In his quest to seek out people and ideas shifting how the world works to make it better, Scott Henderson talks with Kedar Iyer, co-founder of GapJumpers.me.

Kedar Iyer and Petar Vujosevic decided to build GapJumpers to tackle one of the world’s most pressing problems: youth unemployment. In exploring the issue, they found that one in four students is unemployed simply because they lack the relevant real-life work experience to break into any career. There exists a significant gap between the academic knowledge provided by educational institutions and the tangible skill sets needed to secure a job.

That’s where GapJumpers comes in. On their online platform, our college nieces and nephews can tackle challenges posted by companies in the likes of Google and Virgin Mobile, getting the experience and endorsement they need to build out their résumés. Meanwhile, GapJumpers also allows companies to effectively screen and select the top young talent who have already proven credibility and a high quality of work.

GapJumpers is currently working in Chile, through the support of the Startup Chile program. In this interview, we also hear from Sergio Majluf, professor and director of UDD, one of the pilot universities using GapJumpers to help students gain experience.

What is your venture, and what makes it stand out?
Kedar Iyer: I’m the co-founder, as you said, of GapJumpers, and GapJumpers is a platform that provides companies – reputable companies around the world – with a way to pretest young talent and for young students, graduates, and young professionals […] to test themselves, to test their skills because most of these companies are inaccessible without prior work experience. And that’s what we provide on GapJumpers – a way for people to test themselves and be tested.

Why did you launch GapJumpers?
Kedar Iyer: About a year ago, we were looking at the biggest problems in the world, and youth unemployment came up as one among the top few – besides global warming, of course, which many people are still trying to figure out. So, we said, “How do we solve youth unemployment?” And in that search for a solution, we found that 25% of the unemployed youth suffer from unemployment because of what the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund term as “job skills mismatch” which means the skills acquired in the workplace are not the skills that educational institutes prepare students for; so, there is a gap between the educational system and real-life work experience. And we said, “How can we solve this problem?” […] By overcoming the barriers that internships, typical internships pose […] which is geography, timing, irrelevance, and of course, scarcity. And that’s how we came up with GapJumpers, which is an online platform for young students without work experience to get that work experience and in return prove themselves as being credible talents that companies around the world can evaluate…so that recruitment is no longer one of those cumbersome, time-consuming processes. It is more based on skills rather than personal networks.

Why are you continuing to use GapJumpers, and why would you encourage others to?
Sergio Majluf: One of the things we try to do most of the time is expose our students to the companies, and in GapJumpers, we have found a very positive way to make that exposure happen. So, we need students to have more experience relating to companies, and GapJumpers is a great platform for that because they have many companies online; and those are companies that are willing to welcome students to try and solve real challenges. […] With GapJumpers, students have the chance to tackle real problems and real creative problems, and that’s a very good opportunity for both the students and for us as faculty to learn to get a little bit of the real world into the class. […] Not also with the job as the final goal but with the tools they need to go through the process of maybe finding a job but also maybe creating jobs for themselves and for other people.

What are the challenges that you’ve had to overcome?
Kedar Iyer: They’ve been two-fold: one on the university’s side, where students and professors sometimes feel overwhelmed by the fact that their classroom setting is now almost left exposed, vulnerable to direct feedback from companies. Let’s be honest, a campus environment is a very protected and safe environment for students to fail in… I think one of the things we need to incorporate in the design is to bring that human element in where feedback is a lot more “gentle” rather than binary – “are you good enough or are you not?” How do we provide feedback when it’s not good enough? And that’s something that we’re trying to work on – to make that initiation smooth and gentle rather than being quite harsh.
Sergio Majluf: However, from the school’s perspective, it is incredibly valuable to have the students have the opportunity to really fail because if we keep protecting them […] and they go out, they’re very frustrated when they fail in the real world. So, in this case, GapJumpers is bringing part of the world into the classroom, and that is extremely valuable in the learning process.

Aunties, interested in getting college nieces and nephews prepared for real-life work experience? Learn more about GapJumpers.me.

Photo: Stuart Miles
Published: August 7, 2012