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Skilled Logo
Inspiration
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.
What it does
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 include 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 professionals and meet professional teams. In longer skillternships, students will focus on completing a learning path that is agreed 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.
How I built it
Our front end consists of HTML,CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript and embedded Javascript templates for rendering dynamic views. Our backend consists of a MongoDB atlas database hosted on Google Cloud Platform, and Express.js and Node.js for serving views and making calls to our database.
Challenges I ran into
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud to have created a platform which is accessible to all groups, including those who are underrepresented in various industries. By removing the usual high performance barriers which disproportionally impacts women and people of color, especially in STEM fields, we are able to empower various groups. Allowing students to explore jobs based on their interests and receive accessible education resources is one of the first steps to overcoming bias in the STEM field. Being able to deploy a full-stack web application for the first time was very exciting.
What I learned
Everyone on the project worked with new technologies that they have never seen before. This was the first time deploying a full-stack web application using the MERN stack. We were all able to learn to create a new database using a NoSQL database, route pages using Express.js, style pages using new templating system, and adding bootstrap was a great learning experience for us. Everyone made sure to work on things that they have never used before. Learning new technologies and deploying a web application in under 24 hours was exciting and I don't think any of us would have though this to be possible in another environment. We were very happy to be a part of Hack@Brown's inclusive atmosphere which embraces innovation and open collaboration.
What's next for SkillED
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 companies 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. The next steps for SkillED include curating educational resources for learning paths and attracting companies to the platform. The platform is attractive to startup companies which will have a low cost way of hosting students, while also having students work on administrative tasks as well.
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