GoEducate, Inc. (www.goeducate.com) and Accion Labs, Inc. (www.accionlabs.com) today announced a formal partnership to expand GoEducate’s AI-powered career navigation and regional opportunity marketplace platform across the United States.

Following several successful deployments—including the Sacramento Opportunity Portal (https://sacramento.goeducate.com), the Northern New Mexico College Career Navigation System (https://nnmc.goeducate.com), and integration with Nucleos (www.nucleos.com) for correctional education programs in Florida and Hawaii—GoEducate and Accion Labs are joining forces to scale the platform’s reach to regions, campuses, workforce boards and prison re-entry programs nationwide.

A Partnership Built on Proven Collaboration

The two companies have collaborated for years to develop and refine GoEducate’s platform infrastructure—an innovative education-to-employment ecosystem that connects people, programs, and jobs in one integrated environment.

With the primary build now complete and market tested, the partnership transitions from development to implementation at scale, pairing GoEducate’s platform-grade infrastructure and AI-driven tools with Accion Labs’ proven ability to develop, deploy, integrate, and maintain enterprise-grade software solutions across complex environments.

“This partnership is the natural evolution of our long collaboration,” said Rod Johnson, GoEducate’s board chair. “ We built a platform that helps individuals explore real jobs, aligned training, and live career pathways in one place. With Accion Labs, we can now bring that experience to entire regions, schools, and re-entry programs at scale.”

Connecting People, Programs, and Jobs

GoEducate’s platform reimagines workforce navigation by offering a public-facing marketplace where individuals can discover career opportunities and directly connect to the education and training that lead to them.

Key innovations include:

  • AI-supported career exploration via the GoSurvey (https://goeducate.com/GOSurvey), used by over 40,000 individuals to date.
  • Automated resume building and matching through GoResume (https://goeducate.com/GOResume), linking users to live job postings.
  • Regional and institutional portals for unified visibility into education and employment ecosystems.

Both tools—GoSurvey and GoResume—were co-developed with Accion Labs, demonstrating the deep technical partnership between the two firms.

“Accion Labs has been privileged to work closely with GoEducate from the inception. Accion Labs’ proven track record of delivering transformational digital and product engineering services and solutions backed by innovation has enabled GoEducate’s platforms to develop a compelling career navigation system. Accion’s mission has always been to deliver scalable, intelligent solutions for customers that drive success. By combining our technical expertise in AI, cloud architecture, and enterprise integration with GoEducate’s visionary career navigation system, we are enabling a national model for connecting people, programs, and jobs” said Prathima Rao, SVP and Business Unit Leader of Accion Labs.

Expanding Nationwide Through Strategic Deployments

Together, GoEducate and Accion Labs will target key national use cases:

  • Regional workforce boards connecting training programs with real job opportunities.
  • K–12 and higher education institutions providing modernized career counseling tools.
  • Corrections and prison reentry programs enabling incarcerated individuals to prepare for employment.
  • Corporate and public-private initiatives focused on upskilling and talent pipelines.

GoEducate has a long-term relationship with the R & D national human capital and STEM nonprofit, National Laboratory for Education Transformation (NLET), www.nletbeta.org NLET has a long track record of Federal and private grants working on education-to-employment systems. This relationship allows NLET to respond to grants and RFPs for program development where GoEducate is a primary solution.

About GoEducate

GoEducate, Inc. (www.goeducate.com) is a workforce technology company connecting education, training, and employment through intelligent career navigation tools and regional opportunity marketplaces. Built on years of development and pilot testing, GoEducate enables users to explore real-time career pathways while helping institutions and employers align education with workforce demand.

About Accion Labs

Accion Labs is an AI-first, Platform-led Innovation Engineering company headquartered in Pittsburgh, USA. It specializes in building AI-enabled digital solutions that help enterprises modernize how they build, operate, and optimize technology.

Accion Labs operates across 23 global locations with over 4200+ employees, including more than 1,000 engineers trained in AI and GenAI. The enterprise delivers solutions across five core areas: Digital Engineering, Cloud & Platform Engineering, Data & AI, Enterprise System Automation, and Agentic AI, supported by proprietary IP and proven delivery frameworks. Accion specializes in Digital Strategy Consulting & Innovation, Software Development and Engineering, Operations & Management with a rigor on Performance Optimization, Automation and Analytics.

Accion Labs has been recognized among Pittsburgh’s Fastest-Growing Companies by the Pittsburgh Business Times and as a Leader in Innovation by Smart Business Magazine. Accion Labs is also recognized by ISG, Everest Group, Zinnov Zones, and HFS for its leadership in Generative AI, Software Product Engineering, and Engineering R&D.

Media Contacts

GoEducate, Inc.
gordon.freedman@NLET.org
www.goeducate.com

Accion Labs US Inc.
info@accionlabs.com
www.accionlabs.com

Oakland, CA (September 11) The National Laboratory for Education Transformation (www.NLET.org), a California R & D nonprofit, announced the appointment of Dan Lamborn as a Senior Advisor for the Semiconductor and AI Sector Workgroup.

Lamborn brings nearly two decades of industry knowledge in the semi-conductor and microelectronics ecosystem. His experience at Intel spans process engineering, supply chain management, supplier relationship management and team building.  His tenure spanned multiple process nodes from 32nm to 10nm logic including Intel’s first embedded air-gap process, which he developed from concept to high-volume.  In addition, he joined the Intel/Micron partnership on NAND memory technology and integrated two 3D-NAND nodes.  Lamborn stepped away from Industry to start-up an academic institute at Boise State University and developed a passion for technology focused workforce development and organizational partnership and collaboration.  Lamborn holds degrees in chemical engineering, a BS from The University of Utah and a PhD from The Pennsylvania State University.  He also holds an MBA from The Pennsylvania State University.

NLET sees an important role in developing job-ready candidates for the US semiconductor industry, supporting CHIPS Act initiatives and programs, and dramatically increasing AI developers utilizing superior U.S. chips. The appointment of Dan Lamborn as Senior Advisor for NLET’s Semiconductor and AI sector work will leverage his technical and business experience, along with his extensive network of contacts developed over 20 years in the semiconductor industry and academia.

“We’re honored to welcome Dan to our Advisory team and working group,” said Gordon Freedman, founder and President of NLET. “Dan’s unique perspective from industry and academia will be a tremendous asset as we expand our work in California, Arizona and New Mexico to support workforce development for the semiconductor industry.

NLET supports two cutting edge AI solutions that join, in one system, users looking for work, courses, programs and training tuned for the real-time job market, and employers in need of very specific talent pipelines.

As an advisor, Lamborn will guide NLET in initiatives that bridge education, entrepreneurship, and industry needs—ensuring that emerging talent and businesses are aligned with the evolving demands of the semiconductor supply chain, educational support and the broader electronics industry ecosystem.

“It’s an amazing time for the industry and for our nation as we look at the opportunities in developing the education, training and industry networks to connect the many workforce needs.  I’m honored and excited to join NLET at this time as the semiconductor industry amplifies their focus on expanding career opportunities here in the USA,” said Lamborn. “The efforts of the NLET team will help to bridge many connectivity gaps between training and career connections and will be a significant benefit to the industry.”

This collaboration underscores NLET’s commitment to engaging industry and education experts to help drive its national agenda for leadership in education, technology, and workforce transformation.

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About NLET

NLET is a 501(c)(3) national nonprofit organization focused on accelerating innovation and workforce development through strategic partnerships with education institutions, industry, and government. NLET designs and deploys programs and best in class technology that connect emerging talent with high-demand sectors such as semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and AI.

Media Contact: Gordon Freedman, gordon.freedman@nlet.org

I am honored to have been interviewed about our work at the National Laboratory for Education Transformation, www.NLET.org, by Wes Smith of the www.PresidentsForum.org, the up and coming consortium of change-agent institutions. See the interview here.
The basic message in my President’s Forum video blog is that the online, edtech, work-tech era, as we know it, is coming to an end.
Starting roughly in 1998, it was mechanical on the web. Code was pounded out to make courses and program digitally instead of in-class.
Unfortunately, online learning, ed and work tech came up without the “smarts” that started to define digital culture all around us in the consumer and social spaces online and in apps.
Now with AI-first projects the world changes again. People, programs and jobs will exist in sophisticated data lakes to reach aligned objectives for each.

Oakland, CA (June 13, 2025) The National Laboratory for Education Transformation (www.NLET.org), a California R & D nonprofit, today announced the appointment of Richard Curtin, Managing Partner at Silicon Catalyst (www.SiliconCatalyst.com) as a Senior Advisor for the NLET Semiconductor Industry and AI Sector workgroup.

Curtin brings decades of strategic leadership and deep industry knowledge in the semiconductor ecosystem. Silicon Catalyst is the world’s only incubator focused exclusively on semiconductor solutions. Curtin has been instrumental in shaping early-stage startup acceleration, driving go-to-market strategies, and fostering global partnerships with industry leaders.

NLET sees an important role to develop job-ready candidates for the US semiconductor industry’s workforce, in support of CHIPS Act initiatives and programs, and to dramatically increase the number of AI developers utilizing superior U.S. chips. The appointment of Richard Curtin as Senior Advisor for NLET’s Semiconductor and AI sector work will leverage his technical and business experience, along with his extensive network of contacts developed over 40 years in the semiconductor industry.

“We’re honored to welcome Richard to our Advisory team and working group,” said Gordon Freedman, founder and President of NLET. “Richard’s unique perspective and track record of innovation and execution in the semiconductor space will be a tremendous asset as we expand our work in California, Arizona and New Mexico to support workforce development for the semiconductor industry.

NLET supports two cutting edge AI solutions companies that join, in one system, users looking for work, courses, programs and training tuned for the real-time job market, and employers in need of very specific talent pipelines.

As an Advisor, Curtin will guide NLET in initiatives that bridge education, entrepreneurship, and industry needs—ensuring that emerging talent and small businesses are aligned with the evolving demands of the semiconductor supply chain, educational support and the broader electronics industry ecosystem.

“I’m excited to join NLET at a time when the semiconductor industry is experiencing dynamic growth and unprecedented national focus,” said Curtin. “The work NLET is doing to develop and connect talent pipelines with advanced technology industries is both timely and essential, and I look forward to contributing to its mission. Further, fueling the certification and training of AI professionals is an added benefit to create demand for the industry.”

This collaboration underscores NLET’s commitment to engaging industry, veterans and experts to help drive its national agenda for leadership in education, technology, and industry transformation.

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About NLET

NLET is a 501(c)(3) national nonprofit organization focused on accelerating innovation and workforce development through strategic partnerships with education institutions, industry, and government. NLET designs and deploys programs and best in class technology that connect emerging talent with high-demand sectors such as semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and AI.

About Silicon Catalyst   “it’s about what’s next®”

www.siliconcatalyst.com

Silicon Catalyst is the only incubator + accelerator focused on the Global Semiconductor Industry including Chips, Chiplets, Materials, IP and Silicon fabrication-based Photonics, MEMS, Sensors, Life Science and Quantum. More than 1,500 startup companies worldwide have engaged with Silicon Catalyst and the company has admitted over 150 exciting companies. With a world-class network of mentors to advise startups, Silicon Catalyst is helping new semiconductor companies address the challenges in moving from idea to realization. The incubator + accelerator supplies startups with access to design tools, silicon devices, networking, and a path to funding, banking and marketing acumen to successfully launch and grow their company’s novel technology solutions. Over the past ten years, the Silicon Catalyst model has been proven to dramatically accelerate a startup’s trajectory while at the same time de-risking the equation for investors.

Media Contact:  Gordon Freedman, gordon.freedman@nlet.org

California needs a living, breathing laboratory to experiment and pilot, fail, and try again to solve the three-body training, searching, and hiring problem. This will require stepping out of the well-established comfort zones held by institutions, employers, and foundations to look for common solutions to a common problem across all the sectors in the state.

The Steady-State Economy is Gone

Twenty-five to a hundred years ago, the economy existed in what could be described as a labor, training, and employment steady-state. Early in the 20th Century, physicist Albert Einstein, once a steady-state believer in how the universe operated, created his two relativity theories and physics changed forever.

We now face a similar situation in the world of training, job-seeking, and work. We have transitioned out of a steady-state environment where skilled labor was largely represented by unions who saw to the training and advancement of their members and employers who described their employment needs concretely. While this world sped up between the end of World War II and the late 1980s, the ground was still relatively stable. People knew what the jobs were and what was needed to be qualified.

During that period, schools provided the first cut, sorting students into either future blue-collar workers who would not need a college degree and or future middle-managers and professionals who would need a college pedigree. Now, thanks to the information age and the rapidly accelerating digital and algorithmic era, all these worlds are tumbling in a relativistic free fall.

The Relativistic Economy Defies Prediction

The life of learning, training, and work is now relative; someone could be doing data entry at a medical facility one day and decide the next day to pursue a medical degree.

The number of factors effecting types of work and its volatility or stability can no longer be predicted or tracked accurately. Furthermore, the types of mid-skilled work that are in high demand are generally opaque to jobseekers, hidden from view in the blur of the new economy.

The nature of work has changed so radically that even the line between blue-collar and white- collar work is losing definition, as are pay scales. A person doing high-end programming, classically a blue-collar keyboard job, can make more than a mid-level or first-level senior executive.

Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in the era of hyper-social media to explain the multitude of existing jobs or the training required. The popular conception of the types of jobs that exist is likely a holdover from how baby boomers and their parents thought about traditional occupations.

The largest factor effecting job unpredictability is the rate and type of jobs that are being removed due to automation and artificial intelligence (AI), which, in turn, is creating new types of employment. Add to this the labor and economics reality that unions are at the end of a long retreat in the skilled trades, while, unexpectedly, mid-skill jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree are again expanding rapidly.

Overcoming the “Three-Body Problem”

In the relativistic economy, people, training, and jobs are floating variables that are not defined by data standards or tracked uniformly in one ecosystem or technical solution. And there are no owners, stewards, or guides as there were in the past.

Instead, there are fractional participants who represent one aspect of the employment-training, job-seeking triangle. By contrast, in the consumer, social media, and commercial sectors the various participants in those markets are exposed to each other every second by algorithm and shared benefits. The effects are powerful and scalable.

However, in what can be described as the employment-education-jobseeker “three-body problem,” no such mechanisms have emerged. The three-body problem, also from physics, describes the fact that there is no mathematics that can accurately describe the gravitational interaction of the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Physicists from Isaac Newton to Henri Poincaré struggled unsuccessfully with this mathematical problem.

Likewise, the motions and directions in the employment, training, and jobseeker information space are equally complex, and defy the direct application of algorithms with any accuracy. Technical solutions that could describe and further each of these roles is held back on one side by institutionalism and on the other side by technology and data solutions that struggle with making two predictive calculations well, let alone three.

Achieving a unified solution across the training-searching-employment three-body problem is also impeded by the technology at community colleges, universities, HR departments, and workforce development agencies which, through no fault of their own, is fundamentally “yesterday.”

These technologies and data systems are old, brittle, and cannot interact with each other because their lineage is from ledgers to floppies to servers to remote servers. And, most importantly, they were not made to interact or report to end-users (students, jobseekers, faculty, or HR personnel).

Thus, the legacy programs and projects are nowhere close to being integrated cloud solutions, like the ones that power social, commercial, and consumer apps. Those apps were, and are built, tested, and re-tested from the ground up with users in multiple focus groups.

In higher education learning management and student information systems, just as in employer HR systems, the end-users—students, jobseekers and employees—are almost always the last consideration.

So Goes California, So Goes the Nation

In a large state like California, despite a robust economy and its global economic position, many people are still out of work, or employed but locked into dead-end jobs, while the cost of living is rising. This stagnation hits disproportionally harder on those near or not far above the poverty line, disproportionately impacting the large Latino population and the largely urban African American population.

Thus, intelligently addressing the California education/training-to-work pipeline is an economic and social imperative because it affects everyone in the state. Unfortunately, institutional, agency, and policy solutions alone are not the most effective means for change, inclusion, and public understanding.

There may be mechanisms to adjust for this situation, but they are not going to come directly from the institutions, agencies, or practices that have participated, perhaps unknowingly, in the construction of the social inequalities and economic barriers in the first place.

The use of modern information and data technology tools and solutions to identify training opportunities is desperately needed. Such tools can be married in real-time training with aligned employment opportunities to guide people in need of employment or better employment.

Building a California Laboratory for Training and Jobs

California, because of its global prowess in technology and media, has the native means for such technical transformations, but none of the methods or collaboration powers to carry out such work. To work collaboratively across the commercial and public sectors requires leadership and risk and the recognition and drive for shared results. The state has done it before in other areas.

Within the 114 community colleges, 23 California State University (CSU) campuses, 75 workforce investment boards (WIBs), and myriads of foundations each working on some aspect of the equity barriers to appropriate training for available jobs, there is a lot of untapped potential.

To release this potential will require that new organizations, virtual and data-rich ones, self- organize under mutual leadership to unite the traditional education and training institutions with the economic and change-oriented powerhouses in the California economy.

Until this happens, most individuals in the state who are unemployed or under-employed will continue to confront difficult decisions with imperfect information, no useful overall communication or information channels, and no mechanism to receive streamed opportunities about training and jobs in their social media accounts.

Since there is a lack of reliable, education-labor market data and information in a form that can be consumed on a smart phone and learned about through social media, there is no way to hear about opportunities, study linked training materials, become certified or badged and apply for, or be recommended for work, all in one solution.

Certainly, there is a table big enough in the state to gather all the stakeholders, including those searching for work, with California’s higher education institutions and workforce agencies and have them all interact directly with the iconic California brands in the tech, bio, research, manufacturing, agriculture, and media industries.

A human capital laboratory is what is needed in a state that knows how to innovate. This should not be impossible. We are talking about the California Dream after all.