Tackling the school-to-work gap: a revolutionary AI career platform is here

New platform Anyway acts as a digital mentor, a career coach of sorts, that draws on students’ interests, values and progress to deliver tailored advice, surface relevant learning experiences and drive more considered decision making.

It’s personalised, always-on support that moves the average student to careers advisor ratio from 385:1 to 1:1, and will ensure better social and economic outcomes as students confidently take steps toward further education, training or employment.

The platform represents the next chapter for Year13 and how far that company has come, from humble beginnings as a blog to an AI native platform now supporting more than two million young people in their school-to-work transition.

“As technology changes the way we work and creates new opportunities across the economy, young people need clear, practical guidance on the skills they will need and the pathways available to them,” Lucinda Longcroft, Interim CEO and Director of Policy & Government Affairs, Tech Council of Australia, says.

A key part of the Australian launch is a landmark partnership with the University of New England (UNE), who joins Anyway as its exclusive higher education partner.

Based in regional NSW, UNE brings years of expertise in online education and shares a strong commitment to improving outcomes for young people in regional and rural communities.

EducationHQ spoke to Will Stubley, co-founder of Australian career platform Year13 and co-CEO of Anyway, about the importance of the platform, how it will benefit schools and students, and how offering a safe and secure solution to ensure students can build a career plan is at the top of their priortity list.

EdHQ: So Anyway is up and going here and overseas?

Stubley: We’ve been in the US for the last six months, and we just released our beta platform live last week. Here in Australia it’s been going extremely well, and the student and school feedback has been as good as I could hope for the moment.

One of the harder things about our business growing has been, you have to bring the whole ecosystem together. And so the network side of it is actually quite a challenge to get right. But once you get it right, you start to get the network effects and that’s kind of where we’re at now. I’m very proud of it. I think it’s the world’s leading product in this space.

Will Stubley, pictured above middle, at Anyway’s launch even in Sydney, says with their partners, Year13 is committing to using technology, collaboration and shared expertise to help young people find direction, build capability, and take confident steps toward their futures.

Can you tell us about the evolution of the technology from idea to realisation? How did you decide on AI and the functionality and focus of the tech?

We’ve been around for over 10 years now, and we’ve pretty much had the same problem statement: ‘how do you provide personalised support at scale?’ The way we used to do that is, we’ve got a few different data sets, we’ve grouped them together, you’ve got the student side, and you’ve got the economic development or labour market pathway side.

We’d then say, ‘okay, we’ve got 10,000 students in our database wanting to do an apprenticeship, let’s go over research, government websites, all the different companies that are facilitating apprenticeships and write content about it.

And so we became a large publisher in Australia for youth careers – and that still works really well, we haven’t completely shut that off – but when large language model technology came out, it’s meant, ‘okay, well, you can now run a large language model in between those two data sets, and rather than it being a piece of content that’s trying to target 10,000 students, you can have personalised advice on a one to one basis’.

And so that was the unlock – for our use case, the technology is super powerful, because really, you’re running it in between two sets of data to be able to make it personalised.

So the big problem statement was how do you provide personalisation at scale? And that’s what that does.

How do you encourage students to use the platform and what does Anyway involve?

One of the challenges we’ve faced is not that many students are waking up in the morning going, ‘you know what, I’m going to research accounting careers’. And so we needed to work out a way to engage students on these topics that they are often not engaging with until it’s too late.

And so we’ve got a big content engine where we work with partners and we actually run rewards around it. So, for example, we just did one in the US where the winner won a trip to Australia to do work experience in our Australian office as well as touring Microsoft’s offices and things like that.

So we’re putting pretty cool prizes and events and rewards around these topics. And that drives engagement, which we call ‘consideration’ – so we want young people to consider their options and test drive their different options.

Once they’ve done that, they can then work with our career advisor to build a personalised career plan.

So basically, we want young people to open up the world of work and understand what options they have available and then have the capability of the one on one coaching session to then build a really strong and confident plan for after school.

When is it optimal for students to be accessing the program, do you think?

It’s one of those things where the more you engage, the more it helps – so that’s where the more that the system understands what your goals and interests and what you have or haven’t considered, the better the job the platform can do.

Part of our job is to go, ‘OK, well, there’s all of these industries that you haven’t even looked at yet. So, your risk of making informed decisions is a little higher because you don’t know about these pathways yet. You can never really learn about every aspect of everything, but the more that you do engage, the more you’re going to be informed. And so that’s really the message.

We have a direct-to-consumer platform, so we’ve got large social channels where we reach millions of students globally, but we also work with the school system, and so you’ve got a structured environment where you get limited time, but a student can come to us of their own accord as well and have unlimited access.

So we’ve got two ways of making sure a student can make a good decision.

There are going to be cynics who will say, ‘what about data mining’ and, ‘what about privacy and students’ personal information?' How do you alleviate schools’ fears here?

I think that is the right question to be asking, you know, ‘where’s it going?’ and ‘how’s it being handled?’ And that’s why we have made a very conscious decision to be an enterprise solution and work with the education and employment systems.

So our goal is to be a trusted partner, not only with schools, but with universities and government. It’s one of those ones where I think the more of those questions are asked, the better, because that’s where we put large investment into.

We’re right in the sweet spot where we had enough scale and enough resourcing to do this properly.

I guess the bit above that as well is this topic has been heating up. So you’ve got the social media platforms that have been banned, which is a bit of an indicator for us going, ‘well, the only solution here is working with the system’, and that’s part of our strategic goals.

For more information on Anyway and to give it a try, click here.