Edtech Startup, Grdient, Providing Students With Immediate Employability Skills

SINGAPORE - March 6, 2017 - PRLog -- Grdient is an EdTech startup founded to address the gap between graduating students and their immediate employability success. It continues to outshine competition as the go-to place for students intent on learning the skills they need to make a sustainable career possible in Singapore.

Founded in June 2016, Grdient has worked to tackle the education gap head on by offering its services to complement the current education system in Singapore. Presently, the startup offers personalized mentorships and career coaching on top of soft skills such as interview as well as problem-solving skills. Grdient then conducts all of these skillsets in the forms of boot camps and immersive programmes. Once the participants have graduated from this programme, Grdient will pair them up with other up and rising startups around Singapore to provide them with real internship experiences.

"Securing a good job out of school today is no longer just about obtaining a degree certificate," said Jonathan Chua, co-founder of Grdient. "At the rate in which unemployment is rising today, it is evident that much more needs to be acquired by students to be lucrative hires. A large percentage of this unemployment is university graduates, which indicates a trend we are here to remediate."

A recent report released by The Straits Times found that the unemployment rate rose from 3.5 per cent in 2015 to 4.3 per cent in June 2016, one of the highest numbers Singapore has seen since the financial crisis in 2008. A major issue contributing to these numbers is that educational systems focus primarily on academics and international exams, but not the practical skills required to excel in today's jobs.

"There is a dire need to shift and restructure how our education system approaches employability," said Jonathan Chua. "The nature of our job market is constantly changing, which is why our education system needs to change with it."

Students who have signed up for the Grdient immersive programme will spend two weeks in an interactive classroom setting before going for internships at various startups for 10 to 12 weeks. These programmes are organized to provide students with relevant work experiences according to their preferences and strengths. Grdient's hands-on model will help students to snag their dream jobs based on their experiences and knowledge of the highly innovative and entrepreneurial world of startups.

Presently, Grdient has an expanding team of mentors and consultants to link up personally with the students, as well as partnerships with 19 startups around Asia and counting. Some of the startups include Carousell, ShopBack, Ninjavan, Honestbee, and Zilingo.

Additionally, Grdient recently launched an interactive online portal, GrdientHQ, which aids in networking for the startup community, from the greenhorns to the established startup founders. The platform also provides online courses which were developed to enrich its users with relevant skills such as Design Thinking. GrdientHQ is helmed by community managers whose task is to share these resources and link users with experienced mentors to guide them.

GrdientHQ also enables users to take on message boards to discuss topics of interest about academics or career paths, and also create threads about entrepreneurship skills.

"We want to build a university of the future that will provide students with skills that are highly sought after and also increase their chances for employability," said Jonathan Chua.

For more information, visit: http://grdient.com/.

For more information on GrdientHQ, visit: https://app.grdient.com/.