ObSkill

Inspiration

Due to COVID-19, one of us lost our own internship for the Summer of 2020. Many of our peers have felt a similar effect. With access to a large student network and large company network, we felt the need to give both sides support by joining the two. Some businesses are struggling to adapt to the new remote work style. We first hand noticed interns being paid for 40-hour work weeks when because of the new remote style, they were only working half of that. We began to question if it was worth it for businesses to continue the same pay-rate for internships, with a drastically decreased rate of productivity. The answer is it’s not. The internship program has to adapt as well.

What it does

To provide a route for the internship program to adapt, we encourage companies to host workshops for students to work on. These workshops are short term company-student interactions that can last anywhere from a week to three months. The website is currently functioning to connect students to employers to continue career development in this remote manner. By organizing these opportunities into workshops, it is allowing us to track the level of work being completed by students. This allows the rest of the industry to see some evidence of how well students can work in a remote environment. This opens relationships and opportunities on both sides for the brighter future.

How we built it

The original site was launched as an online survey to collect interest through a wordpress site. We hosted the site through AWS servers. As interest expanded, we focused more on the improvement of the wordpress website. All the back-end work was being done by hand, such as organizing user data and matching students to positions posted by companies. For the hack-a-thon we focused on creating our prototype in figma to better explain our vision for ObSkill and the benefits it can bring.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge we ran into was not having a full stack developer join our team. This caused us to have a main focus on creating a front-end prototype in figma. This allowed us to plan out all of the site functions, preparing us for the future of working with a full stack development team. These challenges are occurring because of the growth of our idea, as more students and companies sign up it is becoming harder to run without the process automated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how the prototype came out. We feel it is a great representation of the first phase of ObSkill. We are also proud of the fact that we have already assisted a handful of students in getting connected to opportunities for this summer. The positive feedback from the students and companies is what keeps us going with the further development of this idea.

What we learned

We learned about the difficulties of bringing our ideas to reality. Our initial idea of making this platform through wordpress was unrealistic, and now we understand all the planning and mock-ups required for a successful website. As two students without web design experience, we had to quickly teach ourselves tools such as wordpress and figma to portray our idea. We now know the importance of getting a strong back end development to improve ObSkill for the future.

What's next for ObSkill

Our immediate goal is to create or find a developing team that can help us create an automated web application based off of the figma mock up we created. We are reaching out to more companies that could use our assistance while the number of students on the platform grows. We plan to launch an updated version this summer with an automated back end, thus allowing us to support and benefit more students and companies moving forward.

Built With

• figma
• wordpress