Four years into bringing its unique model to workforce development and education, Greenville-based Skillsgapp is taking yet another leap forward.
Skillsgapp was founded in 2020 by CEO Tina Zwolinski and Chief Marketing Officer Cynthia Jenkins. It created the award-winning Skillionaire Games, designed to connect career pathways to today’s hyper-connected, tech-savvy population.
“‘Skills gap’ is something you hear all the time,” Zwolinski said.
In that term, which is defined as the gap between an employee’s skills and those needed to be successful in a job, lay the company’s mission, Jenkins said.
“We connect youth to life-changing careers through game-changing play,” she said.
A recent promotion through South Carolina ETV for National Surgical Technologists Week offered South Carolina residents a chance to “scrub in and win,” by playing “Healing Agent,” where players created avatars and proceeded to try on different in-demand health care jobs in South Carolina.
“We’re beginning to feed information to players during game play,” Jenkins said. “For example, a player enters the virtual room as a surgical technician, and the game informs them that a surgical tech in South Carolina makes about $60,000 a year, and that Greenville Technical College has a surgical technician program, and that Prisma Health hires for the role all the time.”
Jenkins said the entire experience uses the Proteus effect, a psychological phenomenon that happens when people adopt an avatar’s personality traits or characteristics.
“The games are becoming more dynamic,” Jenkins said. “They’re no longer just about play. They’re becoming more and more experiential by allowing youth to try on different experiences that they might not get in real life. This is especially critical in under-resourced communities.”
Using AI to enhance gaming experiences
Through funding made available by the National Science Foundation, Skillsgapp is also beginning to use generative artificial intelligence to enhance gaming experiences both for players and potential employers.
“What that’s going to do is educate and guide players toward local career paths based on a player’s in-game performance, their location and their personal preferences,” Jenkins said. “The idea is to move players from career discovery to taking action.”
The enhancement is being tested in South Carolina, where it can scale to meet the needs of the state’s 400,000-plus students.
“This is by no means a curriculum-based career-training module, but we’re also finding that we don’t have to ‘hide the broccoli’ about many of these careers,” Jenkins said, “because players are actively learning potential career paths, which makes a real-life, contextual connection.”
Skillsgapp also now offers potential employers visibility to the players as a bias-free recruiting tool. It also offers an expanded suite of games through the Skillionaire Games that are focused on cybersecurity, health care, life sciences and advanced manufacturing, plus durable soft skills such as communication, teamwork, problem solving and punctuality.
“We can close that skills gap, and help employers reduce churn,” Zwolinksi said. “And we remove bias in the process, which is one of our key goals.”
Read the full article on UBJ.