our offering and expand to additional American Job Centers.
For marketing, media, and exposure, we would love public relations help in telling the stories of successful placements and publishing findings from our Benchmarks and Problem Platform features.
For product distribution, we could use connections to other programs that would substantially benefit from our product. This not only includes American Job Centers, but educational institutions, nonprofit work-based learning organizations, and government work-based learning programs. MFF’s Student Support Foundation, for example, could be a strong product distribution partner for Guided Compass.
Besides workforce development board, Guided Compass (GC) would like to partner with innovative training organizations, MIT solve, MFF, human resources (HR) consultants, and digital access organizations.
First, our ideal innovative training partner can personalize career-seeker training across a wide variety of career pathways, including entrepreneurship & freelance pathways. GC provides a detailed snapshot of career-seekers’ skills, interests, and personality at any point in time. But we do not provide 3rd-party assessments to test these attributes. We’d like to integrate with training tools that would use this information to tailor curriculum for career-seekers.
Second, we would love to partner with MIT Solve itself. While GC Challenges solve acute work-related problems as training tools, MIT Solve‘s solve large social problems. I’d like to programmatically point advanced career-seekers on a social entrepreneurship track to MIT Solve challenges.
Third, we would love to partner with the Morgridge Family Foundation’s The Student Support Foundation. We work with high schools and colleges directly, particularly through our Problem Platform, allowing teachers to source real world problems for their curriculum as well as to get feedback from industry mentors on student projects.
Fourth, we’d like HR partners and consultants that are open to piloting our benchmarks as well as alternative ways to recruit candidates across their departments at scale. We have an HR diversity consultant on our board, so she could drive those relationships.
Lastly, we’d like a partner to provide shared workspaces to gain access to computers and the internet, as well as digital literacy training.
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CEO