How Upkey is Reinventing the Job Market: Amir Badr
Mia McManus, a student and Winter Intern for InTheir20s shares her thoughts on our recent interview with Amir Badr
Quick Background on Amir Badr
In this interview, Amir Badr identified his desire to leave his home country of Iran at the young age of seventeen years old. However, all of the odds were against Badr when he discovered that only a two-year military term could satisfy this desire. Despite this, Badr was able to successfully escape Iran without serving a military term due to his own grandmother. Funding totaling to an amount of five thousand dollars from his grandmother fueled his escape. He then ventured to Turkey, Germany, and ultimately the United States of America. Badr arrived at an airport not knowing a word of English, having only an address and one hundred dollars. A kind stranger noticed that he was lost and helped him by offering directions and a paid taxi ride. A few months later, Badr ran into the same kind stranger from the airport at his job at a Persian Mediterranean restaurant. The two reconnected and this kind individual soon became his mentor, who eventually landed him a competitive job at Exelon.
Motivation behind Upkey
The birth of Upkey resulted from Badr noticing that many immigrants and minorities in the United States do not have professional resources, and often struggle to map out their academic and professional journeys. Keeping this in mind, he created Upkey to provide mentorships, externships, networking, and skill development in an interactive way. Resulting in a population of current students and recent graduates who will be prepared when transitioning into the job market. Badr also came across the issue of many Fortune 500 companies not recruiting diverse candidate pools. This resulted in companies only selecting candidates from top schools and universities that are considered to be “a perfect fit”. Upkey strives to break down this barrier on a daily basis by encouraging recruiters to expand their company’s candidate pool by looking beyond an individual’s grade point average and socioeconomic background. In return, this creates value in the grit, perseverance, and personality of individuals.
The Start of the Virtual Internship Program
Over 10,000 students expressed to Amir that they lost their internship due to the pandemic. The students also mentioned that they were not sure how they were going to advance in their professional endeavors in the midst of a pandemic crisis. This prompted Badr to create Upkey’s signature program that was launched during the start of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. The virtual internship fostered a learning experience for both Upkey Interns and staff members. Approximately 1,000 interns were introduced to a curriculum that focused on high demand twenty-first-century skills. Such as consulting, finance, artificial intelligence, communication, and leadership to name a few. Upkey used this program to fulfill the needs of a diverse array of students and this is displayed in their data. For example, sixty percent of these students were classified as minorities. Not to mention that fifty-two percent of these students were first-generation college students.
