A few words about discoverED...
Press release, 10/10 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Jessica Trzyna (443) 621-7690 or jtrzyna@weissprassociates.com
Next Development Receives $75,000 TEDCO Grant, New career program will help college students stand out
BALTIMORE, MD (10/10/08) – Baltimore-based Next Development, LLC – a new tenant of the Emerging Technology Centers (ETC) – announced today that they have received a $75,000 grant from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO) to develop discoverED, a comprehensive network of career tools built by students for students.
This grant supports a continuing development initiative by Next Development, founded by recent college graduates, Jeff Shepherd and Rob Maddox . The two alums have been working with colleges and their students to build modern career tools that suit their needs and the companies looking to hire them.
“We experienced first hand that what was out there didn’t work,” says Jeff Shepherd, Founder of Next Development. “We understand the challenges faced by college graduates on a fundamental level and our frustrations were echoed by our peers. This was the basis for creating discoverED.”
Typical job searching sites are driven by specific job titles, rather than broad categories like college majors. discoverED uses the college major as a central focus and provides education and development to answer the age old question, “What can I do with a degree in ‘X’ field.” All of this takes place in a community setting that allows all members of the college campus and employer’s recruiting staff to share expertise, exchange knowledge, educate, and provide meaningful employment connections. Because the students will be educated about the positions for which they apply, employers can expect to see candidates that are a better fit and work out longer than employees who stumble upon their positions.
“We can all remember our first job search, how difficult it was, and how the end result wasn’t exactly what we thought,” said Ann Lansinger, President of Baltimore’s Emerging Technology Centers.. “This is an expensive process for both employers and employees. discoverED will help make this process more fluid and effective.”With discoverED, every college student across the country will be able to keep track of their entire college career with projects, resumes, and transcripts in one place and apply to on-campus jobs, internships, and post graduation careers – all for free.
About Next Development
Founded in 2006, Next Development is an education technology firm that provides solutions to colleges and students. Their new product, discoverED, is a full circle network of freshman year to post graduation career tools that helps educate current students and graduates on career opportunities available to them and how to seize them. For more information on discoverED and Next Development, visit http://www.thediscovered.com.
About the ETC (www.etcbaltimore.com)
The ETC, a venture of the Baltimore Development Corporation, is a non-profit business incubator focused on growing early-stage technology and biotechnology companies. The ETC promotes economic development, providing business, technical, and networking connections to help these companies grow and prosper – adding to both the job and tax base of Baltimore City. To date, ETC client companies have received over $819 million in funding and have been issued nearly 200 patents. Since 1999 ETC has provided assistance to 153 companies. Eighty-three percent of its graduate clients are still in business.
About discovered
A while back, we set out to create a way to bridge the gap between college and work. No true means to convert educational experience into work experience existed. Students had questions. “What kind of career can I get with a degree in this major?” “What steps do I have to take to get there?” “Where do I begin?” Employers wanted to target college students for internships and recent graduates for entry level positions, but no channel specific to the higher education setting existed. We built a program, discoverED, to facilitate the connections of college internships and post-graduation careers. This is where it started…
discoverED is a college career development community; a system of resources that bring together the minds of college administration, faculty, students and the businesses these students go on to work for and build. This is what it’s all about…
The most visible aspect of discoverED is the process of internship and job placement for current students and recent graduates. This process is built around simple and easy to understand criteria that are derived from the structure of higher education learning, mainly, the college major. Today’s typical job searching site is mainly driven by job titles, rather than fields of work. In the case of the student or college graduate, the path the future holds is not often as specific as a narrowly defined job title, but rather the degree in which they are seeking or possess. Sometime it isn’t a career being sought, but rather an internship to get a feel or better understanding for a certain field. Sometimes it is a position on campus to help pay for college. Sometimes it is an on-campus research position with a professor getting ready to publish work a student feels compassionate about or may be interested in studying further in the future. No matter the type of position, no matter the place, no matter the person involved, discoverED captures the essence of the college process and places the right candidate in the right job.
Beyond simple job searching, we’ve created ways for the campus community to come together and share expertise. From a forum where students can ask members of the campus and even alumni what job possibilities may be available in each major, to a blog where students can read stories of jobs that alumni from their institution have gained.
The more we progressed through designing discoverED style job searching, the more avenues the program presented. Among these avenues were a manner in which colleges themselves could advertise and manage on-campus positions, a process by which students could create and store resumes and instantly share them with professors and members of their career services team for critique and assistance, a system that would help students keep track of assignments and projects and provide them a place to store files accessible from any computer, and as time goes by the list continues to grow. This is how it evolved…
On a daily basis we think about everything discoverED has to offer, from its strong points to features we would like to have in the future. We have a mass of great ideas, and they are on the way. This is how we grow…