In the coming years, "something that will be more important is thinking about how to learn to learn"

Genesis, episode 1, Jean Guo and adaptability

"I'm Jean Guo. I'm the founder and executive director at Konexio. And my role is to work with vulnerable populations and upskill them through digital skills training to prepare them for the future of work. So, I was born in China and I came to the US at the age of five, Los Angeles area, with my parents. I think I picked up the language very quickly since I was so young, but I saw the struggles, especially of my mother, as she didn't speak the language or have a professional network. So I started at an early age becoming self-sufficient and helping her. For example, she was afraid to pick up the phone as she didn't understand what was said on the other end. I think that also developed this culture of being adaptable, learning and also being resourceful at an early age. When I was in high school period, the period where you try to figure out your college, I think I didn't probably have the self-confidence in myself to apply for the best schools

So I think if I didn't have the right mentors, the right teachers and also my mum, who really pushed me, I wouldn't have gotten to go to Stanford University. I studied two majors: human biology and economics. My first job was working as an analyst in a consulting group. I then got a Fulbright scholarship to come to France. I worked at the Paris School of Economics on topics of health economics and, also, the integration of vulnerable populations. So, in the beginning, it was not really a part of my plan when I arrived, doing the research, just a few months in, to start something, but because I heard these stories of individuals telling me that 'I'm here but I don't feel I'm part of the community and it's been months, it's been years, I thought maybe I could try and do something.

So I went at the time, and there are these computer spaces in Paris that are for individuals who might not have computers, so I went to 15 of them to ask if they could host a class that I wanted to build for this student group. Fourteen turned me down and I got one to be excited to host us for free. That's how Konexio started. It was one classroom, one small group of students. I recruited a small group of volunteers. And that was the first cohort in 2016 that I launched. I always say there's two kinds of entrepreneurs: those who always wanted to be one and then find the idea, and then those who find the problem they really want to solve and try to build a solution for it. I think I'm in the second category where I found a huge problem that I really wanted to solve, which led me to create Konexio.

Adaptability is going to be a constant in our lives because of the fact that when I look at where we are in the space of skills, the skills today might not be the skills of tomorrow. And we know that, for example, by 2030, there are jobs that will be required that we don't even know yet. So how do you even prepare with this amount of uncertainty for jobs that don't exist yet? Something that will be more important is thinking about how to learn to learn, to pick up new skills. There's never maybe a moment you will feel completely ready and that's perfectly okay.

For a few years, I was a figure skater. What it taught me: when you fall, you get back up. You learn how to pick yourself up and I think that's a thing that helps you also to build resilience and grit in life. So many things were hard in the beginning. As my French was not perfect, people would make fun of me when I gave presentations in French, in front of me. There's a lot of times I had to justify why me, why I was legitimate in terms of my skills to be able to run this.

You learn from those moments but I think for me, how I took that was: 'Okay, I think I could improve my pitch. I can improve how I talk about Konexio, and I will use it as fuel to add to the fire to be even better. We're kind of our own agents in our lives and I believe firmly in the fact that you have the power to do something and change a lot of what you want. So I think for me, it's taking action every day and happiness is not maybe a passive act, it's something you actively should strive towards, work towards, to be richer, more fulfilled."