News – Blog
23 March 2021
9 in 10 workers will need to be retrained or learn new skills over the next decade, but in a rapidly changing labour market, it can be difficult for jobseekers and career changers to identify the risk to their jobs and explore their options. Meet the winners of the CareerTech Challenge Prize, connecting workers to the information and support they need to thrive.
Today, Challenge Works and the Department for Education have announced Bob UK and Would You Rather Be as the winner and runner-up of a £1.2 million initiative to equip workers with the tools, information and support they need to navigate the labour market and plan their future careers.
These innovators were selected by an expert judging panel from a competitive field of 20 finalists, and will share in £200,000 to continue to develop and scale their solutions. They were announced at Nesta’s event, The Changing World of Work.
Bob is an automated online coach that gets crucial, life-changing employment advice to people who need it, quickly, easily and for free. Developed by non-profit Bayes Impact, Bob helps users understand how their skills can fit with those required by employers, and provide advice to help them improve their job application techniques. Job seekers can receive ongoing digital coaching via email, text and an app that delivers personalised motivational support, helping its users to feel continuously supported.
Through the Prize, Bayes Impact has been collaborating with ACH, a social enterprise providing integration and employment support to refugees in Bristol, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry, to test their solution and adapt it for a UK market.
Would You Rather Be is an AI-power app to help people find career happiness. Users answer 10 minutes of quick-fire questions, and the platform calculates the careers they’d thrive in. Users are then presented with hyper-personalised pathways into each, allowing them to explore the different qualifications or experience needed to get into a given career, and compare the time, cost and available funding for each.
Since the start of the Prize, the app has had over 40,000 users, with 84% saying it helped them discover or get into a career they would enjoy.
The CareerTech Challenge Prize was launched in October 2019, as part of a £5.75 million partnership between Nesta, Challenge Works, and the Department for Education. The programme initially focused on supporting adults in England most at risk of rapid labour market change – specifically, those without a degree and working in sectors such as retail, manufacturing and transport which are expected to be widely affected by automation. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, the scope of the programme was expanded to include those put on furlough or recently made redundant.
Although people are often aware of these shifts at the macro level, it can be difficult for workers in an at-risk role to know if or when their own role could be automated, or the skills they should be developing to ‘future-proof’ their positions. Research by Onward suggests that although 64% of people believe that much of the work currently done by humans will eventually be done by robots and computers, only 9% of people feel their own jobs are threatened a ‘great deal’ by automation.
A major focus of the prize was investigating innovative uses and sources of labour market information – data which can shed light on the past, current or future state of the labour market. There’s no shortage of this data – government statistics, official surveys, academic research or even data collected from job search sites can all provide a wealth of insight into the skills which are in demand in a given area.
However, this insight is often inaccessible to those who would benefit most. The CareerTech Challenge Prize called for solutions which could proactively engage with workers in at-risk roles, encouraging them to reflect on their careers and explore new possibilities, while providing straightforward, actionable and locally relevant recommendations to help them plan.
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sharing more information about our winner and runner-up and their journey bringing their solutions to life. In the meantime, you can read about all of our finalists, or explore all of the innovations supported through the CareerTech Challenge in this interactive storyboard.
Challenge Works is also delivering the Rapid Recovery Challenge, to support those most affected by the economic impacts of COVID-19 – you can read about their semi-finalists here. Alternatively, consider joining our Rapid Recovery Challenge Network to help connect our innovators to the communities most in need of their solutions.
