A problem solver at heart, Gary Gan, Co-Founder of JobKred, knew he wanted to start his own business since young. From selling magic cards at MRT stations, running co-op bookstores in school, to starting four businesses from scratch, he’s always been on the prowl for new opportunities.
After a failed B2B venture (which he admitted was due to his lack of technical expertise), he took a hiatus from entrepreneurship to join a tech startup. This was another opportunity he was sniffing out – to learn on the job. He quickly realised that he lacked some of the relevant skills for someone in his role. Rather than treating it as a setback, he sniffed out the opportunity to solve the skills gap problem he believed was widespread.
This was how JobKred was born 2014. Today, many small and large businesses, including Fortune 500 Companies, rely on his skills intelligence platform.
We spoke to Gary over a video call (given the pandemic), to hear more about his experiences as an entrepreneur and his journey of building JobKred.
Living The Life Of An Entrepreneur
Gary knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur before he even had a career. His first venture was selling the popular magic cards at MRT stations during secondary school days. This gave him a head start to run co-operative bookstores in junior college.
This led to more ideas, and till date, he has already started four businesses across different industries, including: a karaoke, a video gaming cafe, a loyalty rewards platform, and his latest tech-powered workforce development platform – JobKred.
His approach towards career progression was learning by doing. Every venture – be it a success or failure – was akin to a progressive career chapter that helped him to identify his shortcomings and sharpen his business instincts.
As Gary puts it, you need to “find your passion, do something that you personally enjoy. Then build your own experiences over time, and never stop learning.”
Recognising Skills Gaps In The Workforce
Gary initially played to his strengths when he sold relatable products to the people around him, focusing on mostly B2C businesses. When he later made the switch to break into the B2B market for the first time, he failed terribly with a reward programme business. He learned a great deal from that painful year.
He identified the root problem to be his lack of technical expertise. He took a hiatus from entrepreneurship to join TradeHero, a tech startup company – with no pay – to get his hands dirty – within the technology space he wanted to play in.
Over the course of his career, he gained substantial industry experience and built extensive connections with C-suites, giving him a confidence boost in prospecting multinational companies and embarking on a new B2B venture.
However, things were rather bizarre in the beginning of his stint with TradeHero. Though he had years of entrepreneurship experience under his belt, he was found himself clueless about the exact skills he needed to assume the role of Business Development Director. While he eventually picked up digital marketing, data analytics and coding skills, he noticed a similar problem among many prospective job seekers during his recruitment drive. Many graduates from top institutions, whom he interacted with, were lacking in practical skills despite their stellar academic records. Like him, they did not have the right skills – and a clear understanding of the skills they needed – in order to compete for their desired jobs.
That, to him, was an imminent problem to solve and a business opportunity to seize.
Turning JobKred Into Reality
After his stint at TradeHero, Gary was determined to help other people overcome their skills gaps and fulfill their career aspirations. He and his co-founder, who was introduced to him by a mutual friend, started researching intensively about the recruitment industry, analysing millions of resumes and drawing connections between skills, experiences and job titles.
Consolidating all their findings and analyses, they built a workforce development platform, powered by their recommendation engine, that could help people to identify their skills gaps, provide training options, and display relevant job matches.
Gary gave an interesting analogy to explain the purpose of JobKred. The platform functions as a doctor who runs blood tests to help people identify certain health issues, and then directs them to the pharmacist to prescribe the right medication. In the context of career development, JobKred simply helps individuals and companies to identify their gaps and upskill effectively with the right training courses.
Gary has been guided by a principle for what makes a good business: “The basis of most, if not all, good businesses starts from helping yourself and others to figure out a problem, and find ways to grow to a scale that is investable.”
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Riding On The Wave of Digitalisation
While there were many companies that were aware of the skills gaps among their employees and actively looking into learning and development programmes, JobKred did not come off as an immediate solution as compared to established consultancy firms with a strong track record in change solutions. As the Co-Founder of JobKred, he invested a lot of time in educating potential clients about the importance of skills intelligence by providing ROI calculation on their talent pool and real-word case studies.
To Gary, “many companies have the tendency to hire outwards than training from within. The truth is, there is a limited supply of talents with the right skills, and they are often too expensive to hire. Instead, business owners can focus on identifying and training existing employees with a 50% match of the required skills sets.”
On the other hand, there were companies that did not believe in the value of training. Though JobKred offered a solution that was at the forefront of HR technology, it was too early for its time. Few business owners were familiar with the concept of skills intelligence back then. It was only until the trend of digitalisation kicked in, that skills transformation – and JobKred – started getting massive traction from the public and private sectors.
The sweet spot, in Gary’s perspective, was to introduce something evolutionary at the right time, without having to invest too much effort in educating and prospecting clients.
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Overcoming COVID-19, A Crisis Turned Opportunity
Like many other business owners, Gary was not spared from the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Due to the economic uncertainty, many prospective company partners were struggling to retain their headcount, much less their capacity to invest in skills intelligence. As a result, business for JobKred slowed down.
However, it did not take long for JobKred to recover and scale further as more individuals and companies began to recognise the importance of upskilling. If any good came out of the pandemic, it would be a reminder that nobody was irreplaceable. With more jobs becoming obsolete, constant reskilling was necessary for anyone to stay competitive and relevant in an ever-changing workforce.
For employees, the need isn’t just to upskill, it is to reinvent. “Everyone needs to transform every 5 years, and likely at an increasing frequency. The future will only be more challenging, especially for fresh graduates of this generation, they need to keep up with the accelerated learning pace and turnover.”
As part of the company’s continuous efforts to meet the needs of the workforce, JobKred is currently in the works of launching a new analytical tool to help individuals and companies analyse their core strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, Gary and his Co-Founder are practicing what they preach with JobKred – actively tapping on their own intelligence products to boost the company’s internal capabilities by developing their employees and themselves.
Gary’s vision for JobKred is to become a global leader in skills intelligence. While the dream may seem ambitious for a small homegrown company, JobKred is well positioned for a promising future with its growing portfolio of Fortune 500 companies.
On giving advice to aspiring entrepreneurs and anyone active in the workforce, one of the most effective ways of gaining knowledge was by following successful people on social media and forums. Compared to books that served as motivational resources, he received very practical advice by reading responses from thought leaders and founders surrounding fundraising, business and career development on platforms like Quora and Twitter, as well as industry e-newsletters.
In terms of upskilling and broadening one’s horizons, he feels that there was no better way to do it than learning hands-on. Be it starting a business, or taking on a new job, be willing to try and grow from mistakes.
“Every individual must have a mentality of exploration, be open to job mobility. Focus on your core capabilities, but actively develop new skills so that you can expand your scope of work and approach problems with different perspectives.”
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