Based in Netherlands

The Experience Factory

A For-profit with social mission

How This Works

As part of the TRANSFORM Support Hub, you will learn how to advance your career while getting hands on experience with organizations like this one.

Organization Details

The Experience Factory (TEF) is a young social enterprise that focuses on reducing youth unemployment by providing a unique personal approach to traineeships to unemployed recently graduated Colombians, guiding them into social responsible leaders of the future. Our focus are graduates from universities who are well educated but lack the work experience, business and soft skills required by companies for the first steps in their careers. TEF provides a program that prepares the talents in the first step in their careers and supports them to develop their full potential for their future careers, which could be on all levels of management, industries and organisations.

Impact Story

TEF was initiated in South Africa in 2014 to fight the unemployment amongst graduates and tackle the more structural and long-term challenge of lack of good skilled (black) management. In South Africa, hundreds of thousands of graduates can’t find a job because they lack the essential (social) work experience, business and soft skills for the jobs. Meanwhile we noticed hundreds of thousands of vacancies because the companies could not find nor guide the right talents with sufficient work experience, business and soft skills for the job. Hence, we founded The Experience Factory to find and prepare the talents and offer them a structured development program in which work experience is combined with a personal & professional development program including mentoring, lecturing and peers review, in order to assist them in the first steps and year of their careers.

We believe the job market in Colombia for the graduates pursuing their first steps in their careers faces the same characteristics and challenges as in South Africa. Colombia is socially divided in 6 layers or ‘estratos’ where people who belong to estrato 1 live in the poorest neighbourhoods and ‘estrato’ 6 in the richest parts of the city. The same situation is applicable for the universities. Very expensive private universities guarantee a bright future while the middle universities provide good quality education, but students encounter problems with finding employment afterwards.

In South Africa we have been piloting and pivoting the program over the last 2 years and we are now ready to scale and replicate the model to Colombia. For this we set up a crowdfunding campaign to make sure the resources are in place to set up a professional organisation and also pilot the model in Colombia.