An interview with Alex Lamb, Founder & CEO of BOLDLY

What traction do you have so far?
BOLDLY is live and we are in implementation with our first clients. We’re passed beta but have plenty of activity executing our product roadmap! We’re getting great feedback from clients so far, and the prospective customers we’re speaking with are really liking our focus on career mapping and skills, as well as our coaching DNA. We already have good traction, but it feels like we’re just at the beginning of our journey!

What is the story and inspiration behind starting BOLDLY?
We were amazed and frustrated by the lack of decision-making resources we had during our career journeys, and we’re practitioners! When I look back at my own career decisions, I went through a really tedious process of speaking with various friends, professionals, I got a Coach and went running and took every assessment under the sun. It was a very in-direct and messy process of working out my own path. There’s some value in that messy exploration, but there’s also ‘truths’ about careers that not everyone needs to find independently. We developed BOLDLY to make sure people who don’t have enough resources have a place to go and find relevant information on their career choices. We saw a huge gap in the market to be the one go-to place for career resources, information, and advice and services. And it’s not just about career satisfaction and happiness for our individual users. This connect as a macro imperative back to the economy – the more people who are well-aligned to their jobs, the more efficient the whole market works, and BOLDLY wants to play a key role in identifying skills and vocational alignment. There’s so much opportunity for us to have an impact in this space.

What is the unmet market need or challenge that BOLDY is addressing?
Throughout history we haven’t really had enough data to understand how careers truly worked. Recruiters and managers have relied on heuristics and hacks to identify role-fit – we’ve made assumptions based on university attended, grades attained, personality indicators, and a host of unvalidated assessment tools. Then, if there’s an insight about the career path an individual is on, we’ve mostly had ‘static’ career development plans, with no measures of efficacy as they progress.

BOLDLY wants to be the tool that not only accurately identifies skills and competencies in individuals, but also hyperlpersonalizes their development journey, connects them in with relevant project and work opportunities, and ensures we can flex as the future of work and new roles materialize. It’s a big market need, but we’re going at it!

How does your company solve the proposed problem and why you’re the team to solve this problem?
We solve this problem by integrating all of the career resources an individual could need – assessment, careers bots, learning content, internal mobility, coaches and mentors, careers media and activities to build self awareness. It really depends on what the company selects into their careers ecosystem, and the offering they have for their staff. We have backgrounds in organizational psychology, recruitment process outsourcing, project management, HR Technology and innovation, as well as international experience and understand the challenges of the career journey.

Why are you participating in the LearnLaunch Accelerator? Why did you choose this program?
I met Tetyana Astashkina and Ben Bungert and spoke with Jean Hammond and I really saw them as great advocates for our business. I believe these are the type of people that you need to grow your business, and they really supported the vision for BOLDLY, and attracted me to the accelerator. The relationship with ETS is an added benefit – there’s so much potential there, with the rigour they bring to research and data. They’re sitting on so much potential to impact the skills for the new economy – we’re super excited to keep exploring the opportunity to work with them.

Learn more about BOLDLY here.