BraveNewTalent builds online communities around Talent – specifically communities around skills, people and employers. It is through communities that Talent can discover, uncover and develop their skills and employment options.

History and Background

The education system we know today is unable to keep up with exponential change taking place in the employment market. The rapid development of technology has created a gap between skills required by employers and the skills developed in academic institutions. Looking back at history, the original and oldest model of education was via the community. These communities formed around villages, apprenticeships and guilds.

The education model changed around the Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century in response to the requirements of that era. The standardized education system is now slow to respond to the changing requirements of today.

The Internet and technology are changing the game, creating a new paradigm for the way we learn and what we need to learn. The knowledge people acquire in school is rarely what employers actually need. Students are often educated with outdated or only partially relevant information by people that have little connection to the industry.

Adding to this, the assessment system does not capture the complexity of measuring potential. This gap is widening the faster as we progress through the Digital Enlightenment. This is what is commonly termed the Skills Gap.

In the next 10 years we are likely to see more change in the global education system than in the previous 200 years. The market is beginning to move from the Industrial Age into the Digital Age.

The Economic Impact

One of the greatest bottlenecks to economic development is the Skills Gap. The majority of the world’s population do not have the skills required to compete in the new knowledge economy. The Bricks & Mortar model (Schools, Colleges and Universities) cannot scale as fast as the demographic driven demand, particularly in the emerging markets.

Of all the world’s resources Talent is the most wasted. We use human capital in a very inefficient way. A very small percentage of people reach their full career potential. Further, most people are poorly matched as studies indicate that 3 out of 4 hires are “wrong”. This is not surprising, given that the classic CV & Interview recruitment process is only 25% accurate. Even competency tests only increase this to 40%, making hiring risky and potentially very expensive.

The world is full of ‘rough diamonds’ – people with phenomenal potential but have never had sufficient polishing to shine – that need shaping, developing and accurate matching.  We use human capital in a very inefficient way. The next ten years will be defined by the application of technology to unleash the world’s human potential in a way that has never before been possible. At BraveNewTalent we aim to lead the way.

This is the Golden Age of Technology in Education.

As the digital divide is bridged the world’s leading teachers and trainers will be able to connect to a global audience irrespective of geographic position or economic restraints. Peer to peer education will be possible with a scale never before possible. It is via technology that we now see the distribution of skills with scale. We can now see how the global talent market could better reach their potential.

The BraveNewTalent model

BraveNewTalent aims to change the face of the talent and education market. The opportunity to create change in the way we develop, assess and match Talent is now here. If one looks at the problem of the Skills Gap one can make a simple observation: those with developed skills are largely in employment but often there is a skills and interest mismatch. Those without developed skills are largely underemployed and sometimes unemployed. Through social media existing employees have the power to bridge the Skills Gap by participating in a peer-to-peer skills exchange community.

The BraveNewTalent model proposes the Community to be the hub of all online interactions around the knowledge, skills and employment exchange. When you look at the driving demand for skills in the world you would see that it is largely the private sector. If employers had a new way to use their own resources (their employees) to develop the skills of their future workforce in an efficient way we would have a new approach to the problem. Employers have the brand gravitas to attract Talent into their community. Their employees have the skills necessary to develop Talent within the Community. This is a symbiotic relationship.

Employers will be able to distribute training and development content to their community to form a virtual school in the cloud. The model of opening up learning and development content to the community is a very powerful way for BraveNewTalent users to access world-class knowledge. In turn, the employers benefit by building their employment brand and access to Talent as well as the ability to use the response to the training content as a way to make better informed hiring decisions. The pace of adoption of employer driven, employee delivered virtual schools is expected to be extremely fast to achieve critical mass as they impact so many aspects of the business positively by creating value – the areas include recruitment, Talent Management, internal learning and development, employer brand, CSR/Social responsibility, innovation, etc. BraveNewTalent hereby facilitates the creation of employer driven virtual schools that unlock internal knowledge and skills to a global audience.

Our Investors

BraveNewTalent is well funded by some of the UK’s leading Angel investors as well as VC fund Northzone. We are growing the business rapidly and attempting to make a global impact around this very important problem.

The BraveNewTalent Culture

BraveNewTalent is on a mission – we want to make history as a company. We are expanding rapidly but do not want people looking for a job but people with great ambition and passion looking to make an impact. We work hard and play hard. We want to bring the Silicon Valley culture to London where our developers are artists. We aim to completely change the game by helping to solve one of the world’s largest problems.Our environment is a one of fast learning, collaborative team work, high energy, passion, limitless ambition, sound integrity, strong values, good communication, autonomy, pushing the envelope, team focus, independent thinking, constant innovation, taking responsibility (being the solution), iterative development, diversity of culture and thought, commitment to the cause, active involvement and fun – loads of it…