EMPLOYABILITY
T
It’s about
ensuring that
everybody’s
using the
same
language
around skills
ell us about your business,
Occumi, and what it offers
young people.
We help students to identify,
understand and better articulate the
transferable skills that they’ve developed from
their education and work experience.
We have two streams of work and the first
is direct support for students. We have a web
tool that students can log onto through
their educational institution. They enter their
educational qualifications and work experience
and are presented with all the skills that they
are likely to have developed based on what
they’ve entered.
Sitting behind that is a lot of research that
we’ve done ourselves into what transferable
skills an individual develops from studying
certain courses or subjects at a certain level,
or from working in a particular industry in
a particular role. Whether that’s full-time in a
bank or part-time in a supermarket, you will
develop valuable skills.
We worked closely with academics and
employers, aiming to join the dots between
the education and employment pieces. A lot
of young people from wider-participation
backgrounds, or first-generation students,
don’t have the social capital to be able to speak
to people about their skills, understand what
employers are looking for or the opportunities
that are right for them. Our research involved
more than 1,000 unique data points, including
input from over 650 university lecturers, course
outlines and findings from existing studies.
With the tool, each student is instantly
presented with a personal dashboard, providing
information about their skills and the
terminology that employers are looking for; for
example, ‘analytical thinking’. We help show
students what that skill actually means.
and whether they’re right for the role, rather
than encouraging diverse recruitment for
diversity’s sake. We know there are people
from all sorts of backgrounds who have talents
that make them suitable for certain jobs. It’s
just about giving them the chance to get their
foot in the door, levelling the playing field.
How did you come up with and
develop your idea?
Joe and I have known each other since we
were 11 years old and we were halfway through
our second year at the University of Kent when
we came up with the idea; I was studying
psychology and he was doing history.
We were at a point when we were starting
to think about what we wanted to do after
university, and we were both first-generation
degree students. I’m also from a BAME
background. We wanted to work in London
and experience the corporate world, but we
didn’t know anyone who had done that or what
employers were looking for.
We were conscious that we’d be competing
against people from Oxford, Cambridge and
Russell Group universities, which might be seen
as more favourable than ours. We felt within
ourselves that we had valuable skills that would
allow us to do the sort of roles we wanted – but
what exactly were those skills and how could
we articulate them to employers? Exactly what
opportunities were available to us based on
the skills we had? These were the questions
we had at the time.
From that point, we started doing our initial
research, speaking to our peers and seeing
whether they felt the same and then to
students across different universities. After
that, we spoke to academics and employers,
before moving on to developing the algorithm
we eventually we would eventually turn into a
web-based tool.
And how are you helping employers
to address unconscious bias?
How did you get it off the ground?
The second part of the business uses the same
skills-identifying algorithm to help employers
filter candidates based on their transferable
skills rather than on their background.
This helps employers to reduce bias in that
very initial stage of recruitment. It’s primarily
with companies that are recruiting at entry
level or for early careers and often they are
recruiting in large numbers. For example,
they might have 400 applications; how do they
narrow those down in a fair and unbiased way?
We work with them to help identify the
practical skills they are looking for, around a
particular role, and then we can filter the
candidates that come through based on
their skills. We want recruitment to be based
on merit, around the skills that an individual has
We did the research and developed the
algorithm ourselves. But we are not web
developers. We knew we had to get funding
in order to build the initial prototype. When we
were testing the concept, we entered a
university competition to see whether it had
real business legs. It was only a couple of weeks
after we’d had the idea and we found ourselves
runners up. So that’s where we decided we
could pitch for investment.
We are both from Colchester, Essex and
were fortunate to be able to pitch to a local
investor, who helped us get the initial thing off
the ground. Neither of us had experience of
pitching or public speaking. We had to develop
those skills along the way, speaking to
companies and at universities.
FUTURE TALENTED // 25