Month Two Pitches: Benny

This is a transcript from the video of Benny's pitch from month two of the Nomad Academy Program.

"The last time I spoke in front of you. I spoke about upskilling and upskilling by improving education and learning experiences through storytelling.

I found a beautiful quote. I really love it.

“I once heard the definition of hell: On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become” …. YEAH!

And I think that's why upskilling is so important. What do you still need to overcome? What is the best version of myself?

And I try to find out what kind of skills are necessary to become the best version of yourself. And I ran a different kind of research. And, not surprising, most of the people say soft skills. In the US 79% in Germany, 86%.

I mean, the closer look, what kinds of soft skills do they think are important? For example, communication skills, critical thinking, problem solving, management skills.

It's not so much surprising. We're talking about the 21st century skills, especially four:

That's creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking.
They call it the 4C’s.

Why they are so important, right? Because when you master them you become highly adaptable. So if you’re good in communication and critical thinking. You can do anything.

And even Charles Darwin comments, he said “it's not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It's the most adaptable to change."

You have a look back to the dinosaurs and rats that survived. That's a good example. But the thing is, with soft skills: Soft skills are soft.

Which means they're really hard to measure.

And when you want to train soft skills or training for soft skills through, Quality content is pretty expensive.

I made a rough calculation about one course. A communication course. It’s like the office because it's all on the same set. So you can shoot everything on one set in the meeting room, for example, a bunch of extras. But even then the rough cut measure is about 100 times more beautiful. Making a prototype, that's it's tough. The research showed. There is a need for better quality educational content.

That's from one of the surveys.

So most people say, yeah, I would like to have education content … especially when there is a  story and it will hopefully be more engaging. But at the same time, people don't pay for education. So when you see. Well, you have. I don't know. How about a review subscription or media subscription.

So we have these skills which are hard to measure, we have a investment AND people don’t want to pay.

So that's the moment in the journey where everything seems to be lost.

But there's one thing that, millennials especially, that businesses, companies, are prepared to pay for.

That's interesting, because when you look at corporations and what they are spending, it's like it's 366 billion dollar industry just for leadership development. In the U.S. alone, it's 166 billion dollars.

And so it's interesting.

So I spoke to Learning and Development Departments. “I have an idea of what soft skills and how you can train your people".

“That's an interesting idea [they said]. But first of all, we want to find out what kind of skills they need because they have a problem to detecting the skill gap”

So I spoke to a company in Sweden. They are leading in AI for education to try to find out how we can detect the abilities of people and what kind of skills they are good at.

And then we said, OK. Yeah, that’s it's interesting because when you’re honest, you have different sources of education.

So you have Google search, podcasts, whatever. For one of them you pay for them, but for most of them, you don't pay. So it's a free content because you mean YouTube videos, for example. Ben, every morning sends us an answer from YouTube video Ted Talks.

Looking at the sources, I wonder if it's me, OK?

But there are different skills that you learn in every video, new ides, whatever.In every article, you get new insights. And when you try to unbutton it and bring it to a map, you get a unique, unique skill map of your abilities.

Yesterday, I read a quote in your presentation. It's called The Passport for Your Future. And I think, well, that's interesting. Many of start to create the skill map and see what kind of skills people have. You know, what they need. And then you can create content.

So making a strategy. The course always improves how we learn. I truly believe you can do it by engaging stories, you know about soft skills, engaging stories and how we learn. But first of all, we have to find out what kind of skills people need and what they are aiming to do.

I mean, you can do it by curating content, like what kind of content you consume. You can find out what kind of students you need.

So think big, but start small.

The MVP. OK. Let's start with the free content. I ran an MVP this year for one of my clients because of my success at one of the innovation conferences. And one of my clients paid just for having a curation of the content. So it's a nearly two weeks event and there is a lot of content, lots of information, but nobody is great with [curating it].

So they paid they me the amount of money to have a presentation that just gives them the direction and they are not the only people that want this.

So I asked them again if they wanted to have such a curation [of content from SXSW]. And they said, yeah, that's a good idea. So I will be doing this next year again.  So I want to have more than one client that wants to do curation and so I’ve started talking to different companies.

And that's what I try to do in the next four weeks. To find out what kind of companies want to have curation of content and to make a little small skill map just for this company to understand what they need.

And that’s the status [of the project] so far.
Thank You."

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