SkillED is an accelerated learning, career interests and exploration platform. SkillED is built to allow students from high school and college to explore different careers and learn new skills without the high barriers to entry that are usually presented by internships and other professional experiences. In some industries, students must be highly skilled and posses amazing credentials in order to gain opportunities, but this presents a barrier for people who do not know what they want to do. Making these life choices can be difficult for many students and often people end up in careers completely different from their studies. SkillED remedies this by providing collaborative professional and educational opportunities for companies and students.
Rather than apply for internships in their favorite fields, students can create a profile on SkillED and take our career interests assessment. They will have industries recommended to them. Each industry will have an explanation, list of relevant skills in that industry, and skillternships that the student can apply to. Each skillternship will highlight basic necessary skills needed for that field. These skills are presented as a "Learning Path". A learning path will contain a set of basic skills that an individual could learn in one month or less. In the case of Web Development this could inlcude learning HTML, CSS, and very basic JavaScript.
Skillternships, as opposed to internships, are shorter and have a greater focus on education. Skillternships can be as short as one week or as long as one month. They are unpaid and are focused on providing free, quality education resources to students. Once a student is accepted to a skillternship, the sponsoring company will pay for courses in a students learning path. Learning paths will contain a series of online courses which will generally cost $100 or less for the entire learning path. Much cheaper than the cost of labor for an intern. During shorter skillternships, students can shadow professsionals and meet professional teams. In longer skillternships, students will focus on completing a learning path that is agreeded upon by the company and the SkillED platform. Companies may also have the student complete a small project upon completing the learning path. For each industry the SkillED platform would provide a dummy project which helps define the expected scope of a project. Companies can choose to use this or mode their own based on said project.
SkillED helps to standardize the skillternship process. Learning path resources are curated by and standardized by SkillED. Parter companies can choose which learning paths are relevant to the skillternship that they are posting. An example of this would be the "Intro to Wed Development" learning path which has a course for basic HTML, basic CSS, and introductory JavaScript.
SkillED also standardizes the scope of projects. The platform provides reasonable guidelines to help companies set reasonable goals for a final project for students.
SkillED also ensures that the expectations of each skillternship are reasonable for the length of the given skillternship. This provides the student with a reasonable amount to complete a learning path and also a final project if applicable.
The standardization process ensures that the experience is educational and enjoyable.
SkillED recommends industries to students and provides detailed reviews for each industry. The platform also provides an interest assesment that helps students determine which industries and jobs might be more interesting to them.
SkillED allows students to recieve access quality educational materials by allowing companies to "sponsor" students. Once a student is accepted for a skillternship, the sponsoring company will pay for the student's learning path. This removes another barrier for students, which is purchasing quality education materials.
The overall purpose of the SkillED platform is to provide an accelerated, education focused process which allows students to explore new opportunities without needing years of experience to break into their field of interest. Students focus on learning basic, fundamental skills and compnaies provide a short term experience which helps students navigate different industries of their choice. In an ideal case, students would be able to perform various skillternships prior to their freshman year of college in order to determine if their desired careers are something that they truly enjoy.