Sociov is a career coaching platform which aims to democratize career coaching services in Southeast Asia with the help of data.
Sociov is co-founded and led by Youth Trainer, Neil Soria, while studying young people across Asia. During his journey to deepen his understanding on the intrinsic and inviolable dignity of young people, he came across leaders, coaches and mentors who all made him realize that providing young people with the opportunity to be creative and inspired to imagine a better future are rights every person must have.
By democratizing career coaching, Sociov hopes to enable parents to understand the dynamics of the behaviors and career choices of their children. According to Soria, “The pressure of understanding while taking control makes parents vulnerable of using the wrong approach to influence their child. Imagine, you want nothing but the best for your child but, without data, there is a huge tendency that you might be giving them some bad career advice.”
The pioneering coaching-tech start-up targets a B2C market with a parent account and an end-user account for their child. “We are finding our own blue ocean in the professional coaching industry. The industry is young and has a lot of potential but not a lot of people understand what coaching is, how such service could help them and how it is different from mentorship and counselling.”
Sociov matches the end-user or the child account with a professional career coach, through their proprietary matching algorithm. The parent account will have access to data visualizations of the assessments of their child and other predictive and prescriptive models such as career track or future job recommendations based on their child’s data.
“What a lot of parents don’t know is that their bad career advice can lose them a ton load of time and money. Worst case scenario is when these ‘opinion-based advice lead to child rebellion’. Imagine spending on your child’s education, needs and future during their elementary and High School days but then when they come to university they shift or worse become unemployed as they graduate just because they followed an unfit word of advice. So, we want to equip parents with data. If parents become data-driven when approaching and communicating advice properly during difficult conversations with their child then, we can build healthier family relationships.”
A young yet, ambitious team
Neil, co-founder and CEO of Sociov, shares with us that their team is young, ambitious, and daring and is always looking for ways to innovate the business. "When we first thought of the concept, we wanted to move as fast as we could. This had us succumb towards wasteful processes. Thanks to mentors, advisors, and coaches, Sociov has been continuously adopting lean methodologies like the Lean Startup and Kaizen. These help us cut waste and costs."
Neil and his co-founders, Lea Berioso (CTO), Josh Alas (CHRO), John De Recto (CFO) and Atty. Chad Osorio (Legal Counsel) launched a Concierge Minimum Viable Product early 2021. The five co-founders consider coaching-technology as a billion-dollar opportunity.
“We are aware that the biggest chunk of our expense will be allocated on building a strengthened team, marketing, consumer education, changing customer behaviors and product development” Neil says. “Coaching is still not a household name, we want to change that.
Sociov is launching a lite version of the app with limited functionality in the first quarter of 2022.