Welcome to Skyllz: the future of Education & Recruitment.

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Skyllz

5 min readJan 11, 2018

We, humans, did a pretty good job in the first, second and third industrial revolutions. We’ve adapted to change every step of the way, developing skills, transforming our lifestyles, and conquering ever more aspects of the miracle we call social evolution.

We are now entering our fourth industrial revolution however, and we’re moving up the gears too fast. Led by robots, supercomputers, genetic engineering, IoT and self-driving cars, this new era is happening at exponential speed, impacting every single discipline, economy and industry.

If we look at the intersection of higher education and the labor market, we see that we need a completely new and specific set of skills to face the rapid changes.

That’s where we come in.

Nowadays, talent scouting and recruitment organizations focus on the empirical evidence that candidates have the skills (the “what”), know how apply them (the “how”), and the drive to do so (the “why”) [1]. Intangible human capacities to face problems, analyse solutions and work in a team are more important than ever in evolving as a professional in this fast paced environment.

The key is to create a suitable professional and personal profile that fulfills market requirements. Old-fashion, slow and non-digital procedures such as attending college, getting a degree or wasting time writing a resumé are old solutions for a new world. They just don’t cut it in today’s world.

Is it possible to create a decentralized and automated system that can operate in this new era?

We think so! :D

Talent: the diamond in all of us

Skills are the practical manifestation of human talent.

We shine as professionals when we align with our deepest talents [2]. This sounds pretty obvious, right? However, it is especially relevant in our current robotic, machine-learning ecosystem where jobs are being increasingly threatened by artificial intelligence. More than 10 million UK workers are at a high risk of being replaced by robots within 15 years as the automation of routine tasks gathers pace in a new machine age, according to The Guardian[3].

Until now, humans could afford to just be part of the chain,repeating tasks over and over. But in this new age, the law of evolution takes a step forward: only those brave enough to dig into their genuine talents and live according to them, will make a difference and survive the robots.

We are born with unique talents. Everyone of us. Education should focus on helping us find them and shape them in order to fit the current labor market demands.

Freeing human talents

Today, it’s difficult to stand out without the support and prestige of a great university, school or company name. But we believe human talents are powerful enough to make an impact on their own.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg are perfect examples of this. Proof of a candidate’s skills should be enough to determine their value, no matter what institution is behind them. A self-taught boy in Estonia with natural abilities for growth hacking should be able to access exactly the same job opportunities as a recent Ivy League or MBA graduate.

The blurred line between personal and professional life

In previous decades, it was a lot simpler to distinguish between you work life and your personal one.

In a world that is more connected than ever,it is almost impossible. Everything we do, learn or develop in our personal lives, in one way or another, will affect our professional identities and vice versa.

Every learning activity we do should be automatically recorded and become part of a candidate’s professional ID, whether that’s reading a whitepaper or watching a YouTube tutorial, attending an event or publishing an article on Medium. There are no limits to the skills we can showcase and put into practice from any aspect of our lives.

A new system that allows us to develop, prove, share and use our skills and talents is needed to simplify our complex and unique new ways of life.

Skyllz’s motivations

Focus on working hard and living according to your unique talents. Forget about tracking your steps. Let the system and the community validate and showcase your skills for you.
Don’t let institutions like universities or schools decide your value. If you fit into the labor market, you fit.
No matter where you were born, studied or worked, you should be able to develop your talent and use it to make a living.
Every single skill should be considered under an universal proof-of-skill protocol, making recruitment decisions fairer and easier.
Every activity where a skill is acquired, applied or improved should be automatically recorded on a blockchain and become part of your professional ID. From watching a YouTube tutorial to leading a team. From attending to an event to publishing an article in Medium.

And that’s why we’re launching Skyllz

Introducing Skyllz

Skyllz reinvents how talent gets access to work and work gets access to talent in an open ecosystem where meritocracy, transparency and decentralization play together to disrupt status quo in talent assessment, skills certification and allocation of talent and knowledge.

In order to nurture the vision of Skyllz, a powerful ecosystem is born: the Skyllz Distributed Platform (SDP) — the open-source, public, blockchain-based and distributed skills validation protocol from the Skyllz project. [4]

The SDP ecosystem is fueled by two different but closely linked elements:

Proof-of-Skill, which is the reputation related to every specific skill on the SDP, is non-tradeable and handles skills validations as traceable annotations on the Ethereum Blockchain.

SKT (Skyllz tokens), an exchangeable ERC-20 compliant token that fuels the SDP ecosystem and operations within and across Skill Touchpoint applications (STapps). It enables users to participate in the ecosystem, and validate skills.