What brought me to UNIQ You two years ago is exactly what keeps me here: a bold, innovative, and proven collective approach to tackling a stubborn and complex challenge — one that sits squarely at the crossroads of skills shortages, gender equality, educational equality, and STEM education.
UNIQ You’s fresh approach continues to resonate with industry and education, their commitment and partnership is what is driving us rapidly forward with our national expansion and scale goals.
Being responsive to trends in Australia’s evolving labour market, providing educators and students with easy access to labour market information in a real-time, trusted, and powerful format – conversations – is what sets us apart from all others.
In this article, I’ll share deeper insights into how UNIQ You is intentionally scaling for impact.
Scaling for Impact
While many resonate with Marian Wright Edelman’s famous statement, “You can’t be what you can’t see,” UNIQ You believes that in today’s world — overwhelmed by information, noise, social media, and curated images — simply seeing is not enough.
Young people need to see themselves in it before they can truly consider that they might be it. To extend further on this: when students genuinely connect with a person and their story, they begin to believe that ‘it’ — the pathway, the job, the role, the life — is truly available to someone just like them. This belief then builds the confidence they need to pursue and ultimately become ‘it’.
UNIQ You, by focusing on strengthening the early stages of the talent pipeline, is expanding the pool of female talent who are seeing and considering roles that lead to employment in rapidly growing, under-represented industries facing critical skill shortages. Our emphasis is on growing the overall talent pool — not simply giving organisations a competitive edge in attracting talent from the existing limited pool.
As an outcome-driven organisation with access and equity as a key strategic priority, ‘reaching those who need us most’ is one of UNIQ You’s strategic priorities. ‘Those who need us most’ are students and educators whose access to career pathways and support is often limited not only by where they live, but also the intersecting factors of gender, socio-economic background, race, ethnicity, and language.
Providing genuine access to a diverse pool of relatable real-time stories to students via real-time conversations with a choice of more than 100 UNIQ You Advisors, expands their circle of influence beyond natural networks and geographical limits by literally bringing the world to them.
UNIQ You has 3 outcome measures; knowledge, curiosity and confidence. These 3 measures form the basis of our Measurement, Evaluation and Learning framework.
We are sharpening our focus on Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL)— last year UNIQ You’s MEL framework was strengthened by the introduction of stakeholder focus groups and interviews, and this year we are taking it a step further by working closely with some of our education partners to gain deeper insights into the most significant points of influence and engagement for young women when they see and consider careers in underrepresented fields. By strengthening our MEL framework, we’ll ensure that our programs continue to deliver meaningful, relevant and measurable change.
In addition, through our Major Partnership with Rio Tinto, we are running a pilot program focused on professional learning for educators and career development practitioners designed to achieve sustained impact beyond initial engagement.
Our long-term goal is to conduct a longitudinal study tracking the pathway of students from points of influence in secondary school all the way through to employment.
UNIQ You is a ground-breaking service, and at risk of sounding cliched, UNIQ You’s service does smash stereotypes and does bust myths. Most students struggle to find authentic role models they can truly relate to, it’s not enough to simply show career pathways, they are very savvy and need real people and trusted connections.
View our 2024 Impact Report and video here.
Val Ridley
CEO, UNIQ You
