Today we presented Savvy Up during the 5-minute pitch session at the Education Technology (EdTech) conference in Albany - here you can see us doing our presentation! We really enjoyed it and got some good feedback.

We discussed the challenges facing young people and employers today - the gap between the youth experience and what employers want (they don't have those features yet). This has also been exacerbated by generational factors - so it's much harder for young people to get that crucial first job experience which teaches them basic workplace skills such as being on time to work.

A great quote from one of today's speakers (I can't remember who, sorry!): "Soft skills are hard skills." In our experience, this is true.

Tertiary educators: You can help by introducing workplace skills earlier on in the qualification. We'll work with you to train your students and get them ready for the workplace.

Employers: You can help by creating a paid internship or entry-level job for a young person. We'll make it easy for you to hire them by doing the heavy lifting of training them in the basic skills, through the Workplace Expectations programme.

Everyone: You can help by hiring a young person in your neighbourhood for small tasks to help them get some first job experience.

We'll talk about this more in detail at a later date.

Thanks to Abhisek Kala for the photo, and to everyone who gave us feedback or helped us prepare our pitch. We're really grateful.