We’re excited to share news of the release of a brand new version of Fledglink, a free app that helps match young people aged 16-24 with the best jobs, internships and opportunities for them based on their personality, goals and interests – and much more.

We teamed up with the team at Fledglink earlier this summer to help refresh the app’s UX and accessibility to make sure it would have the biggest positive impact as possible on fledgeling young professionals.

As Fledglink founder and business psychologist Ellie Yell (pictured right) explains: “Our mission is to help every young person achieve their potential. The development of the app has always worked towards this, by offering the best support and guidance to young people and making it accessible and user-friendly.

“One important aspect of this is to provide the best possible resources to help young people grow and develop. The app refresh was all about the user, making everything young people need to develop their early career more accessible and personal.”

Jobs of the future

The free-to-use app provides its users with an array of features including smart matching with employers, employer diversity awareness ratings, exercises and tools for becoming job ready, work and internship opportunities, peer to peer networking and virtual assessments designed to allow users to verify their skills.

The app also makes finding opportunities fun and unintimidating, particularly when it’s been widely reported that 85% of the jobs people will be doing in 2030 don’t even exist yet!

According to Fledgelink game ‘the super future job predictor’, Simpleweb developer Kate who worked on the Fledglink refresh just a year after re-booting her career as a developer, will be best suited as an ‘Upcycling Engineer’ in her future career – bringing to life new products that positively impact humanity (which we think is pretty cool).

That’s not all though, as Ellie adds: “The biggest new feature of the update is the new, customisable ‘discovery feed’. Before we just had a simple home feed that displayed posts written by users. We transformed this into a personalisable news feed, where we post useful resources, blog articles, opportunity alerts and events all carefully curated for our users.

“The most exciting aspect of this is that users can now choose what kind of resources they would like to see on the news feed, from a choice of ten different categories.”

A personal mission

Ellie started out by founding Demo:U, a company that provides immersive assessment and interview experiences for socially disadvantaged and minority individuals. But Ellie wanted to find a way to reach the thousands more young people out there that wanted support and so set about creating the free Fledglink app to do just that.

For Ellie, part of the motivation for setting up Fledglink came from wishing she’d had more support working her way up the career ladder herself.

“Because I’m so old, I didn’t have the luxury of something like Fledglink to help me find out more about myself, get ready for work and discover careers,” she explains. “So I had to work hard to seek out and get opportunities; which paid off.

“The one thing I wish I did more of was work with someone to prepare answers to interview questions. I felt stupid about asking dad or mum to role-play scenarios with me. But all that meant was that I ended up giving stupid answers. I learnt quickly, but I could have got dream jobs at the time if I’d prepared better.”

Meaningful careers

Helping the next generation to find their dream careers is an inspiring goal, but not something that’s easy. The team at Fledglink are now working hard to make sure the new version of the app reaches as many young people as possible.

Ellie explains: “We’re really looking at how we can drive positive behaviour within the app. What this means is asking ourselves how can we encourage users to start working on everything that goes into gaining meaningful employment when they are finished in education.

“If we can achieve this, it will open up a huge amount of opportunity to some who may otherwise not have access to it. We will be using the app to support our workshop programme which we will be developing over this school year.”

Download Fledglink for free via the Fledglink website.

If you’d like to discuss your startup or project, get in touch with Simpleweb today.

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