Insighters

High school students must face one of the most important decisions in their lives, they have to decide about their academic or working future.

The traditional school approach provides technical and theoretical knowledge about different disciplines. However, it has a tendency of putting the development of soft skills in second place.

Insighters suggests a virtual platform where students are able to explore, discover and develop talents by means of more than 40 different challenges outside the formal educational system, fostering future working opportunities.

If our solution was scaled globally, it could change people’s lives in a positive way by expanding considerably the performance possibilities for young people in different working areas, reducing the unemployment gap and inequalities of opportunities.

Students in their last school year have to face one of the most important decisions in their lives: which professional career should (I) study?

The problem is that young people have yet to discover for themselves any area of doing or knowing that is truly attractive to them.

This is demonstrated in the survey of the UCV Social Studies Program, conducted with more than four thousand last-year schoolchildren, where 53% declared they were undecided regarding the career or institution to which to apply.

In addition to the data provided by DEMRE from Chile University, where 268,000 young people enrolled this year to take the university admission test, and of the total, 27% corresponds to applicants from previous promotions.

According to Educrea, a tendency has been perceived in young people to postpone their entry to higher education and take a sabbatical year.

The reasons for this phenomenon are diverse, but the most serious is that adolescents do not know what to study.

Finally, this problem is further intensified by the data provided by MINEDUC, where three out of ten students drop out during their first year, which is due in the first place to vocational disorientation.

Virtual platform where students from 7th grade to 4th high school are able to explore, discover and develop talents through more than 40 different challenges annually.

How does it work?

1. Students enter the platform.

2. Together with their team they solve a deliberate challenge.

3. The Global Input is produced where they evaluate their performance, are evaluated by their peers and by the professional team behind the platform. (School counselors, psychologists, among others.)

4. Students will be able to see their level of progress on the challenges they have completed.

5. Finally students get their reports according to Gallup's 34 talents.

The lives we are working with and meaningfully improve correspond to students from 7th grade to 4th high school within the Chilean educational system. For your reference, their ages are between 12 to 18 years old.

The ones that are currently undeserved are mainly students who attend the public educational system. This fact demonstrates the social inequality and at the same time shows the lack of working opportunities. 

In order to understand their needs, we are interviewing them to have a better understanding of their problems, building focus groups and at the moment of designing the prototype we validate it with the same students. In this way, they actively participate on the project. 

The solution allows the students to know different talents in an experiential and intentional way that perhaps until that moment they had never imagined they could perform. Finally, they will develop those talents that are closer to their tastes and preferences, turning them into skills that they will make available in their future job choices.

The problem we are addressing (above explained), the solution we have designed (virtual platform) and the population we are serving (young students) are tightly aligned to both the TPrize Challenge and two of its dimensions. 

Firstly, we are providing innovative tools to teachers and educational institutions with the purpose of developing future skills for students by means of the platform and its methodoly.

Secondly, we consider the third dimension. There is a link between the recognition of skills developed outside the formal educational system and our solution which has an impact on the students' future. 

The reason why I have selected Pilot as a solution's stage of development is that we are currently validating it within a group called 'Conexión Total' which corresponds to 100 Christian students between 14 and 18 years old from different social realities across the country (Chile).

The solution that is currently applied in our target market in order to solve the problem has been present for many years without undergoing changes or innovative updates. We seek that the way of deciding what a student wants to do at the end of their school stage changes radically. This feature makes our solution innovative. 

To make a decision like that, it is necessary to experiment with certain roles and their tasks in different contexts, that is why, through our solution, students will be able to go through various challenges attributing multiple roles with which they can experiment.

Our main technology focuses on a software developed as a web application, with which system users can access from different devices. The algorithms developed within this application allow the data of each student to be stored and managed, in order to show progress reports and recommendations for university courses and universities.

Our technology (web application) is developed with PHP language, using the Bootstrap framework and connected to a MySQL database.

The web application will not handle a large amount of personal data, so we consider that the use of our technology is not a risk. Even so, since they are underage users, we have considered establishing protocols for the creation of users under the authorization of their parents.

Since we are currently working on the Pilot stage we would suggest that number as follow:

1. Current number of people served: 100 students.

2. Number we will be serving in one year: 1% out of 11.342 schools enrolled at the Chilean Educational system. Data taken from MINEDUC, 2012. 

3. Number we will be serving in 5 years: 10% out of 11.342 schools enrolled at the Chilean Educational system. Data taken from MINEDUC, 2012. 

Our impact goal for the next year is to create the First Centre of Orientation and Exploration of Talent in Latin America starting with Chile. We will achieve this by offering the solution to different Educational center across the country. At the same time by making alliances with municipal corporations and educational foundations which contribute to expand the project. 

For the next 5 years, we seek to be present in at least 3 Latin-American countries. 

Some of the main indicators we are using to measure our progress are

-Amount of meetings in order to offer the service.

-Number of generated leads/potential clients.

-Number of demos made.

-Amount of people who enter the platform.

-Challenges' progress level.

-Number of completed business.

-Customer acquisition costs. 

-Number of monthly campaigns. 

-Monthly website traffic.

The amount of people working in our team as follow:

Full-time Staff: 3 people

Part-time Staff: 2 people

Other workers: 1 person

First off, my team is well-positioned to deliver the solution because we all share the vision of becoming Mentors of the Next Leaders Generation. In the team, you can find two strong background areas: education and IT. 

Our secondary but not less important skills rely on innovation and communication. 

I would like to highlight a key aspect of most of us: we are not currently working on an area related to our first career. That is to say we have personally experienced that you can be useful by applying an unlimited number of talents on a completely new working area. In my case, I am originally a teacher but working on communication, not pedagogy. 

As I stated before, this life experience is highly meaningful and representative of those who we serve, particularly at the moment of implementing our solution.  

Our team represents the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion if we consider gender, age, religion along with different social and economic backgrounds of each member. We always respect each other no matter our personal features are. In addition, our team is lead by a woman and all the members recognize an inner talent in her. 

Firstly, we aim to work with a community of people who come from all over the country, being respect our main standard. 

Secondly, opportunities are and will be equal for all of us in all stages of our project. 

Finally, we put our talents at the service of the community, generating inclusion at all levels. 

We are applying to the 2021 TPrize Challenge because it aligns with our purpose which is to be mentors of the next leaders' generation and train young people in order to develop their talents. 

Furthermore, we consider it a great contribution to have the opportunity to be mentored by experts industry leaders, receiving mentorships and networking connections is invaluable for us. 

Additionally, we are interested in learning with activities you may provide to help us incubate, scale, or accelerate our solution across Latin American and the Caribbean. 

Since this is a new project, we consider of great contribution the areas we selected above. Our solution is compound of versatile points such as Human Capital, Financial, Public Relations, Monitoring & Evaluation, and Technology. If any of these show interest in Insighters and are willing to be our partner would be beneficial for future growth, scaling, or accelerating our solution by improving our marketing strategy, financial organization and automating the system. 

1. GALLUP

A global analytics and advice firm that helps leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems. 

2. MINEDUC

Ministry of Chilean Education.