2012 May
Pathbrite Campus Ambassadors
On 21, May 2012 | One Comment | In Uncategorized | By Janette Phan
We are so excited to introduce our Pathbrite Campus Ambassador program this Summer. It’s the perfect chance to start getting students involved in their campus communities. This is a great opportunity to gain valuable experience and knowledge you can share with your fellow classmates on your college campus to help them land the job of their dreams. Brainstorm, organize, and implement marketing and brand awareness strategies focused around Pathbrite Portfolios.
If you think you’ve got what it takes to represent Pathbrite on your campus, be sure to check out www.pathbrite.com/ambassadors for more details. In order to apply you must create a Pathbrite Portfolio that showcases the skills that make you the perfect candidate. It can include your resume, examples of your writing, travel experience, community service or any video, photos or audio of your skills and achievements.. Get creative and be sure to include these categories: Leadership, Written/Oral Communication, Strategic Thinking, Work Experience. If you’re unsure about how to utilize categories, here are some screenshots to better illustrate how to organize your artifacts.
Become the advocate on your college campus that can show how Pathbrite can help curate the artifacts of a lifetime of achievements.
Welcome to the Era of the Knowledge Graph
On 16, May 2012 | No Comments | In Knowledge Graph | By Derek Gordon
This is cross-posted from my personal blog, Daily Casserole:
Welcome to the era of the Knowledge Graph.
You’ve heard of the Social Graph, which was invented and popularized by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Simply put, it has been described as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related”. In fact, much of the value that potential investors see in Facebook as it approaches its much-anticipated IPO later this week is in the data the company sits on — which is an accumulation of information that users add to the service (photos, videos, links, etc.) together with the relationships between individual Facebook users and what they share.
A Knowledge Graph, then, is an aggregate view into what any system or social structure knows about any given topic or idea. As more and more information is assembled — in the Google database, for instance — it is possible to see relationships between individual pieces of information and to connect dots to assemble all the knowledge available on a given topic into a single view.
To this end, Google introduced a new approach to the way it handles search today and they’re calling it a Knowledge Graph. They’re hoping it will change the way people use search moving forward. To do this, Google is using both its own database and other sources like Wikipedia, the World CIA Factbook, Google Freebase, Google Books, online event listings and other data it crawls, as well as some undisclosed commercial datasets. Take a look at the example to the left, which is a Knowledge Graph-powered result for a search for Frank Lloyd Wright. You not only get biographical data from Wikipedia in neat little summary, you also get a collection of Google Images and a nice feature showing what other people searched for that might be related to your own search query.
While Google is not the first to coin the term, they are certainly the biggest and most prominent brand to embrace the idea of a Knowledge Graph. Says Google:
…we’re building aKnowledge Graph: a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they’re connected to one another.
This is how we’ll be able to tell if your search for “mercury” refers to the planet or the chemical element–and also how we can get you smarter answers to jump start your discovery.
Like every innovation at Google, their intent is not only to get their users better and more accurate information, but to then better target advertising around your search results. They genuinely want to make people smarter or better informed, but they also want to provide improved opportunities highly accurate ad delivery.
Google’s point of view on the knowledge graph, however, is about relationships between pieces of information (what they term “knowledge”) and how those relationships can be instantly exploited to present search results that are smarter and more comprehensive than ever before. Here’s a video describing the new effort and the ways they’re innovating around the idea of a knowledge graph:
But this is just one take one what a knowledge graph can be.
At Pathbrite we’ve introduced a different take on the knowledge graph, which has more to do with what actual people know and have accomplished in their own lives:
We help students – and learners of all ages – collect, track and showcase a lifetime of learning and achievement, and then recommends pathways for continuous success. We do this by documenting, analyzing and mapping personal achievement of all kinds against an individual’s goals and those of their peers – which is Pathbrite’s version of a Knowledge Graph. Students use Pathbrite Portfolios and their performance relative to a wider Knowledge Graph to close skills or achievement gaps, and to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
While our company is early-stage and our product still in Beta, the hope is that Portfolios and a wider Knowledge Graph will help students and others get into their preferred schools or land the jobs of their dreams. School admissions officers and employers are beginning to use the Pathbrite Platform to get a holistic view of candidates, and to better evaluate their readiness for and organizational fit to any given opportunity at hand. Long-term, the hope is that any entity — organizational, corporate or governmental — can get an accurate view into what any cohort might know and jobs they’re prepared to do thanks to the Pathbrite Knowledge Graph. Here’s a video describing Pathbrite’s take on Portfolios and their Knowledge Graph:
It’s so great that Google has introduced its own take on the Knowledge Graph, because it elevates awareness of the power of knowledge when aggregated, analyzed and shared on a global scale. It also highlights the next frontier in knowledge management and self promotion, which Pathbrite plans on leading.
The Struggle to Start a Career Right Out of College
On 15, May 2012 | No Comments | In Careers | By Derek Gordon
A lot is being written about the extraordinary costs of attending a four-year university and the exploding student loan debt our youth are saddled with as they emerge from college. A pernicious companion problem is the lack of good jobs for those entering the workforce clutching a new college diploma.
According to a New York Times analysis:
With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. Now nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.
A recent post from Andrew Sullivan’s blog on the Daily Beast highlights the twin challenges:
A new Rutgers University survey (pdf) found that just half of those who graduated between 2006 and 2011 are working full time:
That’s bad enough, but when you look at just those people who have graduated since 2009, it gets even worse. Fewer than half of them found a job within a year of graduating; whereas 73 percent of those who graduated between 2006 and 2008 found jobs in the first year. Kids who graduated after 2009 are three times more likely to not have a fulltime job than the kids who finished between 2006 and 2008.
Those who are working aren’t making much:
Employed, post-2009 graduates also have an average starting salary of $27,000, $3,000 less than the average starting salary for the classes of 2006 and 2007; experts estimate that given the fragile state of the post-2009 economy, these wages are likely to stay depressed for the next 10 or 15 years.
Nathaniel Beck compares job prospects across majors.
Today’s graduating seniors not only need a good job because it’s important for them to begin their careers, but because they’ve got to service an extraordinary level of debt. Without a good paycheck, too many students are deferring or outright defaulting on student loans. At $1 trillion in cumulative student debt and counting, it’s in everyone’s best interest that we help graduates find careers after leaving college. There are jobs for graduates, but too often the opportunities don’t find a match either because of geographic issues, a skills gap, or a failure by a graduate to communicate their abilities well.
These problems are why today’s graduates must go beyond a 1-dimensional resume or personal timeline to present themselves in 3-D — in a way that helps them to differentiate themselves and to stand our from the crowd. Pathbrite is on a mission to ensure that students are able to match their skills and abilities to available opportunities, wherever they may find them. Increasingly, young people are using our Portfolios to put their best foot forward and to highlight all the ways in which they may be qualified for a career — from videos to photos, resumes to recommendations or work product to volunteer projects, graduates are telling their own story better using Pathbrite.
Join Pathbrite at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012
On 14, May 2012 | No Comments | In Company News | By Derek Gordon
Pathbrite is proud to have been invited to participate in the the new Make Education Pavilion at this year’s Maker Faire 2012 Bay Area. The new Pavilion is organized around the theme of “The New School” and is expressly for kids, their families, and their teachers. You can find us in the Sequoia Pavilion of the San Mateo Event Center (map at left).
The team from Pathbrite will be teaching kids about the importance of documenting a lifetime of experiences, learning, and achievement by encouraging them to collect artifacts from their day at Maker using available tools such as smart phones or digital cameras. As artifacts are created — including photos, videos, audio files, PDFs and any other sort of digital breadcrumb — they can be emailed in real time to Pathbrite. We’ll curate all those artifacts and publish them in a Maker Experience Portfolio for everyone to see. Students, their teachers and their families can also elect to create personal portfolios as a way to remember their day at the Maker Faire and to experience the value of curation and publishing to tell a story.
Participants can email the artifacts they create from their day at Maker Faire to: maker@pathbrite.com
