CareAcademy creates digital tools that train and certify senior caregivers and home health aides, opening access to in-demand roles.

CareAcademy seeks to help caregivers provide older adults with the support, guidance, and compassion needed to improve their quality of life.

The company’s goal is to make it easy for caregivers to learn new skills and continue their educations to better serve clients and advance their careers, while supplying home care and home health agencies with skilled professionals who are able to deliver better care, with better outcomes for clients.

The team works with thousands of agencies, franchisers, and caregivers nationwide to accomplish this goal every day.

Cell-Ed provides adults with foundational skills training through three-minute micro-lessons delivered on mobile devices. As the company says, it’s literacy, language, and job readiness in the palm of the hand.

Cell-Ed is tackling the opportunity gap prevalent in today’s labor market by offering a universally accessible platform that does not require a smartphone or internet connection to provide training opportunities to adults who work in low-wage jobs, have low English-language proficiency, and have limited in-demand skills—a population that includes a large percentage of immigrants and women.

Cell-Ed provides mobile, foundational education as a pathway to achieving secondary and postsecondary degrees, work credentials, and essential language skills to ensure access to better jobs and economic livelihood.

Embodied Labs offers an immersive training platform for caregivers. Through virtual reality (VR) experiences, caregivers can experience the perspectives and conditions of people receiving care, gaining an understanding they can’t get from traditional training tools.

“It is our goal,” the company says, “that the tools we develop will lead to a deeper understanding of the human condition, contributing to a more compassionate world.”

A web-based platform that connects educators and learners with a network of professionals who can offer real-world advice and insights, Nepris helps users stay up to date on the latest trends in the labor market, providing them with access to firsthand information about what types of jobs are available and what skills are in demand.

Low-income and underserved students are disproportionally likely to drop out of school and unlikely to qualify for in-demand careers that can provide an economically sustainable wage. Research has shown that a lack of engagement in the classroom is a leading indicator that a student will drop out. The Nepris platform is intended to increase student engagement, expose students to a wide range of careers, and connect classwork to real-world careers.

NextStep works in partnership with health care facilities to offer free technology-enabled training and placement for professionals with certified nursing assistant (CNA) credentials.

NextStep aims to create opportunities for people who are out of work or in low-wage jobs to begin careers in frontline health care roles and to address the severe caregiver shortage in the United States.

NextStep’s technology platform, curriculum, and student support system are designed to reduce the financial, logistical, and learning model friction that has prevented many low-income workers from pursuing the CNA credential, which can be the first step in a nursing or caregiving career path.

Pairin’s technology unifies disparate workforce systems and data to help people make better decisions and connect with the resources and services needed to achieve their education and career goals.

The Pairin platform unifies and modernizes regional and national workforce ecosystems, including K-12, postsecondary, adult workforce, and the disparate data sets that underpin them all. The personalized and visualized data enable organizations to more effectively deliver career guidance, skill development, and tailored community services, ultimately helping to match individuals to jobs.

The largest online network of manufacturing professionals, FactoryFix helps manufacturers fill job openings by connecting them with candidates who have been vetted and screened to ensure they have the exact skills and experience needed.

FactoryFix is dedicated to being a place where manufacturing professionals can find a great job today, learn skills for tomorrow, and get personalized career coaching along the way. The company intends to help do something about the labor shortage in manufacturing by providing a more attractive and accessible way to pursue careers in the industry.

Provider Pool offers an online marketplace that connects health care organizations to health care professionals. The company’s mission is to streamline health care staffing by providing a cost-effective tech-enabled self-service platform that automates hiring and recruiting processes by offering employers direct access to a vetted community of professionals.

The United States has a chronic nursing shortage and the majority of the profession’s attrition takes place among nursing students and professionals of color. Provider Pool aims to address that situation by building pathways to quality health care jobs for non-degreed health care workers and people from populations that have historically faced barriers to jobs that pay well and offer opportunities for economic advancement. The company provides access to educational and vocational training opportunities for health care workers, improves cultural competence in career advising, and creates a community of peers who provide one another with support in the form of motivation and accountability.

SkillSmart provides tools to track, retain, and grow the employers and workforces that make communities thrive. The company offers two primary solutions: Seeker, a skills-matching platform that’s designed to increase transparency in career development and job search activities, particularly in the construction industry, and Insight, a platform designed to streamline tracking of project data, including workforce, wage, and compliance data, to help companies stay in compliance with labor laws and other regulations.

SkillSmart offers construction compliance, reporting, and tracking tools. Communities everywhere are seeking to grow and become stronger by providing opportunities for all residents and businesses. Driven by the belief that strong and thriving communities matter, SkillSmart provides solutions that organizations can use to track, measure, report and act upon all participation levels.

Upswing provides solutions, including a virtual assistant called Ana, that educators can use to reach, relate to, and retain nontraditional learners by scaling student services, supporting 24/7 online tutoring, optimizing engagement, and utilizing insightful data to identify and support students who may face challenges that make it difficult to complete their educations.

Nontraditional students leave college before completing their programs at twice the rate of their peers, often because they do not have strong levels of engagement with or connections to key faculty and staff members, including tutors, counselors, advisors, and professors. Colleges believe that investing in faculty and staff is critical to the goal of increasing student persistence, but problems arise when nontraditional students—who pay as much to attend college as their peers—do not feel they have equitable access to support from those professionals. Upswing’s goal is to not only provide tools that enable and facilitate those connections, but also proactively engage students to further ensure that the connections occur.

Climb Credit is a technology-driven lender providing loans for training programs with high return on investment for students, increasing access to stable, high-wage, meaningful work.

Climb’s founding principle is that education needs to have meaningful results for learners—and those results should correlate with cost. It says that the U.S. higher education system has left millions of people in debt with no way to pay, partly because the cost of education programs is not effectively tied to the outcomes and results of that education. Climb’s operating assumption is that placing limits on education costs correlated with expected career results can help create better outcomes for learners and reduce burdensome student debt in our country. At its partner schools, graduation rates are consistently at 94 percent, job placement rates are above 80 percent, and salary increases after graduation are above 70 percent.

Edquity is an antipoverty company that helps colleges improve students’ financial security by increasing access to resources and emergency funding. The Edquity platform, provided for partners as a white-labeled mobile app and web platform that can be rebranded by the partners, allows students to apply for and receive emergency cash grants in less than 48 hours and find resources to help them meet their basic needs. Edquity arms institutions with the analytical tools to understand in real time where students’ needs are and track the efficacy of their institutional initiatives.

Edquity’s theory of change centers on narrowing equity gaps in educational outcomes and social determinants of health. In the short term, Edquity does this by streamlining access to critical emergency cash assistance to students in crisis in a manner that is equitable, fast, and high in impact. In the long term, Edquity will leverage its outcome and experiential data to advocate for more enlightened structural policies that increase the supply of resources for students where equity gaps currently exist.

Level empowers people to build and grow microbusinesses by providing the portable financial benefits they need to prosper. Designed for micro-entrepreneurs who are building businesses, Level is a financial services platform powering a growing on-demand economy.

Level is redefining and delivering the portable financial benefits needed in the on-demand economy—empowering people to build and grow microbusinesses and putting micro-entrepreneurs in charge of how they work. Its first product, the Level Advance, provides flexible, transparent, and fair credit to enable people to invest in productive assets and access working capital. This creates a virtuous cycle as entrepreneurs grow their very small businesses, employ others to work with them, and access resources they need to get jobs done at a consistently increasing scale. Level says it is “unlocking the potential of microbusinesses and empowering them to grow and succeed.”

Educational institutions can use SignalVine’s two-way text messaging platform, powered by artificial intelligence, to engage students, staff, and employees. The system has proved to be an especially powerful tool when it is used to encourage—or “nudge”—adults to take action to develop new skills or pursue opportunities. SignalVine helps increase the impact of workforce development teams.

SignalVine has enabled institutions to better engage and support their students by better understanding who their students are and what they need, and then proactively providing the students with support and opportunities. Using student attributes, responses, and history of engagement, education leaders can target students with specific, individualized guidance for success. The resulting data inform decisions to scale the support for more students earning a credential and being set up for success in their careers and life.