Get to know AutomationWorkz: A network engineering & cybersecurity reskilling platform for front-line workers. Their secret sauce? A tool to predict, engage, and support learners to complete rigorous tech training.
Ida Byrd-Hill is the founder and CEO AutomationWorkz. Ida has been named as a Director to the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, She is on the National Minority Supplier Development Council, and a member of German American Business Council, SHRM, ATD, AIAG, NABJ and others. Armed with her BA in Economics and a MBA, Ida has previously worked as a wealth manager. She is passionate about the need for AutomationWorkz.
What is the story or inspiration behind starting AutomationWorkz?
There are two stories behind its creation. One day I was riding the bus home when a young man who was seated next to me asked me for a bus schedule. I replied that I don’t use paper schedules to which he was very surprised and curious about how I got around. I shared with him that I use Google Maps and this only added to his confusion. Before leaving the bus at my stop, I had just given my first ‘Google Maps Lesson’ to the whole bus. It was at that point that I realized that there was a need, especially amongst the working class demographic to learn digital skills.
Secondly, about 16 years ago I predicted that we would have a talent shortage in the technology arena, and we are currently in a great recession where business growth has dropped. There is a lot of uncertainty and hesitation from corporate America to digitally reskill the front liners due to the fear of low completion rates, also common in post secondary institutions. We were curious to solve this issue and having realized this, we created the Life Culture Audit to be a tool that will provide more guidance to students and give them a better chance to complete their training/education.
We are using this tool to assess the motivation and culture of frontline employees, to see if they have the coding abilities, life goals, and vision that will give them the motivation to finish the courses they may enroll in. Along the way, we discovered that this tool facilitates a coaching relationship between the training staff and the learners which creates the leverage to reduce dropouts. We aim to train individuals in network engineering and cybersecurity to create a foundation of a rigorous curriculum and through this, we have been able to achieve a 75% completion rate from the typical 13–16% completion rate.
What is the unmet need or challenge that AutomationWorkz is addressing?
We’re aiming to tackle the challenge of providing education for the typical working-class individual who has a very busy day, is constantly on the move, and does not have time to sit in a traditional classroom. More importantly, we are attempting to provide them with more hands-on education therefore everything we do is more focused on video games and digital simulations, and even our assessment is a hands-on tool. Instead of bombarding them with questions like, “What does success mean to you?” They go through hands-on activities, and that’s how we determine whether they’re ready for tech training. We try to cater to those who are kinesthetic learners, meaning they learn with their hands.
And what do you think is unique about the approach that AutomationWorkz takes on this?
What is unique about us is that we offer a hands-on approach. Take for example when someone plays a video game, very few people read the instructions of the video game, and then some may even go find some cheat codes. But very rarely does someone open up a game and say , ‘Okay, let me see how to play the video game’. Well, that’s how traditional learning operates, you read the instructions, you understand everything and then you do the activity. Rather our students jump right in to figure it out. They may go back to the instructions when they encounter challenges, or even better yet, they may go and find something like a cheat code or figure it out, but very rarely do they just sit down and read the instructions to fully understand what the instructions are saying, and then go through the lesson.
Our lessons are more video-oriented, video gaming, digital simulations, crossword puzzles, and other really hands-on type activities, that don’t require you to be an expert to jump in and figure it out and learn as you go. I think that it’s an approach that really should be happening everywhere. Because even though we have virtual education, most entities, whether it’s their K through 12, or post-secondary, do not cater to this type of learning style.
How are you thinking about the impact that your product creates for the world or the market that you are in right now?
Well, firstly our impact is on every corporation around the world because they know that they need to digitally re-skill their employees. The challenge is that the people who are not in the know are not really attempting to reskill, because they don’t think that they have the capacity to learn. However, we want to show them that they do have the capacity to learn, maybe not the way traditional education is taught. Through the way that we teach, they have the capacity to not only learn but to compete, and then go off into the technical world to get very high-paying careers. So our biggest impact is that they will complete the program, and then they will move into a tech job making a lot more money than they were making when they started with us.
The second way that we make an impact is through the Life Culture Audit, the assessment that we administer. The training that we offer is great and it is very different and radical than what people normally do. We believe that the assessment is more critical and it will have a greater impact because of what it does. The assessment allows one to experience what programming looks like because of the way we talk about technological careers, programming, and software-type careers. Typically, people think that they have to be a genius to go into those industries. And so consequently, a lot of the frontline workers are not gravitating towards the industries because they’re afraid of the industry due to their challenging K-12 education experience and they do not see themselves as a genius.
The first thing our assessment does is help them discover that they have some problem-solving skills that relate to the coding programming area. We use a gaming exercise as a way to test them. The second thing it does is it kind of predicts who can do well, because they could complete the 20 levels of the game. This means that they have great problem-solving abilities and they can go into tech training, and more rigorous careers. They may not be mathematical geniuses, but you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to go into computer programming or network engineering in cybersecurity. You just need to understand the problem-solving abilities of those both disciplines’ brains.
The third thing that our software does is it motivates individuals. It asks them to define what their goals are, define what their vision is, and for most of our participants, right now we’ve noticed about 77.8% have never done a vision for themselves, which is very critical to me. How do you know where you’re going, if you don’t have a map? We encourage them to look at their goals, define what they are, and create a vision board with that information. This tends to give them such an ‘Aha’ moment because they now have a clearer vision of what they want to do.’ So they get an abrupt change at that point, because all of a sudden, they realize that what they want does not match their actions. And so instead of saying change your actions, we let your vision board tell you to change your actions. Almost every person who’s done a vision board with us has changed the actions that they were doing because they realized the actions they were taking do not match where they want to go, and so they made their own changes. It gives them a different motivation for getting things done.
The last thing that the app will do is coach them through the process because they are looking at their life on a road map that is new to them. They need lots of coaching to make it through the process because it’s a mental transition since they were thinking a certain way for 20–30 years and now they need to make a mental transition. So we give them motivational lectures, motivational videos, and motivational texts to coach them through the training process, or the career change process because they have to think differently to make that change. The Life Culture Audit process probably has more impact than the training because it really gets into the person’s mindset, and why they’re dropping out. We’re hoping instead that what we’ve done with the life culture audit will make this pivot, and transition it from a 90-minute class to a mobile app, that will impact people all over the world. Now instead of saying change your mindset, they’ll do it on their own through the app.
What is the next most important milestone for AutomationWorkz?
Our two major milestones are to focus on determining how to reach our actual customer and to build the app which requires funding. We’re also making some preliminary MVP so that we can see how it’s supposed to work for the mobile app.
