CareerVillage.org is a 13-year-old 501c3 non-profit organization whose mission is to democratize access to career information and advice for underrepresented youth. Its open-access Q&A-style career advice platform crowdsources from a vast network of real-life professionals with a vision of creating an equitable career landscape for young people.
The widespread lack of access to career support perpetuates the struggles millions of young people face in navigating employment. In pursuit of bridging the massive gap in career resources, CareerVillage is now launching its latest program: an AI Career Coach (‘Coach’).
This unique tool is much more than just an AI chatbot. Coach is a revolutionary platform that harnesses the power of AI and sector-wide collaboration to offer cost-effective, scalable, 24/7/365 career support. Designed to be personalized while accessible to anyone, Coach can help people practice for interviews, improve resumes, explore new career paths, and a whole lot more.
For over six years, CareerVillage.org has used machine learning in production for a variety of tasks including text classification, NLP, forecasting, text generation, and more recently integrated generative AI into the core user experience of the Q&A site. The CareerVillage team, leveraging over a decade of experience in creating impactful, large-scale career development technology tools, has rapidly developed the AI Career Coach platform. Remarkably, the journey from initially committing to the project to receiving positive feedback from live Coach testers took just 11 weeks. A robust coalition of partners in the education sector, coupled with invested support from trusted corporate partners, has been the pivotal force in launching and scaling this project.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Foundation have been incredibly supportive of CareerVillage.org for over three years through a hands-on, high-impact employee engagement partnership. At this crucial juncture for CareerVillage, HPE has leveled up its support of the organization, enabling catalytic growth to scale and reach even more people who need career guidance. HPE believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds the potential to solve some of society’s biggest, most pressing challenges by amplifying human capabilities and allowing organizations to derive value and actionable insights from data. AI Career Coach will bring this belief to life by providing transformative support for students using AI and technology.
CareerVillage aims to officially launch AI Career Coach in Spring 2024, and from there the team will continue to update, iterate, and make new deployments to the tool based on user feedback. Creating a platform that is both accessible and impactful to every person seeking career help is core to the CareerVillage vision, and the organization is committed to carrying out this mission responsibly. They are excited to continue to grow and nourish the CareerVillage.org Q&A platform while scaling up their reach by offering AI-powered mentoring through Coach. The support of partners like HPE, who empower organizations to make an impact in the world using transformative technology, has made it all possible.