In 2022, JobsFirstNYC launched a Skills Mapping initiative in partnership with SkyHive to accelerate labor market-responsive training, reskilling, upskilling for New York City young adults and communities that have traditionally faced resource challenges, with the help of ethical artificial intelligence. The Skills Mapping Academy is a capacity-building series delivered by SkyHive’s Training Team and offered at no cost to JobsFirstNYC partners. In the Academy, participants learn how to use the SkyHive Enterprise platform to help students and jobseekers understand their current skills, explore careers, sectors and related skills in demand, connect to skills training, and match to jobs based on skills instead of degrees.
In an era marked by constant change and evolving workforce demands, the role of workforce development professionals in helping jobseekers access meaningful, family-sustaining careers has never been more critical—or more challenging. Generative artificial intelligence can be a powerful ally for practitioners in many ways. On one hand, it can support their direct work with jobseekers through skills assessment, career pathway exploration, and connecting jobseekers to training & employment opportunities. It also enhances the accessibility of real-time labor market data, thereby guiding program design that aligns with current workforce trends.Despite the promise of these technologies, organizations face barriers to implementation. These barriers range from the up-front cost to a lack of organizational capacity related to using and vetting new digital tools and making space in existing curricula to train their students or clients on how to use them.
To remove these barriers, JobsFirstNYC and SkyHive launched the Skills Mapping Academy, a train-the-trainer experience that aims to make skills intelligence accessible to our partners across the city.
What is the Skills Mapping Academy?
The Skills Mapping Academy is a capacity-building series for workforce development professionals through which they gain access to SkyHive’s Enterprise platform. In addition to learning the functionality of the platform, participants are trained more broadly on the Skills Mapping process: how to help jobseekers and students identify their own skills and match to jobs and training across industries based on those skills. Additionally, Academy participants learn how to upload their entity’s trainings to the platform, and how to create a skill-first map at an organizational level to inform programs.
As Deputy Borough President Ebony Young commented in a recent Skills Mapping Academy session, making technology accessible is about more than just technology design—it’s about cultivating learning mindsets and building the right relationships. She told Academy participants: “We need to meet people where they’re at, which is working with the people that work with the people where they’re at, and then opening those doors. If you talk about removing barriers, it’s about having the right partners in place to be able to communicate and articulate and advance generative AI in a way that’s never been done before.”
While SkyHive provides the technology, JobsFirstNYC, through the Skills Mapping Academy model, builds the relationships and support systems necessary to adopt this new AI tool across our partnerships—and ensures that the early learnings from our partners inform future iterations of the tool itself.
What are the benefits of Skills Mapping?
Skills Mapping offers value across JobsFirstNYC’s four levels of impact:
Individuals
Skills Mapping can assist workforce development practitioners in career conversations with students and jobseekers. The platform can help students recognize the value of the skills they’ve already built and translate their experiences into a language that employers understand. They can also explore the skills they might need to access careers of interest. For individuals looking to upskill, the platform’s Career Path tool enables users to search for any job role, see what gaps in skills they have, set career goals, and track their progress from their current role to a new position. For jobseekers looking to return to work, the platform can help them to connect to job listings and sectors they may not have considered, based on their existing skill set.
Institutions
Entities that use the platform get a real-time view of who is hiring, where the jobs are, and what skills employers are seeking. Additionally, entities can pull data on the existing skills of their populations to inform decisions regarding what types of training they want to invest in to build pipelines to in-demand careers. Skills Mapping supports the upskilling of employees for shifting demands, by showing pathways to job opportunities that may not be too far from current skill sets.
Partnerships
Skills Mapping directly supports the goals of JobsFirstNYC’s Community, Work, and Education partnerships. Skills mapping can be a valuable tool for place-based partnerships to visualize the skills that already exist in their neighborhood, the skills that are in-demand for existing and future job opportunities in the neighborhood, and therefore key insights to building geographically-informed pipelines to higher wages. Additionally, access to real-time labor market intelligence enables these initiatives to design individualized training programs based on the skills that are in-demand now and in the future.
Systems
At a systems level, Skills Mapping can inform reskilling and upskilling plans for entire neighborhoods that make visible the existing skills of each community to its residents. These plans will build upon the unique strengths and abilities of communities, creating direct pathways to higher-wage jobs and laying a foundation for long-term economic mobility.
Ultimately, we imagine using skills intelligence to build a workforce that is responsive to the needs of employers, highly adaptable individuals with the skills necessary now, and to meet the demands of the future of work.
Why Did JobsFirstNYC Choose To Partner With SkyHive?
There is no shortage of options when it comes to AI talent solutions, and many nonprofits are evaluating available products and seeking partnerships with technology developers who are interested in iterating to better address the specific needs of the communities we serve. When evaluating potential partners, JobsFirstNYC was impressed by the company’s multiple ethical AI recognitions—including the Responsible AI Institute’s RAISE ‘Leading Start-Up’ award for ethical AI. Additionally, we were assured that the platform would equitably identify skills even for nontraditional experience because it had the largest global dataset of similar organizations. From our early conversations, SkyHive demonstrated clear value-alignment with JobsFirstNYC’s mission.
Bright Spots of Skills Mapping
During the inaugural cohort of the Skills Mapping Academy, more than 3,500 skills were mapped, resulting in tangible success stories. One stand-out moment involved a jobseeker who had experienced a long period of unemployment securing a position as an electric maintenance technician at John F. Kennedy International Airport with an annual salary of $80,000, after working their way through the skills mapping process with partner Dress for Success. By being supported to transition their experience from jobs-based to skills-based, this individual is achieving their goals on a new career path.
JobsFirstNYC looks forward to lifting up more success stories and learnings as we continue to build out our Skills Mapping initiative. Through our partnership with SkyHive, we hope to iterate on a dynamic and responsive workforce development tool that democratizes access and use of generative AI for translating experience – life, education, training, and work – and finding and accessing careers of interest. Skills Mapping is an exciting new way in which JobsFirstNYC can support our partnerships in tackling the traditional barriers impeding job searching, recruitment, and pathways to career opportunities for the individuals and communities we serve.
