Experiential Learning as a Service with Leah Davidson

How do you bridge the gap between students who do not have the necessary experience and network that will help them get hired after college and companies who are counting their losses and are working to avoid hiring the wrong people? Leah Davidson saw this as a dilemma that persists in society and she has made it her mission to connect students looking to gain real-world experience with companies who are willing to host exciting projects.

Leah Davidson is an entrepreneurial powerhouse with a compelling personal story. She’s the co-founder of Canduit, a SaaS platform for experiential learning that matches students looking to gain real-world experience with companies hosting exciting projects. Canduit is currently working with about 30 plus universities in North and Latin America, as well as online education programs, high schools, and camps.

Before co-founding Canduit, Leah was the Strategic Partner Manager at DoorDash where she was responsible for strategy and operational roles. While at DoorDash, she founded Project Dash which used DoorDash’s logistics network to minimize food waste and fight hunger.

Leah has served as a United Nations Youth Ambassador which involves various roles for different UN agencies including being a blogger for UNICEF’s Voices of Youth Initiative on the Environment and Climate Change. She has also served as a youth expert policymaker for UNESCO on education and sustainable development at a conference hosted in Japan.

Leah earned her Bachelor of Science degree and graduated as summa cum laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where she majored in Economics Management in Global Innovation and minored in English.

What You’ll Hear On This Episode of When Science Speaks

Leah Davidson shares how being the first to attend college in her family shaped her time at Wharton and her professional life

How Leah realized the best way to bridge the gap between students looking for experiential learning and companies who wanted to hire the right talent

Leah discusses piloting Canduit’s technology in Santiago, Chile

The real-world problems and use-cases that shaped Canduit’s target market

Leah shares her perspective on the market outlook for experiential and online learning

How Canduit can support and work with PhDs and postdocs

Leah shares her advice on funding and other resources for young startup founders

Skills Leah has found useful in her leadership role

Connect with Leah Davidson

Canduit

Leah Davidson on LinkedIn

Greg Lewin on LinkedIn

DoorDash

Enabling Academic and Workplace Connection

Finding out what they want to do after years of studying is a struggle for students at any level. And even when they know, getting the job they desire remains elusive to many because they lack the experience and connections necessary to land a job that finds them to be the right fit. On the other hand, employers are working hard to minimize their expenditures for recruitment while at the same time, optimizing their recruitment efforts. They want to make sure they hire the right people but they often lack the tools that can help them find the right talent for the position that they need to fill.

Having been on the student side, Leah Davidson understands the anxiety it creates among her peers, and she learned from her partner, Greg Lewin, that the same woes ail the corporate world. This is why they decided to bridge the gap between students looking to gain experiential learning that they can add to their resume and companies who want to work with the right people for the right job. And so they created Canduit, a SaaS platform that matches students looking to gain real-world experience with companies hosting exciting projects.

More exposure for students in a less confrontational setting

Experience and connection are often necessary to help students land their dream job after the years they spent studying and preparing for their chosen career. It would be helpful for them to be exposed to companies with goals and businesses geared towards the path they want to take because this will do two things: concretize their career trajectory and provide them with experiences that they can add to their resume.

Canduit aims to provide students with an opportunity to gain this exposure in a less confrontational setting. They are able to provide students with real-life experience on what it would be like to work in the industry they are aiming for and can help pave the path towards getting hired by even better companies in the future. According to Leah, it’s not always about getting hired by the big names from the get-go, it’s more important to be hired by companies who are a perfect fit for your skills and your ideal career path.

As for companies, Canduit is able to give them a roster of candidates who are capable of fulfilling the needs of their company, people with the right technical know-how and a passion to learn the ropes and get the job done. They allow companies to get a glimpse of who to hire based on accurate work samples, which are the number one predictor on job performance. Doing this also takes away the confrontational process of students and employers trying to sell themselves.

Canduit offers both students and companies an opportunity to work together both online and offline, giving them the space they need to build networks, connections, and answering the need to find the right fit for jobs and experiences.

Learn more about Leah Davidson on this week’s episode of When Science Speaks.