Wichita startup Knowledge as a Service Inc. (KaaS) has partnered with Wichita State University to help grow the local pipeline of technology talent.
The company recently leveraged the Shocker Career Accelerator program, which brought six students on in part-time roles with KaaS.
“They fill the room with a lot of energy,” said Robert Feeney, co-founder and chief vision officer.
Those students received paid positions that boosted their workplace skills as part of the applied learning model now popular in multiple sectors at WSU.
Three of the students worked as success coaches, and three more worked in sales, Feeney said. And the program also results in full-time employment offers for some students upon graduation. One of those students, Tegan Erwin, a returning adult student at WSU, has been offered a permanent role with KaaS after starting part-time as a customer success coach.
She credited the Shocker Career Accelerator with connecting her to an opportunity she otherwise might have not known existed.
And she credited KaaS — a 2022 WBJ Innovation Awards winner — for a work experience far beyond what one could expect through just an internship.
“I get to create a lot of processes here,” she said. “I get to do so much more than I did in previous jobs.”
That has included working directly with a Fortune 50 technology company and senior-level executives at companies around the world, Feeney said, with Erwin helping leverage KaaS’s Ringorang technology platform.
Ringorang is designed as an app-based, continual training program that employers can use to help drive home the skills needed for everything from safety to processes.
Feeney said that other members of the first student-worker class have been made “soft offers” for employment and that KaaS intends to leverage the WSU pipeline more in the future.
But, he said, KaaS and other stakeholders envision a bigger win-win. The goal is to use the Shocker Career Accelerator program as a model for a similar initiative on a national scale.
Then, students throughout the country can plug in similarly to other companies, while KaaS — which relocated all of its operations to Wichita last year — can provide Ringorang to help with the training those workers will need, Feeney said.
“You bring them on, then add on those skills specific to their job,” he said. “It’s the proof-point that this works. This partnership is going to be the centerpiece for so many more things.”
Correction: The story has been updated to accurately reflect Erwin's current employment status. A previous version identified her as already being a full-time employee.
