Meet Jobspeaker: The company closing the skills gap by helping students explain what they learned in the classroom

LearnLaunch Fund + Accelerator
3 min readJun 2, 2020

--

Interview with Jarlath O’Carroll, Founder and CEO of Jobspeaker

What traction do you have so far?
We have over 50 institutions on our platform today, most of which are community colleges. So we help serve the 600,000+ students across all of those colleges in all of their career and workforce needs.

What is the story and inspiration behind starting JobSpeaker?
I worked in various countries and states in my career from being a programmer at IBM in NYC, to consulting at Deloitte for the UK Government in London. Across all of those experiences I gained entry to the opportunity by building and leveraging my network.

But when I got laid off in 2009 during the financial crisis, that all changed — I decided that I needed to do something different to change the dynamic for myself and other jobseekers like me. The goal was and still is today to give students and jobseekers the tools to take control of their career and understand how to get from where they are today to where they want to go.

What is the unmet market need or challenge that JobSpeaker is addressing?
Actually closing the skills gap — there is a lot of talk about the skills gap and closing it but we are the only platform that actually provides a solution to address closing the skills gap and its underlying causes. Our solution helps colleges understand what skills are being earned in the classroom and helps students express those skills in a form that employers understand. Then we help employers provide dynamic feedback on those skills so that colleges understand how to adjust to close the skills gap within their community/region/state.

How does your company solve the proposed problem and why are you the team to solve it?
We build a dynamic collaboration system for a college to help students get on a learning path, stay on a learning path, see what skills they are earning on that path, and then get jobs from employers related to that path.

To do so, we map the curriculum offered by each college in order to build out their skills taxonomy and a Skills Transcript[TM] for each student based on their learning path. Doing so enables Jobspeaker to recommend employers/jobs to students based on their skills and provide a dynamic feedback loop for colleges to continually refine their curriculum to meet market needs.

We have built a team that is passionate about solving this underlying problem. Rather than providing part of the solution, we look at the problem holistically and tackle that directly.

Why are you participating in the LearnLaunch Accelerator? Why did you choose this program?
Why are you participating in the LearnLaunch Accelerator? Why did you choose this program?
We choose this program because:
- it is one of the premier accelerator in the country in education
- the team and venture partners are very knowledgable about education technology and existing solutions/problems
- we believe that knowledge and perspective can help us with our growth

Learn more about Jobspeaker on their website https://jobspeaker.com/. Also follow them on Twitter @Jobspeaker.

--

--

LearnLaunch Fund + Accelerator

LearnLaunch is the leading early-stage edtech startup fund and accelerator.