The grandson of a British missionary in Zambia, David Kamwana, was inspired to invent and engineer by his grandfather’s workshop. He had the tools to do everything at the workshop - from fixing his car to wiring his house.  

After graduating from John Brown University with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, David noticed how many students were crippled by debt but still lacked the skills to take on more than an entry-level job. He also noticed that job descriptions often fail to truly represent the requirements of a position. 

After several years as a Corporate Engineer, David co-founded OneCrate with the vision of streamlining the job search process for businesses and job seekers. Phase one is to build a digitized database of job descriptions and resumes to allow AI algorithms to help with job matching. Phase two is to use the growing database to help businesses, students, job seekers, and educators map out clear career paths using real and relevant data. 

Key takeaways: 

• Most resumes and job descriptions are created in Word documents or PDFs and, except when and where actively posted, are out of the market and out of the flow. It’s only when a candidate actively looks for a job, and a company posts the job description that they might match up.   
• There could be an outstanding candidate ready and interested but not visible to a company because the candidate has not seen the job posting. OneCrate looks to bridge that gap.   
• Job boards like Indeed have started the process and provide more aim. However, there are still a lot of details on both resumes and job descriptions that are not formatted in an AI-friendly way. OneCrate improves the process with smart digital resumes and totally digitized job descriptions.   
• Eventually, this digitized data will facilitate interesting predictive models that can help businesses, job seekers, and students making choices about their career paths.
• Just improving job matching is a significant step forward, but the future potential of digitizing this data is to streamline the education and training processes so that students step into the workforce with the precise skills and abilities needed by the companies who hire them.   
• Companies who use OneCrate have access to a relevant, easy-to-update org chart that can be viewed and updated. Employees can contribute to their job descriptions, helping them be more accurate and robust.

Quote of the show: (15:08)  “Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, they already have internship programs that allow you to join their programs out of high school and get into a position that could pay you a quarter of a million dollars a year. They already have that. So we already know that it's possible. So imagine going down that, that path and ask that person, how much did you spend to, to get the skills that you have that are getting you paid quarter million dollars a year? And then you, you know, Compare that with somebody who goes to a four-year computer science program learns a whole bunch of different things and spends $150,000+ to get through the program and then has to start from the bottom and probably still has to be trained by the company that they're gonna work for.” 

Links: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-kamwana/  Company Website: https://www.onecrate.com/    

Ways to Tune In: 

Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption  

Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755  

Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZGlzcnVwdGlvbmludGVycnVwdGlvbi5jb20vZmVlZC54bWw  

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD  

Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/disruption-interruption  

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf2zbLqmHtSHQ7u1V-Is8cA