Feasibility study for a tool to promote linguistic and cultural inclusivity in the career development sector.

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CareerEar are the developers of software that is used by career support teams to support job seekers find employment, the platform is currently used by a number of employability teams and programmes including Reed In Partnership, Lambeth Council and Department for Work and Pensions. This application has been developed by a team of human resources and employability specialists, digital entrepreneurs with a strong focus on providing solutions that can provide jobseekers with high quality, and high user specific advice. The motivation from the CareerEar team stems from proven success, providing a job seeker with the right support will typically have a transformational impact on the jobseeker and their chances of securing meaningful long-term employment. The CareerEar team is composed of individuals with both direct and indirect experience of inequality and how the lack of opportunity is a blight on many in our society. CareerEar has developed the software specifically to enable any job seeker to understand their skills and understand the full range of job opportunities they can access. CareerEar provides user data and insights to employability support teams but is directly aware that richer insights are required in order for these teams to support disadvantaged job seekers. English as second language jobseekers and/or those with low computer skills need to be included in such a solution as groups who make up a large proportion of the demographic of job seekers that these employability support teams seek to support. The enclosed application is focused on CareerEar's goal to develop a new tool, EarlyBird, within the CareerEar platform that is able to listen to the job seeker in their native language, translate and transcribe their speech into text and then provide careers centre staff with key insights in written English. For practical reasons, the scope of the enclosed project is to conduct a feasibility study on a "foreign language capable" version of EarlyBird in at least one major world language (expected to be Arabic). Once proven, the business will be able to extend the system to cover other world languages. Investment is being sought to enable the team to access technical, linguistic and inclusive interface design expertise to complement the existing CareerEar team. With this funding the team will focus on a programme of user research, technical feasibility and user testing/feedback with live Jobseekers to ensure the delivery of a more inclusive careers development service in the future.