Originally launched as an internship placement service to help Australian and international graduates gain much-needed experience, Outcome.Life rebranded to InternMatch after building an internship placement platform.

Pivoting to remote internship placement during the pandemic, InternMatch expanded into the US, UK, Canadian and African markets.

InternMatch partnered with the Mandela Legacy Foundation to launch the Global Employment Challenge, an initiative designed to create 10 million jobs across the world by 2035.

When Gerard Holland was working as an outsourced CFO for an international education client, he discovered that Australian and international graduates faced the vexing challenge of not being able to find a job without work experience.

Realising that internships would equip graduates with the experience they needed, he co-founded internship placement service Outcome.Life in 2016.

Later, the company developed an internship placement aggregator platform and changed its name to InternMatch.

While COVID-19 initially brought fears that InternMatch wouldn’t survive a global pandemic, the switch to remote working allowed the company to pivot to remote internship placement and expand into the US, UK, Canada and Africa.

That’s when InternMatch discovered a much more pressing and wider-reaching challenge it desperately wanted to help solve.

“Africa will have one-third of the world’s population by 2050, yet there’s 35% youth unemployment in South Africa alone,” says Gerard.

“If we don’t start activating the continent into employment, the world will have a massive problem.”

When Gerard met with the Mandela Legacy Foundation during the pandemic, one of its stakeholders asked him why InternMatch wasn’t in Africa.

“That conversation made me realise that the model we’d built could have a huge impact on creating employment opportunities there,” says Gerard.

“There’s an enormous skills shortage around the world and a huge population of 18- to 30-year-olds in Africa who are educated and digitally native that can fill that void. In Ethiopia, 65% of people who go to university study STEM and yet so many are unemployed. We are just joining all the dots.”

The Global Employment Challenge was designed to create millions of jobs around the world.

“We’re working with governments and NGOs in Rwanda, Kenya and South Africa to place Africans in remote jobs in Europe, UK, Australia and North America,” says Gerard.

Not only has InternMatch already helped more than 12,000 graduates find internships with 92% of their clients being placed and 74% job seekers being offered employment, but the company’s new scope and $10 million in raised capital is set to significantly expand its global impact.

“In our conversations with African governments, we’re talking about millions of people that could be impacted,” says Gerard.

“Our vision is to be one of the greatest connectors of employment in the world in five years’ time.”

While Gerard wouldn’t necessarily do anything differently if he had his time again, he does wish he had had more fun along the way.

“Life, and business, is about the journey, not the destination.” 

Being part of the EduGrowth community certainly helped ease some of the stress and anxiety associated with growing a Workforce /  EdTech business.

“The roundtables were engaging and insightful and the connections we made at London Tech Week were inspiring.” 

“We’ve formed great networks and achieved revenue indirectly out of EduGrowth.”