Designers
Designers
Designers
EDEFACTO
Where Education Meets Reality
Designers
Azzam Thadey
Key Words
SUMMARY
If you’re graduating feeling anxious and unprepared for the corporate world, you are not alone. Three in five graduates feel emotionally and mentally unprepared for the workforce, and two-thirds struggle to launch their careers post-graduation. Edefacto facilitates collaboration between universities and companies for student-led projects. Universities lack a streamlined process that prevents them from providing students with the corporate exposure they need. Onboarding and managing external partner projects with Edefacto is as easy as Browse, Match, and Collaborate. The prototype demonstrates one full project cycle on the platform. With the idea being tested and validated, Edefacto looks to revolutionize how formal education is conducted.
challenge
I saw my peers and myself feeling uncertain about the skills we possess and anxious about the corporate world ahead of us. Through primary and secondary research, I realized that recent graduates struggle to smoothly transition from university to the workplace due to a lack of soft skills and corporate exposure. Few students worked on corporate projects, but it was not as common as it should have been. After speaking to faculty at Parsons and NYU, it was evident that universities lacked a streamlined process to collaborate with corporations. Also, companies always have more ideas than the resources to test them. Hence, I developed Edefacto - a two-sided marketplace to facilitate collaboration to meet the needs of both stakeholders.
Outcome
Edefacto is a two-sided platform facilitating collaboration between universities and companies for student-led projects. The prototype is a digital product demo that runs through the user journey map of one full project cycle. It looks at how universities can find interesting projects they qualify for, connect with companies, agree on the terms of the project, document the process, and follow up with feedback. Through this, universities obtain a streamlined process to onboard and manage projects with external partners and conduct them with greater frequency to enhance the value of the education they provide.