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FORNY20-FORNY2020

STUD: Cocreate Careers- Building a digital platform to strengthen students level of experience by connecting them with businesses & inst.

Alternative title: Cocreate Careers: utvikling av en digital plattform for å styrke studenters erfaringsgrunnlag ved å koble dem til bedrifter og skoler

Awarded: NOK 1.00 mill.

Cocreate Careers aims to connect small and mid-sized businesses, educational institutions and students seamlessly together, so that they can co-create the experience needed among future graduates. Cocreate Careers serves as a digital platform for production and work on small-scale projects for this purpose. Recruitment of new graduates in Norway involves a large group who end up between two chairs, and often for too long - which comes with a number of socio-economic and individual challenges that we believe we can help reduce. Uncertainty in recruitment of new graduates due to the cost of wrongful employment and potential maladaptation in the first job creates an eco-environment that creates obstacles for early entering jobs after completing Co-creation may help to counteract this matter - by involving the necessary actors needed to create positive development for the problem (educators from the universities, companies and a bunch of students. We believe in the possibility to create value from small projects, where students get build practical skill-sets from their theoretical learning and knowledge in their fields. We aim to offer students a chance to build a robust experience portfolio based on real-time challenges, documented and signed by business leaders themselves. The funding from STUD-ENT FORNY supports us building the prototype for further insights derived from a number of exciting SMEs, schools and students through pilot testing.

CCC tested small projects with design students through a case-study week. We have connected various companies on the platform and our findings indicate that we need to build each project with stronger incentives (e.g. opportunities of internships, paid part-time work after each project deliverable) to make Norwegian students motivated to follow through. We did as well realize that the platform must be tested on a higher level at the universities: our approach has been to make contact with uni teachers, responsible on lower levels (subject) and arrange relevant projects to the subject. Our learnings have therefore been that we need to communicate on a higher level at the university to build an organized structure with the universities to connect CCCs platform to several subjects. We have also seen other needs from the SME perspective to find potential students for internship jobs, where arguments includes 1) valuable resources (time) are used for the company to expose themselves at universities to attract students and 2) the alternative cost could be lower if actors such as Cocreate Careers could supply them in finding appropriate students to participate in internships. However, this particular finding / insight is something we will follow up on later this year to assess further.

Funding scheme:

FORNY20-FORNY2020