OK, we have some folks joining in. Thank you for letting them in, Toya. Thank you for those of you who joined so far. We're gonna give people another minute or two because I'm seeing lots of names and faces joining in.

For those of you who — there are some familiar names and faces! It's good to see you. Dana, there may be some familiar names and faces to you too.

Absolutely. It's exciting. Hi, everyone. All right. Hello. Hello.

But since we are at 2:01pm and because this is being recorded, we can probably get started, Dana. We've got lots of good information to get through and get into. So I'm going to get the conversation rolling today.

Today we're gonna be talking about some programming that we are both excited to be sharing. It's conversations, that we've been having together in our organizations and then with industry now for months, and it's coming to a place where it's becoming real, both in the opportunity to have direct program set up with institutions, but also the funding conversations that we're having to bring this to life.

So excited to dive into it and we'll do a quick set of introductions, because there are familiar faces in the room to me and so some of you I know which is wonderful — and then some of you are new.

So by way of introduction, Dana, if you don't mind, I'll go first and I — They put me on the left! So how could I not really? We read left-to-right! But to everyone who I've not met before: Hello, welcome.

My name is Greg and I appreciate you making time to be with us this afternoon. I've been with the Uvaro team for over 3.5 years at this point. And I'm responsible for all the work that we do as a business to find great partners and collaborators like Riipen and develop programs, and get them stood up, and then also responsible to ensure that those programs that we launch are successful.

And I'll say a quick interesting fact about me is the last 12 years of my life have been in organizations dedicated to some form of education, in either edutech or an education company, like we are here at Uvaro. And Dana — friend and co-host for today.

Well, well, thanks Greg. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Thank you Greg and to the Uvaro team, Toya, for hosting me. For those—great to see some familiar faces, excited for the conversation today. And that's exactly what it's gonna be, right Greg, a conversation. We've been having many conversations as you pointed out to get to this point. So it's super exciting to see where we are.

My name is Dana Stephenson. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Riipen. At Riipen for those who don't know, we are incredibly passionate about learning by doing. We believe in the the combination — by combining skill development and experience, we can set up programs to really set the learners and workers who are participating up for the most success, post graduation.

Primarily, most of our work is we partner with post-secondary institutions. And we really work to embed industry-sponsored projects into the curriculum where students can get experience, professional connections, find the jobs they love. But ever more, increasingly, we are doing more and more work in the workforce development space. So really augmenting workforce development programs with the opportunity to take what you're learning in a training program and often a much more short-cycle, shorter duration training program where individuals are getting the education, the training, the skill development, taking what they're learning and they're applying it in a real world setting and getting the experience, then they're getting right back to the workforce.

And so super excited to be having this conversation today, we've been, as I mentioned earlier, we been doing a lot of conversation about how to design, if we could have a magic wand, how would we would design the best possible combination of training and experience and skills development to really set learners and workers up for success in the future of work. So thanks for having me.

This would not even be a conversation without Riipen and the collaboration that we've had. And so it's thrilling to now unveil some of that. So I would just want to give a quick sense for everyone here of what we're going to use the time for.

You see, yes, on the page, the word 'pitch.' So please don't walk away for the next 15 minutes. Yes, it is a pitch. We want to pitch to you a concept and some of you have heard versions of this in the past months, but it is a concept that is about the best way to develop and deliver workforce development programs in our opinion and belief. This isn't a thing that you need to buy from Uvaro and from Riipen, it's a thing that we need to collaborate with you to execute.

So we're going to pitch a concept and then we have some questions that have already come in that we'll be discussing. So Dana and I will be fielding, in the form of conversation. And then if time permits we'll go into an example, but would welcome, as we get into the discussion, the questions that you might have about what this concept is and how it would work. I would invite those questions to come in as we go through this session today.

For those of you who have joined, who are not familiar with Google Hangouts, we'll do this one more time in the midpoint when we deliberately ask for your interaction. But at the outset, if you would all take a moment, if you've scrolled off of this screen, come back to the screen. Yes, you come back to the screen and take your cursor, navigate down to the bottom right corner of your screen, you'll see a triangle, a square and a circle shape. And if you're not familiar with Google... or Google Hangouts, this is where you can actually use — this is the place where you can interact with us throughout the course of the conversation today. So click on the triangle square and circle icon and then you can click on Q&A.

And in the introductions, we did not introduce the wonderful Toya Ribail who's here as part of the Uvaro team, who will be fielding some of those questions for us as we go through. So if you have questions or comments that you'd like to raise, we will collect those questions along the way and address them in that open Q&A, and we'll do this again one more time at the midpoint to make sure you're familiar with how to use it.

For those who are late to the party, please take note of that and again, there will be an opportunity to interact very shortly, but let's dive in and talk a little bit about what workforce development 2.0 is. And as I've already alluded to — excuse me — as I already alluded to, this is a pitch. Absolutely we want to outline the concept, but it is for and with institutions that this pitch can come to life.

So why we believe this is something you're gonna want to dedicate the next 52 minutes of your life to is that, if you're interested in moving from cost recovery to revenue generation in your continuing education department? This is a program that's designed to help you to do that. We wanna look for opportunities to help generate revenue for institutions.

Secondly, what we're proposing is as turnkey as turnkey can be. There's always some nuances to turnkey, but as turnkey as could be for institutions to stand this up, and we've designed it in such a way that this program does not introduce new operational costs.

And finally, this concept, the program that we're bringing forward could be bolted on to the existing set of programming you have, allow institutions to add new services to programming that you have, and we can evolve into different iterations of this program over time with success. So that's the reason why we believe it is worth now the 51 minutes of your time to be with us today. Let's get into it.

So, the big picture and what led us to start this conversation is the observations that we've been seeing in media, and was made acute in some of the comments made by the Bank of Canada earlier in the year about the state of Canadian productivity. There are challenges in Canada's rankings in terms of how our workforce is performing relative to our peers. And this is a quote from the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, Carolyn Rogers, saying "it's time to break the glass."

Certainly we have productivity challenges. They laid up three different concepts or paths to improving Canadian workforce productivity, which are listed there. This program concept addresses this notion of labor composition. That is something we want to take aim at — is helping workers to improve their skills with better training and helping organizations use the capital and the labor that they have in a more efficient manner by providing skills that are needed to the workforce that we have in place today.

So we see this program as taking aim at a critical challenge that's been put forward in the Canadian economy and by officials in the Canadian government.

Greg, I'd love to jump in there a little bit on that, on that slide as well. And I think, you know, one of the things we've been talking about a lot is, you know, Canada has been making huge investments in labor composition and in training as you've mentioned. But, in R&D and intellectual property — which is absolutely fantastic — But I think we are all realizing as we make these big, huge bets in these key sectors, in these new and upcoming technologies, if we don't have the workforce with the right skills to commercialize these tools, and we don't have the workforce with the right skills to use these tools, then we're just gonna end up with a huge missed opportunity.

So, you know, the flip side of that is obviously, if we can build that workforce, we can have a super amplifying effect and make some, you know, some huge improvements in productivity here in Canada. So super excited here.

Absolutely and agreed, I think that we've been seeing this in the conversations with funders as well, that this isn't an unknown issue, to your point. The budget this past year sets aside billions of dollars — or hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases — but billions over years, [for] artificial intelligence and getting to a net-zero carbon economy. These are the investments we need to make in equipping our workforce to be ready to compete and have the Canadian economy ready to compete on a world stage. And so you have different funding bodies getting set up through ESDC or ISED to fund new programs that are aimed at addressing some of these challenges. Now, we know some of those partners are in the room with us now. So hello to some of you who may be here and joining for the conversation and who have been with us along the way.

But this isn't new information to them and to many of you who are in continuing education departments, maybe this is, "oh okay, we've been hearing about this too."

Our position on this, however, is that a lot of the programming that has been set up from a workforce development perspective has been intended to develop skills and help people to secure new roles and help people to advance in their careers. But the investments typically flow to organizations that provide training and they get measured on training or training completion.

And we think that's not good enough and we know that the government is seeing that that's not good enough because that's what we are hearing and understand, are modifying how future programs are going to be assessed, how your funding, how our funding will be assessed in future is not on the completion of training, and how many people did you put through your programs? But will be assessed on: Did people get jobs? Did they keep those jobs? Did we grow the Canadian economy? And fundamentally, we believe that many of the programs, and we see that many of the programs that have been set up have not been successful.

And it's not because institutions in higher education or training organizations are doing a bad jobs or have been looking at things the wrong way. It's that the supports and the way we've approached workforce development and the design of those programs fundamentally hasn't been correct.

We want to talk about how a different program and a different approach can address this challenge. I'd love to turn over to you, Dana, to talk a little bit about where we're coming from and where we see this moving to.

Awesome, thank you. So we've given us quite a bit of thought and as Greg mentioned, as we think about the role that training can play and workforce development can play to help individuals develop skills, to secure new jobs, to advance in their careers, to get promoted, to stay relevant, to avoid being at risk of displacement through new technologies and innovation, new automation.

And to, of course, better meet the talent needs of employers in our ever-evolving ecosystem.

We spent a lot of time looking at what was out there and trying to really identify and kind of categorize what we've seen in the ecosystem here in Canada, the workforce development space. Actually, you know, we both also work beyond Canada. So we do a lot of work with our neighbors down south and around the world. And so, we've been looking at what we think is working really well, what's not working so well.

I think what this has really led us to is basically these two buckets, one of those buckets, we call the "in and out" bucket. Obviously not to be confused with our favorite burger joints down in California.

This program design you know, as the name suggests, really is sort of more on a "one and done" training. You know, it's very short window training. Often this is very intensive training. It's very much focused on the technical skills that are being developed. Often this can be, you know, 2 to to 16 weeks. But because of the duration of the training, because it's so short, obviously, the intensity is very high. Sometimes that has a lot of difficulty in what we're talking about earlier: The work of the greater learning — obviously, Riipen's major focus and what we think is a huge priority for these new programs, up and coming programs. So there's really, you know, there's limited opportunity for real world application for teachable errors of actually taking what you're learning and applying in a real world setting. And learning from the experience, reflecting on that experience. The career services support is often limited. And it's typically offered really just at the end, really often just mostly part of the resume- and interview-preparing process. And so, you know, as the name suggests in and out you go. Good luck.

Long-tail program design, as we like to call it, and as the name suggests, it really accepts that the individuals, the learners and workers who will be participating in these programs, will often need an extended support window alongside their training for really upwards of 12 months. And even beyond that, something that we really appreciate that Uvaro is doing as well. And so throughout the entire program, there will be, you know, there's just as much focus on the durable skills, the digital skills, as much as the technical skills training.

Everyone here, I'm sure, we're all very well well aware of how much employers are looking for that critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, creativity that comes with those durable skills that are transferable from role to role in your lifelong learning career. But also, we've realized now that employers are looking for individuals who are adept at adopting technology, new technologies as they come out, learning new technologies. You know, being able to adapt quickly.

This is the world that we live in today. So these durable and digital skills trainings are just as important as the technical skills training. And then of course, there is this opportunity in this longer tail type of program where you can take what you're learning and apply it in a real world setting, gain that experience, gain those professional connections, learn from that experience, reflect on that experience and then actually have that validated by the employers. It's an actual external validation of the learning that creates a really strong feedback loop for the training organizations, the partners who participate in this program. So you can continue to, to learn from the feedback, adapt the programming on the fly, continuously improve it, ensure that you're setting up your learners for the workforce and getting that feedback immediately from the employers who are not only participating, but will also be those who will be involved in hiring, involved in promoting individuals who they have sent to these programs, post program.

And then, of course, the career services is really just is a critical component that is baked into it from the beginning, really all the way through, throughout the work to create learning experiences, and even beyond.

So, super excited about these two different models or super excited about the trend of movement of what we're seeing out there today. And the best examples of moving from the in and out to the long tail model. I think it's important to mention here at this point that a lot of post-secondary institutions on the call here is that you know, where this model, we're gonna show a little bit more of a diagram, what this looks like in a second.

But what this model has really come from is the reality is post-secondary institutions have actually been doing this model for a very long time.

If you think about your traditional four year undergrad that has involved co-op that you know, Waterloo is so famous for here in Canada, for pioneering and, having students complete 3–4 co-ops throughout their education pathway. I mean, that's really what we're talking about. Take your education, you go into the real world, you apply, you get that experience, take that experience, you bring it back to the into the curriculum, into the classroom with your peers, share that learning and then rinse and repeat over and over again. So we're really excited about how we can take that model, and adapt it. We believe that it's time to adapt it to the workforce development space. Again, as I mentioned, key to driving the success, and this is the combination of skills development and experience.

You know, too often, I think the training programs we see out there focus on solving the skills gap, but that often just leaves behind an experience gap. As AI automation, new technologies continue advancing, taking on what we're seeing out there, taking on many of the lower level tasks for many individuals who would be — you know, those tasks they would normally be used to hone their skills in these roles, even if it's an intermediate role — turning into a new role, new application. This skills gap, this experience gap, is often starting to look like a chasm. So folks need the opportunity to take the learning, apply it, get that feedback immediately from the employer, reflect on that experience, and then bring that right back into the curriculum, lean on it, learn from it again and, bring it back up to the workforce again and again, and rinse and repeat.

We're gonna show you what that looks like, in a second, I think.

From the employer side, there's an enormous amount of research out there. We don't have to go very far to find it. The best way of really understanding if an individual is ready for a role — has the skills, the experience, is ready for the role — is not through an interview process; It's through direct application. And so this really offers employers to be involved in the programming, involved and providing feedback that helps design the programming in real time. But it's also, they're involved in really seeing learners put their skills to the test, learn what's working, what's not working. They really want to see how learners can overcome challenges in these real world applications. Because undoubtedly every one of these learners is going to realize very quickly that the real world application of these skills they're learning is isn't as cookie cutter as the training that they've been involved in has really made it out to be. That's just the way it is.

And so, we've got to give them that opportunity to make mistakes, learn from them in the real world with that experience and be able to use that to land employment. So that's really at the foundation of everything that we've built here today.

And I love so much, Dana, when we've had our conversations, that Uvaro in our history have been delivering educational programs, training, and providing skill development and valued the experience component. And our members did too. We tried to build it ourselves and we tried to figure out ways that we could create those experiences. And we're so excited when we found an organization that specialized in that. And I do think that putting the two together is so impactful. And especially given that the rich experience you have in higher ed, the credibility that brings to many people who are in the room as well is a big help. Appreciate it.

So bringing it back. So starting with this macro problem, we've kind of broken down some of the challenges and how we've tried this, has been how government and institutions that have been funded by government have tried to address the challenge.

We want to introduce this workforce development 2.0 program and the concept of it. And I'm gonna zip through the components of it fairly succinctly. And then as Dana said, show you what it looks like so you can get a sense for how that experience would go for individuals who would participate.

The workforce development 2.0 program doesn't last for 16 weeks or 12 weeks or however long your course is. It's a year long program. Individuals get access to supports for a full 12 month period of time. The offering includes this list of items here, paid work-integrated learning which Riipen brings to the table through the LevelUp program stipends that they can offer, that have been successfully offered, and has been a program that's been tremendously successful in supporting thousands of individuals across the country and getting paid work experiences.

So embedding that in this program, coaching access, not to one course but a suite of courses and different types of programming, and access to industry engagement, valuing through the work-integrated learning experience, but also interactions with employers in the classroom context, getting employers into the classroom through open workshops.

The funding, we'll get into the details of that in a little bit. Dana and I are gonna address that. That's already a question that came in. So we'll speak more specifically to how the funding works.

But we are putting together multiple funding sources ESDC through the LevelUp program has funding that's already been set aside for that program that we can apply to this. We would see some form of self-funding from individuals who would pay for access to this program. We see in-kind sorts of investments from participants. And then we're working to secure other outside investment as well to help get this, get some components of this program off the ground.

We see this then as a sustainable loop, we when we talk about getting other outside funding that we want to add and contribute in. It's because this is the model of the future. We just need to get it started and then that flywheel will turn and we see these different components of the program being comprised of education (so training), experience through Riipen's work-integrated learning, advancement and advice, and we'll break down each of those very briefly for each of you.

So let's talk about each of these in turn.

So first education, we are talking about skill development. We started in this place of — there's a productivity challenge. We're absent certain sets of critical skills for Canadians in the workforce to compete. So we do start with some form of skill development. Your logo here is each of your institutions in the room, you have continuing education programs and classes that are set up.

This could be your content or your programming that gets taught through this program. It could be that you value some of the Uvaro training content that is there that is associated with customer-facing roles in the tech sector, other partners who we're working with as well could participate here like RoboGarden, for example, who some of you may be familiar with, that provide technical skill development related to machine learning and AI.

So you have an education component that you can bring, that we can bring, or we can bring in from another third party.

We then pair that, over the course of this 12 month period, with the experience which Dana spoke about before. This is the work-integrated learning experience component.

Dana why don't you comment briefly on the LevelUp program in case some, folks in the room aren't familiar with that. But just touch on it briefly so that we can address how the the LevelUp component applies.

Yeah, exactly. So the LevelUp program is a program that's been funded by Employment and Social Development Canada. It's a program where Riipen has — really — with the goal of increasing inclusive access to high quality, high impact work integrated learning for post-secondary, for individuals who are attending post-secondary. It really is focused on innovative approaches to work integrated learning. That's why it's such a great fit for this particular program.

So, you know, recognizing what I said earlier, higher education students have been really doing this model for a long time, co-op has been extremely successful. We don't have to look very far to see that the co-op has been offering, you know, better employment outcomes, better employment outcomes in the right field of study, better satisfaction in their higher education. The list goes on and on.

If you're interested in looking up some of this research around work-integrated learning like co-op, I encourage you to go check out CWIL, the National Association, just at the conference here in British Columbia for the ACE-WIL, BC ACE-WIL Conference Association. They do — they're doing — some fantastic research there as well. We all get that. This model — the innovative approach — is looking at the reality that the traditional co-op model isn't necessarily right for every single student, every single learner, every single worker.

And so this project-based model is flexible, it can be done part time, it can be done between 2 to 8 weeks. It's about 60 hours per project that each individual works on. It can be individually, they can be done individually, they can be done as a group. So if you imagine a four person group working together on a project that's 240 hours put towards a project with an employer, each one of the individuals gets paid $1400 for that stipend, a $1400 stipend for participating in that program.

So it's an earn and learn program, it's flexible, it can fit around other life commitments, including other employment and other training like this.

And so when you think about your non-traditional adult learner who is looking, or professional who is looking for reskilling/upskilling, they don't necessarily have time to go back to do a four year degree and do three co-ops. They go back over to the workforce, they go to get the education, the training, the skill development all at the same time and get right back out there.

So that's why we think this is a fantastic fit. And so we are looking to bring this in and offer it as a way to take the learning, apply it and earn the stipend while completing the project, gain the skills, gain the professional experience, and leveraging that to land employment outcomes.

We've had incredible employment outcomes through this program. Individuals reporting huge increases in their skill development around critical thinking, creativity, those durable skills that I was talking about earlier. Their confidence in entering into the workforce, their ability to articulate the skills that they've been able to develop through these programs to future employers.

That's all validated and verified and backed up by the employers who are participating in the program. So it's not just the training organization saying, "hey, I got the skills," not just the the learners saying "hey, I've graduated, I got the certificate. I now have the skills." It's the employer saying "yes, you do have the skills, you did this project for me, I can verify they did learn those skills and in fact, I can see that they're improving as they've gone through this experience."

So yeah, super excited and of course, it works, we're getting incredible employment outcomes by combining this with short-cycle training programs like this now.

And I mean, this is already something that's been— is being—explored in continuing ed programs. So it's not, not fundamentally new, right? But it it's something that can be bolted on?

No, we've had over 24,000 students go through it. We've got another 9,000 participants who will be going through this year. Funding already announced for the for next fiscal in this particular program. We have continuing education programs already doing it. But we've also tapped into other funding sources to replicate this model.

It's had a huge success, even our neighbors down south are now starting to really pay attention to what's happening in Canada. We've replicated this model in Arizona, in the State of Colorado, in the State of Washington. We've got partners globally who are interested in replicating it because it's working so well up here.

Awesome. I'm starting to see some questions coming, which is great. So we'll come to those questions in a moment. Please keep them coming because we will address them. So please, as you have questions arise, for those of you who saw how to do that at the beginning, please keep them coming in because we're gonna break and take the questions, some that have been already sent and some that you're raising now. So please keep them coming.

To complete the model for how these pieces go together: Higher education institutions offer current students some form of career services. The percentage of students who take advantage of those services varies by institution, of course. But when it comes to continuing ed departments, many institutions that we talk to, that is a barrier in terms of what continuing ed can take advantage of.

Where do we get continued support, but also where do we get continued support for people who are in career transition, not new entrants to the economy, people who are looking to start a career for the first time, but people who are in industry and looking to make transitions?

So these last two components of advancement and advice. This is where Uvaro has specialized for five years in services that we've offered to hundreds of members, which has helped professionals, mid-career professionals transition in the workforce by offering skill-based development on how to approach your job search and programming that organizes that into a form. But also then the mentorship, the community, the access to professional coaching to take action on those plans.

So each of these four components get tied into this Workforce Development 2.0 solution. It starts with the education piece, carries into the experience with what Riipen provides, and then continues on the tail of advancement and advice. And this continues over the course of that 12 month period. It's not like once you're done the course it's over. That support continues for the individuals in the program.

So ultimately, it's reflecting a shift from one-time training and reporting back to ISED, ESDC, and others to say "we served 1,000 people, they got trained, give us our money, right? Didn't we do great?" to "how do we focus on the outcomes for the individuals?" Which is the set of metrics that we know institutions are looking for in the future, to ensure that Canada remains competitive. This is the model that we've been alluding to.

To illustrate what this could look like, in theory, this is an example. This is not how the journey will look for everyone because you in this room know better than we do that people interacting with education take all kinds of different paths. This is just one example of what it could look like.

But this is a 12-month journey, where in month one somebody joins and they take a two month long program, let's say, then they start their first work-integrated learning experience, they move into some advancement. So they start taking that career success course.

And then they go, "oh, actually, I think I wanna try another work-integrated learning experience" and they take another one, they engage in that while updating their resume, while starting their job search, or perhaps advancing their job prospects within the organization that they're at. They see another course or set of workshops they want to take, they jump on those and take those.

And it continues through to somebody maybe receiving a job at month 10, and continuing to get support. So this is just one example of what a journey could look like.

It doesn't start with training and end with training. And when that training is complete, it's support that continues over the course of that full year. And somebody could take up to five of these work-integrated learning experiences in the course of that year. Somebody could take as many courses as they have capacity to take in the course of that year, if they're delivered through the platform.

If we were in a situation where they were delivered through a continuing education department, that you were running, any of your institutions, we would evaluate what's the right cost allocation for the courses that you offer versus courses we have embedded in our own platform to reduce that barrier for people taking additional types of programming, but programming that is there for advancement and advice is embedded in the cost of that membership.

So for you, what we see as a benefit for institutions, the critical piece — why are we talking to institutions about this? Dana, we've been talking about this for months. It's like, to take advantage of those stipends, individuals need to be enrolled in a higher education institution. And we see that infrastructure exists to recruit and get people in to these programs.

We should not, as we look for workforce development initiatives in the future, we should not say "this is not a higher education problem." We should leverage the higher education institutions and the expertise and the systems that are in place, and work together to solve these challenges together. It shouldn't be "Let's do it over here and exclude others."

Let's work together. So that's why we believe so strongly that higher education and industry in the form of Riipen and Uvaro and others can solve this challenge for higher ed explicitly, the benefit is if you have courses today, you can add services to those courses, the work integrated learning and the career services components.

We see that it allows you to move to revenue generation mode, getting people into the programming and add on, pay more, pay a little bit more for that work-integrated learning experience. You've already got them in a course, pay a little bit more for a WIL. Pay a little bit more for a career component. And with a long tail style program, we see this as a model where it's renewable and ongoing revenue, not "let's sell them a course, and then maybe they'll be back in 10 years." It's, "they're in the system, they get 12 months of support from that program where you can continue to collaborate, work with them and support them in that journey."

The individuals in the program, they get a certificate of learning from an accredited institution. They get access to a platform, the service platform that helps them translate those skills learned into the outcomes in the form of promotion or a new job. And through five different work-integrated learning experiences, earning up to $7000 through that LevelUp program.

So lots of questions and activity coming in. So I see for some of you that you've already figured out how to use a Q&A feature, which is great. But I'm gonna remind you one more time. We're moving into discussion mode here. We're just about done with the presentation. We're gonna flip up a couple of slides to frame some conversation, but we want to address the questions that have come in. For those of you who aren't familiar, I'm gonna just very quickly do this activity. Everyone if you scroll off your screen and you're looking at something else, this is your time to come back to your Google tab where we are, move your cursor to the bottom-right corner of the screen. There is a triangle, a non intuitive, I shall say, icon, that is a triangle square and circle. Click on that and you'll see there the option to select Q&A and here you'll see Q&A. So you're gonna see where you can submit a question. You can see other questions that have been asked already rolling into that chat. And I would like a quick demonstration that people know how to use this. If everyone could very quickly enter in, what was the last song you listened to before joining this webinar? I just want to see the Q&A light up.

I know it's not a question, but I wanna make sure people can use that Q&A feature. This is gonna let us know that it's working and you know how to submit a question. What is the last song you listened to before you joined this webinar? And if you don't listen to music when you're working during the day, that's OK. But I don't believe you.

OK. We've got some rolling in now, which is great. Beyonce, that's good. Theme song to the podcast I listen to. All right, good. I'm seeing it roll in. Fortnight? Perfect, Kokomo, Dana. I love that. I love that. I was listening to Costa Rican hip hop. I don't know why, but Costa Rica top 50, that's what I was listening to. Perfect and thank you to Larry for the Tragically Hip. So we know that it's working. That's perfect. I'm gonna just move past this and I'd like to dive into the first question that we wanted to address explicitly and while Dana, you're speaking to some of this, I'm gonna go through some of the questions that have come in as well.

Nicole, I see a question, a couple of questions from you that we'll address. But this is a critical one that we want to make sure we touch on. I've got the question up and I'm gonna drop the share and move into just discussion mode as we work through this.

But Dana, a question to you, and you and I will kind of hit this together as needed. But how do we perceive the funding and fees will work to make this program viable?

OK. So I think this will probably be an opportunity to actually even answer maybe some of the questions I saw as well. But essentially, the way we look at this is multiple contributors to the overall cost of the entire program. So, you know, right off the bat, as we mentioned, right from the top, we are seeking funding partners to subsidize the cost of the end to end long tail training.

So it wouldn’t be 100% full subsidy, but it would be a significant subsidy to subsidize the training. We still do believe that there's a really good opportunity to have some skin in the game as Greg mentioned earlier by having an individual pay for a portion of the programming. When I say an individual, that also could be the employer.

One of the things we've been doing, as Greg mentioned, is talking to a lot of employers especially smaller organizations or medium sized organizations who have invested in building out these learning and talent and training development budgets. But you know, are trying to figure out how to make those work and make those work effectively. I mean, actually get individuals to take advantage of them. And so this is an exciting way to incentivize individuals to take advantage of them, the major benefit of this, I think.

And I think we might answer a few questions here is that the stipends are coming from another source. So Employment and Social Development Canada funds Riipen. We've been very fortunate of amazing support from ESDC, $18 million per year to fund 9,000 project-based work-integrated learning placements. And so those stipends that will be distributed to the individuals who participate in this program here in Canada, for those who are eligible for the program will be able to receive $1400 per WIL placement. So that's how the $7000 comes in. You can do up to five per year, five within a year, which I think is the the maximum amount to really, at this stage, sort of appropriately get the optimal, I should say, benefit out of the program, would be to do up to five per year. So it's up to $7,000.

So that initial investment, you know, if you can think about this, if we had an individual, the cost of the program to the individual or to the employer was about $5,000 you could see an immediate ROI on that investment.

And that is a huge incentive, of course, to really help support retention. One of the challenges — I don't know if we talked about enough earlier — but one of the biggest challenges in workforce development that we hear over and over again, and we see over and over again, really around the globe, is when especially when these programs are subsidized, is the completion rates. So having that incentive, having that, you know, ability to match what you're learning to the real world, connect to the real world, but also get that first paid experience. So it really solves much of the same — you know, you could look at a 100% subsidized program or you could look at a program that costs money upfront, but then you get that money back by actually being invested, by actually completing it and completing it successfully. And so we think that's a much better model to ensure that people are actually completing the program, motivated to take what they're learning and apply and get the most out of it.

You know, no one gets a job from putting on their resume "I got a subsidy for a training program," but getting paid experience put onto your resume, that has a huge impact to be able to actually articulate the skills that you developed to an employer, has a huge impact. We've seen it over and over again, the research shows. So that's really what this is all about, funding partners subsidizing the program funding coming from other sources that we are very fortunate to have here in Canada, to continue demonstrating the success of this program. It is not, you know, the be-all end-all, forever long-term play, but we are very fortunate that we have that right now to build out and build the business case for this for continuous investment. And then the individuals themselves will be contributing, or an employer who will be paying for their individual to go through development.

I think that pretty much covers it. It will be a revenue share. I guess that one important thing to really, to really understand is that the entire program will be a revenue share between the partners who are participating. So Riipen, Uvaro, and the post secondary institutions who will be participating and really developing that, model to best incentivize, the best possible — for each of the partners to develop, deliver the best possible outcomes to participants and employers who are participating.

Yeah, and the only contribution there is, when we were speaking about critical sectors that we need to develop in Canada, big investments in artificial intelligence, big investments and in clean tech more broadly. But getting to companies being able to employ people with competencies and how to run a business in a stable way.

This program would also conceptually, if we were to pursue funding for any of those specific purposes where the government is able to kick in funding, we could bring some of that curriculum to an institution because we have either ourselves or partners who have established that curriculum and can accelerate your ability to bring curriculum into market. That addresses these critical issues that are being funded outside as well.

Toya, I see that you've been answering some of the questions in chat. Which is helpful. Heather had asked a question about the potential to earn up to $7,000 through stipends. I think we can quickly touch on that. So, Dana, do you mind just quickly touching on that point? Just the ability to go through and the ability for individuals to go through and do multiple placements.

Yeah. So I think, you know, Greg mentioned at the top that innovative approaches to work-integrated learning and the approach to workforce development. We're talking about flexibility, personalization, meeting the individuals where they are, and creating the program that makes the most sense for them. Not every individual would necessarily need to take all five. But many individuals will, and the whole goal here is that no learner gets left behind. If you need more experience, you need more education, you need to get that and you're gonna be set up for success. So just to mention one thing, not everyone has to take all five, but the point is these are part time, these are flexible so they can align and fit around other life commitments.

As I was suggesting earlier, we've seen an enormous amount of success with this in our current level up program: 24,000 experiences delivered to date. Individuals can do up to five. This may be a surprise to some folks, but we have many individuals who — probably our number one request is — can I do more than five? So there's an enormous amount of demand to do more experiences and to continue to level up and scaffold from, you know, what we would likely be doing, what we were doing. I mean, depends on the partner who we're working with. But in most cases, what we were doing is starting with lower intensity projects in the beginning, scaffolding up to higher intensity, more autonomy, more room for teachable error. More opportunity to really engage authentically one on one with an employer throughout the duration. Bringing that employer along on the journey.

So some individuals will start early, will start and they'll get a job earlier on and not necessarily need to take on the full number of experiences. But we've seen over and over again, that taking advantage of multiple, and we imagine that that will be a big case, especially for those who face the biggest barriers to employment.

Perfect. Thank you, Dana. There's a lot of questions that have rolled in and I'd like to just continue to scroll through and address a couple of those. And then there's a couple that are on this topic of work-integrated learning. The one that I, if you don't mind, I'd like to take point on, and then have you riff on, because it's an interesting one. I'm gonna combine, a little bit here of what you contributed, Rotimi, what you added Vicki, around LevelUp projects for undergrads versus adult learners. I'll address those and then would like to touch on the question that Chris asked about recognizing the professional life experiences of adult learners.

So, first on the work-integrated piece, Uvaro has incorporated and embedded Riipen into the programs that we are presently delivering, on a number of funded programs. Through Digital Supercluster, it's a project that was designed and executed for Digital Nova Scotia and we have set it up to support another project we are running for a program that is funded through Upskill Canada that is focused on clean tech initiatives through Boundless Accelerator in Ontario. We are embedding Riipen into the execution of those programs and have had tremendous success.

The individuals coming into those programs are not undergraduate students. They are adults, some of whom — I shouldn't say many — but some of whom are newcomers who are looking to get training in Canada, industry- oriented training in Canada and then that work-based experience to help them make that transition into careers. And so we first-hand have seen that translation does work.

We went through an evaluation with Riipen on what's the number and type of opportunities that exist on that platform for people who are more experienced, which is the profile of people that we serve in our programming and are very pleased with the results that we're getting. So we have deployed it, we have seen it in action through existing programs that are funded. And one of those programs is presently on track to be expanded later this year. So we're pleased with that where it'll be a larger version of that program.

But Dana, could you speak to that a little bit about this notion of LevelUp for undergrad versus call them adult or mature learners?

Yeah. So I just want to touch on that because I think there are folks who are very familiar with the LevelUp program.

And so the LevelUp portal that we have today, which was how most individuals participate in our LevelUp program. Accessing the stipends is an open access platform where employers from all backgrounds of all sizes and all geographies post their projects, individuals who meet the eligibility of one of our post-secondary institutions can go and register and start to complete projects on their own. You go through some speed dating, meet the companies get matched and then, off they go, and we're the employer of record, and we pay the students on behalf of the company. I think everyone understands that, who are familiar with the program.

When we're talking about doing custom programming, which we do with many of our post-secondary institutions across Canada, is we're often actually using the private white-labeled version of Riipen where you get to actually customize your own programming and launch that out into our ecosystem, where we've got 35,000 employers. So just like LevelUp, is staffed by Riipen and we're going in, accessing projects, we're bringing, in most cases, 5,000–7,000 projects at a time to make them available to students.

In this case, we would work with our partners, staff another portal, which would still access projects from the same ecosystem, but we'd be able to customize the way that we run that. And so that's how when we work with Uvaro, when we work with our partners in continuing education as we do today, we'll actually use the platform to create an open call. We'll use it as a reverse job or we'll say here's the types of projects that we're looking for. We'll specifically design them knowing what the learner will be looking for, the skill level that they would be at.

As I mentioned, the scaffolding from lower intensity to higher intensity, you can actually design calls for each of those different types of experiences, put that out into the marketplace, and make sure you're getting projects and that are specifically designed to meet the needs of that learner.

So just like how we run it with a normal post secondary institution, we're doing it for curriculum-embedded experiences. It would be this exact same model. And so rather than the LevelUp portal, which is national, which is just open to anyone to post any project, anyone can come in, you would be creating very specific open calls and getting projects that meet those parameters that are specifically designed to meet the unique needs of the learners who are going to that program.

Thank you, perfect, Vicki’s. On to the question from Chris. So this, this question of how does the program recognize and leverage the professional and life experiences of adult learners?

The experiences of adult learners, we address explicitly in the programming that we've designed and as we enter into collaboration with institutions, we would need to evaluate together how might some of your continuing ed programs that you may want to fold into the program match with how we then deliver that advancement and advice component of the offering.

The advancement and advice components specifically are designed for career-transitioning adult learners, not designed for people who are new, so new to industry, new to job search. We have educational components on how to build a resume, how to structure a job search as very foundational components. But a lot of the curricula and the community that is there to support individuals as they work through this 12-month cycle of support is all about executing a job search, in a lot of ways like a sales process for people who have experience in one industry and making that relevant to the industry that they're seeking to enter into.

That's a core foundation of our competency, and something that we know drives a lot of value from those programs in the past four years of the programming that we have offered through just Uvaro, independently, in more of a bootcamp-style program. We're very proud to have recorded an 80% or higher outcome achievement rate for people securing employment, getting into roles and then advancing their careers. And it was because of that ability to translate existing experiences.

Again, it doesn't exclude people who may be coming right out of higher ed core programming to join and participate if they don't have that prior experience. But — it would be part of some — our core target would be re-engaging industry and then re-embedding them in those continuing education programs.

Dana, it's 2:58pm Eastern time. I know it's not the same for you. It's almost lunchtime for you. We're coming up on time and we've not addressed all the questions that have come in, and I'm thrilled at the questions that have come in, the dialogue and the energy from this discussion.

My team just confirmed with us here that we are going to do two things very likely if you're game for it Dana. First is to take the questions that we weren't able to answer and record a set of answers and share those out to those of you who are here, that asked the question and maybe feeling a little unsatisfied because your questions haven't been answered. But also to host sort of an open call session where there can be an opportunity for just Q&A, a very quick recap perhaps. But the focus of it would purely be on question and answer. Dana are you game for that?

Absolutely. All right. So let's do that. Just to respect the time, we appreciate. and I personally — it drives me crazy when I have a meeting at the end of the time of the thing I joined and the conversation continues and I want to hear it, but I have to leave. So we will wrap up here. I wanted to just close on these quick points and allow them to continue on with their day and know that there's more content coming your way.

So to close out as a next step, in addition to these two things that we're gonna share, we are close to securing funding for a nationwide AI-focused program. And so we're working towards something that would be AI-focused and bringing that to market. And we are looking for a small number of partners to collaborate, to bring that program to fruition. We're working just now on giving all of those details submitted to a funding partner for that.

If this is of interest to you, you can reach out to us at partners@uvaro.com and we can include you in for consideration, and some of you we've already spoken to about that.

But more than just that, if you're intrigued at how this might work for your institution, we don't necessarily need that outside or third party funding to get it started, but we can start now. And so if you'd like to explore what standing up a program, just to get something going would look like — again, partners@uvaro.com is a way to reach us and we can — if that's to both of us, then we can handle those and loop in the Riipen team as needed.

In addition to those two things, of you reaching out to us, we will be reaching out to those of you who asked questions. And we'll provide some responses and we plan to host an open session for more Q&A.

Dana, thank you for the conversation today. This is awesome.

Thank you. Always a pleasure. I always enjoy it. I had a feeling where I get lots of questions — we'll have to get the content to happen next time.

Absolutely. But thank you everyone for joining. It's always a pleasure to have an opportunity to sit and speak with with Dana, with you and then with our partners in industry.

So we'll see you again soon with more follow up to come.

Thanks everyone.