SKILLLAB

Labour displacement by automation and migration creates job seekers that need to redefine their career and find new pathways to employment. Their professions are often rendered redundant, making it impossible to simply continue a career somewhere else. But while job titles might not be transferable in those situations, skills and experiences are. 

With Skilllab’s app, job seekers identify and document their skills fast and explore professional career pathways they could pursue in a given labour market. Through the granularity of the skill assessment (13485 unique skills) it is possible to capture a job seekers experience in detail, match their skills to every occupation and show missing skills that would increase employability. Online education form third parties is directly linked to those skills, making education accessible while viewing a desired job.

Job seekers can easily find the education they need and market themselves to employers on the basis of their skills.

Labour displacement by migration and automation imposes dramatic shifts on our workforce and society. McKinsey assumes that in conservative estimates, around 400 million individuals lose their job due to automation by 2030. At the same time, climate change, economic desperation and other causes currently force 150 million migrants (ILO) to re-orientate themselves in new labour markets. Both trends are similar in their effect: a continuously growing number of marginalized job seekers that cannot directly translate their past experience to finding a new job.

To find employment, they need to understand the skills they have, how those relate to requirements of open positions and what educational actions they can take to overcome any skill gap. 

On a positive note, the explosion of high quality online education democratizes the ability to learn new skills. What we need is a tool that helps marginalized job seekers to orientate themselves on the job market and to make good educational and career choices. 

The core technology at work is a mobile application that performs highly detailed assessments to capture an individual’s employable skills, automatically generate and translate comprehensive skill profiles, and map a person’s unique skill set directly to occupations. Building on the European Skills/Competencies, Qualifications and Occupations framework (ESCO) model with 13485 unique skills and 2942 occupations, our AI based assessment engine guides the user through an interview process to capture all tasks performed and knowledge used in prior experiences. 

Users can perform the skill assessment in 27 different languages while the system automatically translates all output into the language of the host country.

Based on a job seeker’s skill gap to a desired occupation, we aim to link publicly available online education content that directly addresses the skill gap. This is achieved by mapping our skill model into third party education content.

While our system architecture incorporates many micro services, the core components are connected via APIs and can be reduced to:

• Mobile application for job seekers to perform skill assessment and explore pathways to employment. Build in React and soon available on Playstore, App store as well as web application.

• Web interface for career counsellors to explore results of skill assessments and to invite candidates. Written in React.

• Skill Assessment Engine that “interviews” users on their skills and competences. Based on multiple machine learning algorithms written in Python, the engine determines which competences are queried as well as the duration of the assessment.

• Back-end and system architecture in Ruby on Rails, running on Google Cloud Platform

The beneficiaries of our application are marginalized job seekers. This includes any person displaced by migration and automation, as well as any other individuals that need to find new pathways to employment. 

Skilllab is committed to a human centered design process with Azza El Hayek (co-founder) full time dedication to this task. Through countless usability workshops (about 350 usability test in the last 2 years) we track and record all usability challenges as well understand the aspirations and wishes of our users. 

All insights feed into a product roadmap and are systematically addressed by our lead designer as well our product manager. All designed solutions are extensively discussed and fine tuned with Azza and other members of the customer success team.

Our application and functionality (see sections above) is exclusively dedicated to serving marginalized job seekers

Career Orientation: Through completing a skill assessment and exploring the matching results, job seekers gain an extensive understanding of their position in the labour market and available opportunity. Metric: job seekers completing career counselling.

2. Upskilling and Training: On the basis of desired job opportunities, job seekers understand their skill gap and identify possible educational offerings that address it. Metric: Job seekers participating in education/training upon completing skill assessment.

3. Employment: Upon completion of skill assessment (and possibly training), job seekers successfully find a job or switch to a more desired job. Metric: Increase in net-income

Job seekers, case managers and career coaches use the resulting Skill Profiles to improve career planning, job search and vocational training.

In the vast majority of cases, existing solutions are based on unstructured interviews. While they address the right problem, key barriers prevented these models to succeed at a larger scale:

• Dependency on manual labour prevent scaling due to cost and quality control

• No human has the knowledge to perform skill assessments across all occupational backgrounds

• Language barriers prevent effective communication and require professional translators

• Dependency on grants prevent sustainable business models 

The key differentiators of our solution are:

• Granularity of skill assessment (13485 skills)

• Matches to occupations and identification of skill gaps

• Recommendations on online education content based on skill gap

• Automatic translation across 27 languages

• Assessment delivered through mobile application

• Continuous improvements to assessment as based on machine learning

Skilllab technology won the global Google AI Impact Challenge as well as the Google Accelerator working towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

 we know that automation and artificial intelligence play an increasingly vital role in making work flow across the globe. As the nature of work changes, so do the skills needed for success in the modern workplace