UpSkillIndo

UpSkillIndo is a mobile application that aims to help small businesses grow by bridging the local talent gap

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Inspiration

Being born and raised in India, we have grown up hearing about how crucial local talent is for the development of indigenous businesses. We also understand that small businesses play a crucial role in the overall development of an economy. Since Indonesia is quite similar to India in certain aspects, we were inclined towards working to help small Indonesian businesses grow. As we go to the University of Hong Kong, we have many Indonesian friends and have often heard from them about how lack of local talent is a major roadblock in the growth path of small businesses. Moreover, as university students, we understand how there's a big gap between formal education and the tangible skills required to work. Thus, we came up with the idea of UpSkillIndo to help students learn new skills while helping them get ready to join the local workforce. Hence, helping local students up-skill to work with small businesses and drive their growth.

What it does

UpSkillIndo allows firms to set up tasks, similar to which they want to hire talent for in a full-time role/internship. It requires firms to select the skills needed to do the task set by them. Based on the skills selected, UpSkillIndo provides the firms a selection of learning materials to choose from. Firms can choose the materials relevant to their task.

On the other side, students are required to select their already existing skills and the skills they wish to acquire. After this, based on the data given by them, they are given a selection of tasks (set up by firms) to work on. They can use the learning materials suggested by the firm to get some guidance. Once they finish and upload the task, a notification is sent to the respective firm. If the firm finds the work of the student to be satisfactory then they can hire the student for a project/internship/job. If not, then they are required to provide feedback to the student so that he/she can improve.

Thus, UpSkillIndo helps firms train and hire talent with tangible skills and help students up-skill at the same time.

How I built it

The mobile app was built using Flutter. The backend for the app was based on Flask. The scripts for scraping search engine results as well as the matching algorithm were written in Python. The database is hosted on Firestore and YouTube API is used to get video suggestions.

Challenges I ran into

It was challenging to work with Flask and Flutter together since majority of our team had never worked with both these frameworks before. We spent a significant time thinking about the problems faced by small businesses which is why we only had 16 hours to finish working on the prototype. While this was a challenge we had a lot of fun doing so!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As a team we are proud to have identified a problem in the Indonesian startup ecosystem and create a prototype to demonstrate our solution. On the technical end we are espeically proud of the video and web docs curator which works for any skills provided to it.

What I learned

  • We learnt a lot about Indonesia!
  • We learnt how to use Flask
  • We learnt that making data models from the beginning of the project is very important, else it debugging becomes really messy
  • We learnt to write scrappers

What's next for UpskillIndo

There are a lot of features that we will like to add to UpskillIndo. For our content curation, we plan to use NLP to help us curate a more diverse collection of resources. A major milestone would be to start curating our own content which would primarily be taught in Bahasa to cater a wider population in Indonesia.

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