(Excerpt from EduGrowth newsletter, February 2017)
Gordon Scott – Founder and Managing Director of Successful Graduate Pty Ltd
What was the catalyst for starting www.successfulgraduate.com?
Having been engaged in the education industry for so long, I can see an increasing number of young people seeking post secondary education. But I don’t see enough students walking off campus who understand the job application process or who are even able to write a job application. I also see growing disillusionment in students when it comes to securing graduate or part-time employment (while studying) and have realised that someone needs to help them bridge the gap between studying and the workplace.
Most large education providers have careers services teams but their students often don’t access these services while studying – and once they are off campus it is often too late or too difficult to take advantage of these services. These particular students have stepped out into a highly competitive workforce without support about how to apply for a job or plan for their career. When students do use on-campus career services there is often a ratio of no more than 10 staff members to 10,000 students. This ratio means not every student is able to take advantage of the service.
Successful Graduate is our solution, the world’s first comprehensive online student career preparation and employability training resource. Currently 4 months into production, Successful Graduate is an eCommerce site that can be accessed directly by students or through license agreements with education providers, allowing them to scale up their reach to students and significantly improve graduate employability outcomes. These employability outcomes in turn help the institution to recruit students who are attracted by positive employability statistics.
What are your tips to other EduGrowth startups for success?
- Have a clearly defined value proposition
- Test that proposition with target markets
- Minimise overheads and concentrate on cashflow
- Embrace the concept of failure, structure yourself to learn from the market’s feedback
- Ensure you have heaps of resilience. You can learn that skill!
- Persistence
What’s next for Successful Graduate?
While continuing to sell in Australia, we are exploring international markets including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, USA and the UK. The website is currently being translated into Indonesian. Now that most of the hard work is done on delivering the platform we are exploring how to use it to provide other resources, such as developing training tools for Malaysian education providers and partners, and additional resources that will assist particular student cohorts in various markets. We are seeking agents for our products offshore and have sought the support of AUSTRADE and the Queensland Government in a number of markets to assist us with this next stage in our journey.
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