Soft skills the key to meaningful youth employment

The team of Brent Liang, Elisa Lillicrap and Kirath Singh recently took their project to Dubai and with it defeated nearly 70 competitor universities to take out the regional finals of the prestigious and potentially lucrative global impact challenge, the Hult Prize.

In August the three will become the first Australian team in 10 years to join 20 other regional winners in London for a six-week "accelerator" program aimed at further developing, refining and growing their project known as Chance.io.

From London, the best of the regional winners will travel to the United Nations in New York where, like gold at the end of the rainbow, one outstanding team will be presented by President Bill Clinton with a million dollars in seed money for their product.

The Hult Prize Foundation, which sponsors the competition with the support of the United Nations and the Clinton Foundation, describes itself as a "global social impact organisation."

"Solving the world’s most pressing challenges is not just the right thing to do, it is also good business," said entrepreneur Ahmad Ashkar, who founded the Hult Prize in 2009 to "encourage start-up ideas from young people that sustainably solve the world’s most critical social challenges."

Today, the Hult Prize is "the world’s biggest engine for the launch of for-good, for-profit start-ups emerging from universities with over 2,500 staff and volunteers around the globe."

Over the past decade, it has injected nearly A$70 million into the start-up sector and "mobilised more than one million young people in 100 countries to rethink the future of business."

"As many as 200 thousand teams vie to complete at various levels each year and this year an Australian team is in the top 20 for the first time," said Sydney team member Brent Liang, a fourth year Economics/Law student and a Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Sydney.

The team describes Chance.io as a "two-sided smart platform using game-based learning and AI technology to develop soft skills among youth and connect them with employers."

"And the importance of soft skills is only set to increase, as job automation and technology such as AI continue to advance," says Elisa Lillicrap, a second year Commerce student who at 17 co-founded her own start-up.

"Significant high rates of youth unemployment around the world are symptoms of a social failure," explains Kirath, who is currently pursuing a bachelor of Advanced Computing degree majoring in Computer Science and Finance. "Youth worldwide lack the '21st century skills' such as problem-solving, communication, teamwork and critical thinking to get hired."

"We are taking elements from gaming and combining them with mobile and internet technology to teach soft skills effectively and on a much bigger scale," says Brent. "It is about being creative with what’s being done by educators and encouraging youth worldwide to learn differently."

The Sydney team has tested the demand for online soft skills training in developing countries and has secured a deal to pilot Chance.io in Myanmar. Members are now in discussions with professional services firms across India, Singapore and Australia.

"We’ll soon be running a series of Chance Sprint events on the University of Sydney campus, in partnership with various university societies to test the validity and performance of our prototype," said Kirath Singh. "As the first Australian team heading to London, it has been a privilege to be supported by the faculty staff at Sydney University and the wider community of entrepreneurs and corporate leaders who helped us grow."

More information can be found at www.chanceio.com or complete a sample challenge by messaging the secret code 'Project Hawk' to Chance.io’s Facebook page.