The Challenge School and Future focused connecting of the last phase of education (MBO, HBO and WO) and the first phase of work (first job). On this project we collaborated with the Ministry of Education.

With this challenge, we tried to find new ways to support MBO, HBO and university students in finding suitable internships, apprenticeships, vocational training places or their first job. At the same time, we wanted to help entrepreneurs in finding suitable trainees and employees.

In practice it is difficult for students to find internships, apprenticeships, vocational training places or a first job, while those do exist according to the statistics. On the other hand, companies sometimes find it quite hard to the right employees or trainees. This is a problem because it entails a risk for students: they can not finalize their training if they have not done an internship.

Enough reason to encourage the development of solutions to find good matches through open data. We provided data sources about internships, first jobs, data about students flows and labor forecasts. These sources were made available as open data.

The challenge ran from November 2014 to March 2015 and was won by Ties de Kock with Vooruitzicht, an app for making a more informed choice about education.