If you have been following Project:IDWIL for a while, then you may know some of this already. If, however, you are new to what this is all about or just need to understand how things have evolved, then I'd love to take a minute to explain some bigger picture stuff.
Recently, I had the fortune to display and present Project:IDWIL at a recent entrepreneurial Expo here in St. Louis. It was great networking and exposure, but best of all it was a chance to condense the most important parts of the IDWIL vision. Any time that you have a project, idea, concept, etc. that you are very excited about, you can talk about it for hours – even days. But when you are trying to gather new interest and maybe even people that could eventually join your team or invest in your potential business, you need to be concise with your message and have some basic questions accounted for.
In this first of three parts, I will cover the "Define" aspect of Project:IDWIL. At this stage, this is probably the least-developed portion of the whole, but it is also the most important aspect when it comes to making the vision unique and valuable to the greatest number of people. Without going into too much detail on the other parts of "Mine" and "Align," we do need to take a look at how this all fits together. The "Mine" aspect is what you will find today on the website – the catalog of videos. This is the content, and this is the aspect that is easiest to build during these beginning stages. But the content alone will not be enough to differentiate Project:IDWIL from other career education sites and tools. This is where it starts to get fun! I am working with a software developer as well as three PhD's in Organizational Leadership to develop software that will allow IDWIL viewers/users to assess their own values and behavioral traits. This is different than many assessment tests in that we are now measuring some of the "softer skills" that we all possess as individuals as opposed to harder skills and aptitudes – so the things we are passionate about as opposed to the things that we are good at. These types of tests exist, however this proprietary software will be tied directly to the IDWIL catalog of videos. The result of this combination is the "Align" aspect of the three-part workflow.
For users, this "Define" aspect allows a refined search tool to find the IDWIL videos that will most likely resonate with them. For investors, this proprietary software-to-content connection gives Project:IDWIL some differentiating factors that could be attractive as it will begins to grow. This workflow allows the community to grow due to the continual efforts to measure successes in matching users with the right videos (compatibility) as well as the system's confidence in how well that compatibility aspect is performing.
These are very exciting times as Project:IDWIL is growing...evolving from a "neat collection of videos that could help kids find the jobs that are right for them" to an experiential community resource that has the ability to continuously improve its functions. That is just a nerdy way of saying that Project:IDWIL is on its way to become an experience instead of just a website.
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