YouRock is an employability skills tool for young people, that will help young people to recognise their latent business skills. It is fundraising for a Hackathon to build its prototype on http://crowdfunder.co.uk/YouRock There is a significant challenge with youth unemployment in the EU. 94% of young people are online daily, and yet they often do not use online tools to become more employable or see ICT and science as a route to potential employment despite there being a skills shortage in this area. There are numerous challenges for young people in the early years of their careers, and there is a gap in the online career services, networks and advice provided for them. Young people avoid LinkedIn, the largest career networking site, with only 17% of under 25s in the US having a profile, citing that a lack of employment history would look weak on their profile. YouRock is a new employability platform for young people across Europe that will fill this gap. It will encourage them to use their existing online content creation activities as evidence of their latent skills and aptitudes. It will involve teachers and tutors in endorsing these skills to help develop a richer career networking profile for them. It will allow them to bridge the gap while they build a career history. YouRock specifically intends to help young people to become more employable, and motivate them to see technology not only as intrinsic to their employability, but also as a potential career opportunity.

1. Youth Employability

2. YouRock
 An employability network for under 24s in Europe
 Fill gap left by LinkedIn - only 17% of under 24s have a profile
 Helps young people to recognize latent business skills
 Also helps youth to see technology as career option
 Crowd-funding for a Hackathon in November
 www.crowdfunder.co.uk/YouRock
 Hackathon develops prototype, full service in 2014

3. Young people and LinkedIn
 “LinkedIn is not forgiving.
This issue goes so deep I
wouldn’t even know
where to start.” Lydia M.
 “Starting out on LinkedIn
with a blank slate can be
quite daunting.” David
Johnson
 “If LinkedIn was a 20 year
old college student who
wasn’t the best in
anything, it wouldn’t want
to join itself.” Kevin Jordan
Further Information
Young People Hate LinkedIn LinkedIn doesn’t matter to
the people who need it most
Why aren’t more college students on LinkedIn

4. Evidence of gap
 LinkedIn, the largest
employment-focused online
network is predominantly
excluding young people.
 Only around 17% of under 25s in
the US have a LinkedIn
account. (Google, 2012).
 The average age of a LinkedIn
user is 44
 Young people under 24 form
only around 5% of its members
(under 18s only 2%)(Pingdom,
2012, graphic right).

5. Aims of YouRock
 It aims to encourage young people to create an online public
aspiration profile for themselves, a personal statement of their
career hopes.
 It will encourage them to use their online content creation
activities as evidence of their skills and aptitude. It will give their
online ‘social’ activities an employability purpose.
 A final aim of YouRock is to encourage young people to see the
technology industry as a potential career path.

6. YouRock and Education
 YouRock will recognize that young
people create a wealth of online
content and that they don’t have
an employment history.
 It will allow them to champion the
things they love to do. It will ask
them to aspire, to contribute
content and to build a profile that
will be rich and can be endorsed
by teachers and tutors.
 YouRock will require a new
understanding from the education
sector that it has a role in endorsing
young people after their
education.

7. The YouRock audience
 Aged 15-24, male and female, European
 Employed, unemployed, or in full time education
 Have little or no workplace experience or career profile
 Have little or no interest in ICT as a career
 Use desktop and/or mobile technology regularly
 Likely to have range of social media profiles, but not LinkedIn
 Seeking to structure their extra-curricular activities

8. Audience motivation
The mission of YouRock is to ensure that young people
have direction and opportunity in their lives, that they are
not disadvantaged by their age or experience, that they
have the tools to empower themselves, and that they see
technology as an opportunity.
 Improved employability chances
 Improved self-recognition of existing skills
 Increased confidence
 Economic and career development

9. Targeting
 YouRock is ambitious and aims to reach 500,000
young people by the end of its first year, more than 1
million by the end of its second year.
 It will target and operate in 11 countries with high
levels of youth unemployment across and beyond
Europe in its first year.
 Countries targeted in the first year are:
Spain, Italy, France, UK, Poland, Germany, Greece, Ro
mania, Portugal, Ireland and Russia.

10. Audience engagement
 Campaigns: e.g. Get
Online Week, eSkills
week, EU Youth week
 Word of
mouth/recommendation:
at registration, and at
profile ‘completion’
 Partners and stakeholders:
Education, jobs and
careers, youth and
student, and technology
 Social media and PR

11. Engaging with Stakeholders
 Individuals – to engage with its community and potential developers
 Policy/Government – to drive departmental engagement, political
awareness raising, and link to campaigns
 Education – to engage with teacher/ tutors to encourage the culture of
endorsement
 Industry and Media – to raise awareness of it in corporate recruitment
processes, exploit the capacity of industry to reach young people, and
the media for the general population
 NGOs – to raise awareness of YouRock as a service that could be
utilised in their work
 National Organisations – a partner in each of the target countries to act
as local liaison

12. YouRock - a user profile
 Personal aspiration – endorsable by tutors/teachers
 Latent business skills – endorsable by tutors/teachers (see
next slide)
 ICT skills – encouraging blogs, social media
collections, online activity (see next slide)
 Achievements – endorsable by tutors/teachers/project
team members
 Ongoing projects – with links to evidence/videos/ projects
 YouRock rating – by teachers/ tutors/ team/ employers

13. YouRock USP - recognizing
Latent Business Skills

14. Finances
 YouRock will have a low cost initial development phase
resourced through a volunteer hackathon and crowd-funding.
 Visit www.crowdfunder.co.uk/YouRock to contribute
 It is being established in the UK as a LTD company, operating
across Europe.
 It will seek corporate investment, sponsorship and venture capital.
 YouRock aims to be financially sustainable within three years.

15. Operational plan to launch
 Summer 2013: organizational establishment, secure
crowdfund target, planning, stakeholder awareness
 Autumn: System specification, ongoing financial
investment, Hackathon
 Winter: Prototype launch, team development, country
engagement, translations, system development
 Spring 2014: campaign engagement, service launch.

16. Further Information
Ian Clifford
 Email: ian@ianclifford.co.uk
 Twitter: http://twitter.com/ian_cli
 Phone: +44 (0)7411 118667
 http://be.linkedin.com/in/ihclifford
www.crowdfunder.co.uk/YouRock