The University of Queensland awards employability focused solution first place at the inaugural global Virtual Hackathon.
Ventures hosted its first global Virtual Hackathon, which ran for three weeks and attracted 130 students forming 42 teams from UQ as well as the University of British Colombia in Canada and the University of Exeter in the UK.
Teams tackled global challenges posed by COVID-19 across eight themes - health, environment, people, employability, economy, manufacturing, services and education. Feedback from participants has been fantastic and the Ventures team now has a platform for hosting similar global, virtual events in the future.
A mixed team of engineering, IT and computer science students from UQ took out first place claiming the $7000 cash prize for their startup Skills+ - an automated career advisory platform.
Engineering and IT student Anastasia Laczko was drawn to participating in the hackathon as it gave her the opportunity to tackle real-world, relevant issues.
“It’s really difficult as a student who is about to graduate or has just graduated to understand where you can best fit into the tech landscape and how to identify the skills you need to land your dream job. Skill+ acts as a personalised career advisor and uses LinkedIn data to generate a list of career pathways that match your skills and experiences, as well a skill tree for each pathway to help identify what relevant skills you have and what skills you should learn next,” she said.
“Skill+ could give people a career trajectory and a career plan that is based on data – it could be less subjective than human advisors and more efficient and automated,” said Tom Nugent.
For their challenge topic, the team chose to focus on employability as most members are about to graduate and enter the turbulent post-COVID workforce themselves.
“So many people are being affected by the downturn in the economy from COVID-19. We were told by an employability team member that jobs listings on StudentHub went from 132 to 2 after COVID which really shows you how hard it is for students and people without work to get important jobs for their careers,” said Martin Le Rossignol.
Throughout the intensive program, students were supported by 100+ check-ins with Ventures staff, attended guest speaker workshops, watched self-paced video content and more than 80 one-on-one mentoring sessions with industry experts.
The students had the opportunity to connect and network with the industry-experienced experts including industry representatives, startup founders and government contacts gaining exclusive mentoring and advice.
The finalists were joined by our industry expert judging panel including Sarah Pearson, Advanced Queensland Deputy Director-General for Innovation, Chris Saad, Former Head of Product for Uber, Dr Kylie Henderson, Founder and Managing Director of The Better Health Generation and Yotam Rosenbaum, Venture Partner at 77 Partners.
The Skills+ team is no stranger to entrepreneurship programs offered at UQ. Martin Le Rossignol said, “any ventures program will give you serious insight into what working in a startup could look like and if you are interested you should definitely get involved, it's lots of fun.”
Virtual Hackathon Winners
- 1st $7000
Aaron Coox, Anastasia Laczko, Dion Lao, Martin Le Rossignol and Tom Nugent
Skills+ – an automated career advisory software.
- 2nd $3000
James Dight, Ankit Shukla and Quentin Wright
3DPracLabs – Breaking down boundaries in science education, by placing the power of the laboratory in the palm of your hand
- 3rd $1000
Josh Case, Benjamin Estrade, Jack Kelso-Ribbe, Bethanie Patch and Kirsten Slemint
SmartStock – Tracking and managing inventory of personal protective equipment in hospitals
You can watch the top 3 video pitches on the Ventures YouTube channel
Ventures programs are open to everyone – from new students to PhD students and alumni.
Interested in applying your entrepreneurship skills to a real-world problem? We’re calling all UQ students from across faculties to come together to build real solutions to water scarcity with the Ventures Industry Challenge. Connect with industry, pitch your solution and compete for $15k in prizes!
To learn more and to see what’s on, visit Ventures events.
