SkillsPassport | Empowering Career Decisions through Narrative Assessments, Personality Profiles, Interest Matching and AIAt SkillsPassport, we believe that informed choices lead to brighter futures. Our platform, co-founded by Paul Hodgson, Deon Botha, and Dr. Lanette Hattingh, focuses on education, career guidance, and talent development. We empower learners, educators, and organizations to make data-driven decisions regarding careers, subjects, and tertiary education.What We Do:Grade 10 Subject Choices: Supports learners in selecting NSC subjects aligned with their strengths and career interests through personalized recommendations.Tertiary Study Choices: Assists Grade 11 & 12 learners with tailored tertiary education options, ensuring they are prepared for higher education and career paths.Life Orientation Career Guidance: Equips teachers with lesson plans, career videos, and access to 750+ careers across 75 fields, making career exploration engaging and effective.Pre-Selection Assessments for Employers: Uses narrative-driven tools to streamline recruitment for internships and learnerships.Our Approach:Our AI-powered platform blends narrative assessments, evaluating verbal, numerical, and non-verbal reasoning, with personality trait exploration to provide actionable insights. Accessible via mobile and desktop, we offer seamless guidance that aligns with students' goals and the evolving job market.Community Impact:Through our Corporate Social Investment (CSI) initiative, for every two licenses bought by privileged schools, one is donated to disadvantaged schools, ensuring broader access to career guidance. We aim to reduce career stress, unemployment, and socio-economic challenges.Since 2022, SkillsPassport has positively impacted over 1 million learners, guiding them to make confident, future-ready choices. Together, we are preparing a skilled workforce ready to thrive in the global economy.

Once the full integration between the telephony system and the company data lake was completed for company-wide data visualizations which were my responsibility to manage and roll it out with the assistance of various development teams internally.After Covid started to ease up, I was responsible for the rollout of Freshcaller which was tightly integrated with Freshworks for ticketing and Whatsapp for customer support. The company had now grown from 30 employees in total to a company in excess of 130, the original call center consisted of 16 agents and grew to 80. My role included deploying an Omni Channel solution which is running successfully today at Mama Money. I was a Key Note speaker for an event held by Freshworks as this was the Omni Channel Solution foundation at the time.I was retrenched in October 2020 during Covid.

My original role was as a consultant to assist the call center with a systems change as the existing requirements had outgrown the solution that was in place. Over the first month, a full solution audit and due diligence were completed as well as coordinating a solution competitor analysis.Recommendations were made from this and my role was then to manage the change navigation, project management, and roll-out of the new solution which would ultimately roll into an Omni Channel Solution to include voice, SMS, chat, WhatsApp, bots, and social media contact points. The platforms implemented included Taskflow for voice, Freshworks for Ticketing, Chat, Bots, and WhatsApp, and finally Freshcaller which then would integrate with the internal CRM soluton.All training and agent learning and development were completed using scenario-based video with narration and call-outs. Included in my set of skills is the ability to create video training on the systems that I am implementing.After rolling out the new solution, I was made an offer to stay on permanently with Mama Money from August of 2019.

Playmore golf did not have a call center doing outbound telesales and I ran a 12 seat team for Playmoregolf selling memberships to golfers throughout South Africa. After a year of successful sales, we started with a face to face team of membership consultants selling memberships from The Pro Shop stores and from various customer events.

Having worked on a few projects in satellite broadcasting, I met an entrepreneur named Tshepo Tshafeng, and together we decided to launch a TV channel in Soweto. At the time, one could apply for a temporary broadcast license around a special event like HIV and Aids day or June 16th. We did these applications and broadcast several times during the next couple of years. ICASA changed the broadcast act to allow for a longer-term license which was granted and as a non-profit, we merged with Urban Brew Studios as they were the producers of significant content which allowed Soweto TV to stay on air 24 hours per day.The channel was then added to the DSTV bouquet of free-to-air channels and is still running successfully today.