San Francisco Company Using Social Gaming To Help Job Seekers
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) - A free educational platform that uses social gaming to teach job seekers the basics of how to use the Internet to land employment will soon be available at libraries in San Francisco and Santa Clara County.
The curriculum of JobScout is aimed at the one in five Californians looking for work who lack basic computer skills essential to stay in the workforce. It starts with how to set up and use a webmail account, then progresses to how to apply for jobs online, said Stephanie Margossian, the company's chief operating officer.
"We take the user through a lesson, and then we offer a very simple game, like a word search or a word jumble, to help reinforce the content and the skills that they learn in the lesson," she said.
KCBS' Margie Shafer Reports:
The culmination is an online resume building tool with automatic formatting to take some of the guess work out of trying to figure out which resume standards are currently in style, Margossian said.
JobScout began as a project of the California State Library before it was spun off as a private company that has since partnered with 200 libraries around the state, including Santa Cruz and San Jose.
Margossian said the platform was designed to be easily accessed on a smart phone for people with limited computer access whose lack of web skills has left them at a disadvantage.
"People aren't checking the newspaper anymore. They're checking Craigslist and they're checking Simply Hired."
The company expects the platform to be available in San Francisco and South Bay libraries before the end of summer.
It can be accessed at MyJobScout.org
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