Much has been said and written about whether AI adds jobs, replaces jobs, or perhaps just replaces tasks. And, much ink has also been spilled debating whether AI is better or worse than humans.
I’ll put those debates aside for a minute and focus on something else: AI helping people get jobs. Or, more specifically, how AI technology can show individuals their skills, including skills they may not realize they even have, their career-path options, learning possibilities, and jobs open for someone with their skills.
Along those lines comes a wonderful story from New York City. JobsFirstNYC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating and advancing solutions that break down barriers for young adults and their communities in the pursuit of economic opportunities, is using “skills mapping” to help policy-makers and businesses assess the needs of a given community.
As part of that skills mapping initiative, JobsFirstNYC is now hosting its second Skills Mapping Academy cohort, led by SkyHive. The Skills Mapping Academy training shows workforce-development practitioners how to use technology to break down individuals’ education and experiences down to specific skills. This way, job seekers are compared based on their skills, not where they went to school or where they worked before.
As part of those academies, one organization JobsFirstNYC is working with is Dress for Success, whose mission is to empower women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire, and the development tools to help women thrive in work and in life. Dress for Success is using SkyHive’s AI technology to show women learning and job opportunities open to them that they may be unaware of.
JobsFirstNYC and Dress for Success explain more about how this works in the 9½-minute video, below, including one big-time success story involving a job at New York's JFK Airport. Let us know if your organization also wants to use AI to help people find training and jobs.
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