Our role within SkilledUp Life is two fold:

• Find Volunteers to fill skill gaps in bootstrapped tech companies, so that they can survive and compete with well funded (usually venture-backed) competitors.
• Find Opportunities for Volunteers so that they can gain real experience and skills to land paid Opportunities elsewhere, either as a freelancer, contractor or employee.

But the world outside SkilledUp Life matters. If we do not take the trouble to understand the external world, we will not succed at the end. Most likely we will wither and die.

What do I mean by the outside world? Let’s tackle volunteers first.

Our lives start with education. We are programmed to study whether we excel in it or not. Sadly, education no longer gurantees a job as technology advancements results in less availability, creating a surplus work force. In order to get ahead of the competition, all of use need to demonstrate experiences and skills. This is where SkilledUp Life comes in. But in order to execute our own value proposition successfully, we need to have a greater understanding of the:

• Education market including education providers, notably Universities, Colleges and Bootcamps (short course providers).
• Recruitment market.

At present, we have not found a viable way to win the hearts and minds of Academia in justifying why they should partner with us. In terms of Bootcamps, we have started to work with Women AI Academy of Germany. We have a mountain to climb to build in-roads with Educators. We love a challenge. Mithun and I will be working on to take on this challenge.

On the other hand, we need to engage with Opportunity Boards and eventually Recruiters to help those who are active on SkilledUp Life to secure paid opportunities. We have started a discussion with a recruitment portal in Sri Lanka to explore how we can help the Sri Lankan labour market. Whilst we have not yet started the discussion, we know that we will also be able to rely on one of our companies, Compaira to address this in the future.

If you like to get involved, do reach out.