A new social network, called WYGU or (When You Grow Up) has launched, offering an online mentoring platform that matches people to appropriate careers.
The site was founded by CEO Alun Baker, initially funded with his own money before raising £350,000 of Business Angel funding, which he has matched.
The platform has spent four months in ‘invite Beta’ and is now launching in public beta this week.
Baker believes that too many youngsters fall into careers without any understanding of what they getting into.
WYGU provides a profile matching tool to help people understand what they would be good at, and then a mentoring platform to connect with people who have “been there, done that”.
WYGU’s Matching Engine is unique in that it assesses an individual’s suitability for between 10 to 100 careers automatically against over a million variables and has the further unique capability of self-learning through the crowd-sourced WYGUpedia.
WYGU will encourage people to be users, mentors or both, promoting a give-back campaign through the use of its trademarked Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) ‘league tables’ showing the top individual and corporate contributors by industry over any given period.
WYGU has been under development with a team of 10 for the past 14 months and is focused on encouraging everybody to take personal responsibility (PSR) for changing the way careers are developed and avoid falling into careers accidentally.
Alun Baker, CEO and founder of WYGU, said: “ “From my own personal experience, I know that most people end up in accidental careers through a lack of informed guidance at school or further education and, crucially, not being able to talk directly with those in the careers we aspire to, meaning we can never understand how to break into them.
“Careers advisors can’t be expected to be authorities or have first-hand experience of every career but WYGU offers a space for open, trusted conversations with people who want to share their knowledge and help others to achieve their goals, using a combination of facts and experience-based information.”
www.WYGU.com
