https://www.jff.org/what-we-do/impact-stories/jfflabs-acceleration/career-navigation-technology-2020/
A technology market poised for innovation and impact. Our scan focuses on the millions of workers too often overlooked or underserved by traditional approaches to career navigation.
Building a stable, sustainable working life across the many jobs and industries that make up a contemporary career requires a new set of skills: adaptability, resilience, self-reflection, and self-directed lifelong learning.
What’s clear is that platforms for employers seeking workers are seemingly everywhere, as are tools for corporate workers looking for new professional opportunities. But for the well over half of American workers in entry-level or mid-skill jobs, the process of finding a career is chaotic, seemingly random, and ultimately broken.
This market scan offers a road map through the complex and messy ecosystem of career navigation—for workers, we know this report will give you hope that there are tools out there made just for you—and they could be your key to finding a meaningful and evolving lifelong career journey.
To make sense of the complex career navigation technology market, our Career Navigation Framework analyzes the tools, platforms, and resources populating this landscape through two interconnected lenses:
This framework helps identify an opportunity that innovators are beginning to seize, pushing new technologies beyond the merely transactional step of connecting workers to jobs and employers to job candidates. Advances in technology are allowing many more kinds of information to flow between jobseekers, employers, and intermediaries.
Our Innovators to Watch are on the leading edge of this new frontier of impact for workers.
Innovators to Watch are a select group of organizations that represent market trends and distinguish themselves from other forward-looking companies by their potential to create significant, business-aligned social impact. Each offers a potentially transformative innovation or is led by inspiring founders and teams that we believe in.
Career navigation platforms of the future should be designed to take a more expansive approach to helping users build networks, enabling them recognize and hone the skills that are essential to career navigation, and using “good jobs” criteria to point them toward truly good jobs. To build pathways to opportunity for all, innovative developers of career navigation technologies must design tools that support advancement, not just access. It’s what workers deserve, and—especially in a time of global disruption and crisis—it’s what our economy needs.
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