PROVIDENCE – Adult education technology startup Wingspans received international honors and a $150,000 award in recognition and support of its “experience translator” platform.
The Providence-based startup, which hosts a database of more than 700 interviews designed to provide firsthand insight into different career opportunities, recently won a $150,000 Growth Award from the Tools Competition, an international contest held in support of education technology and innovation.
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Wingspans and fellow awardees were selected from a pool of more than 1,900 applicants from around the world. The Tools Competition, now in its fourth year, distributed more than $8 million to 50 education technology companies and developers.
“Amid a period of ongoing labor market uncertainty, millions of highly talented workers remain on the economic sidelines, often due to a lack of awareness about how their skill set translates to new career opportunities,” Lindsay Kuhn, Wingspans founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We are honored and humbled that our platform has been selected for this year’s recognition. We see it as tremendous validation of our platform’s potential – and the vast potential of the learners that we serve.”
Wingspans will use the award to develop its experience translator tool, which helps to connect Wingspans’ learners with training opportunities, potential careers and database members who have a similar skill set.
The tool “will help someone … see the value in this experience and uncover their hidden skills,” according to the project description on the Tools Competition website. For instance, it notes, someone with waitressing experience also has skills such as time management, customer service and working under pressure.
“The hope is that after using the experience translator, learners will realize that they have much more to offer than they previously thought,” the project description notes.
Wingspans works with more than 50 two- and four-year colleges, three workforce development partners and the U.S. Department of Education, with local partners including the University of Rhode Island, The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center and Grow Blue.
According to company data, Wingspans already reaches “tens of thousands of students and adult learners.” With the experience translator tool, the Wingspans team intends to reach 10 million learners by 2027.
Earlier this year, Wingspans was accepted into the Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator, which serves another broadly distributed innovation cohort.
Jacquelyn Voghel is a PBN staff writer. You may reach her at Voghel@PBN.com.
