Skill Compass

Digital education advisor at eye level

The AI-based digital "Skill Compass" aims to accompany young people with migration experience on their way from talents to doers with the help of technological support. In this project, we have been working on a digital solution since December 2020 to enable comprehensive access to education and counseling for young people with migration experience. Their backgrounds have often been characterized by systematic disadvantages in terms of access to education and opportunities on the labor market - challenges that can be addressed through targeted support in the form of counseling and support programs in order to leverage the potential of young people. While learning content can already be scaled via online learning platforms, individual counseling cannot be scaled to date and thus limits the number of those who can take advantage of targeted support. This is where the digital "skills compass" comes in, which, with the help of modern AI approaches, can provide a virtually unlimited number of young people with access and guidance in navigating the hardly manageable range of (continuing) education options and networking opportunities. Thanks to methods from the research field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, the "Skill Compass" can justify its recommendations. Similar to a conversation with a human mentor, the young people can understand the suggestions, reflect on themselves and also contradict the "Skill Compass. The "Skill Compass" then learns from this feedback and can make more suitable suggestions in the future.

Cooperation partners: START Foundation, Kiron Open Higher Education, inlinity.ai

Project period: December 2020 - ongoing

Transfer

In a joint project, the University of Ulm, START, Kiron and the startup inlinity.ai identified the requirements for the "Skill Compass" as part of the "Together it will be AI" competition of the Civic Innovation Platform of the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, implemented it in a prototype and tested it with scholarship holders. The concept won an award in the associated "Together it's AI" ideas competition.

Now the digital "Skill-Kompass" is being implemented: The University of Ulm, START, Kiron and the startup inlinity.ai are implementing the "Skill-Kompass" and rolling it out as part of the START Campus for young people with migration experience. In the future, the model can be transferred to similar support programs for young people and thus demonstrate the responsible use of AI in (further) education as part of a further scaling to up to 4 million young people with a migration background.