Building the Career Platform I Needed

"Another job application that can't capture who I really am."

I stared at my screen in frustration, struggling to compress my work into bullet points. How do you reduce connecting farmers to kitchens (generating KES 5M+ in rural income) and building payment systems handling 500K+ monthly transactions into sterile resume lines?

My journey from a student in Malaysia to a software engineer and now founder in Kenya kept hitting the same wall: digital fragmentation. Each transition required rebuilding my professional identity from scratch.

The tech systems I'd crafted for others were solving real problems—helping commercial kitchens connect with farmers, enabling mobile payments for the unbanked—yet the tools to showcase my own professional evolution remained stubbornly disconnected.

This wasn't just my problem. I watched talented developers in Nairobi struggle to translate their self-taught coding brilliance into opportunities. I saw engineers with deep technical knowledge hit invisible barriers when moving to leadership roles.

After one particularly frustrating evening of updating profiles across LinkedIn, GitHub, and my portfolio site, I sketched a simple question in my notebook:

"What if our professional identities could evolve as organically as we do?"

That question became Exel—not just another platform, but a bridge between who you are and what comes next.

The Fragmentation Problem

Most of us live fragmented digital lives. We use one platform for learning, another for career development, yet another for entrepreneurship, and several more for networking, skill validation, and professional growth.

The result? A disjointed experience where:

• Your data lives in silos

• Your achievements aren't portable

• Your personal growth journey lacks coherence

• Your potential connections remain undiscovered

The Exel Vision

Exel isn't just another platform—it's an ecosystem designed to accompany you through every phase of your personal and professional development.

Imagine a world where your education seamlessly flows into your career, which naturally evolves into entrepreneurship opportunities when you're ready—all supported by the same intelligent system that grows with you.

That's Exel.

Start-Up Exel Development Progress - view dashboard

What Makes Exel Different

While traditional platforms focus on specific life stages or skills, Exel creates bridges between them. We're building four core innovations that make this possible:

1. ExelID: Your Digital Identity Evolved

At the heart of the ecosystem is ExelID—a unified profile that follows you across life stages.

Unlike conventional profiles that just store basic information, ExelID:

• Creates a comprehensive "skills fingerprint" that evolves over time

• Securely carries your achievements and credentials between platforms

• Maintains your network relationships across contexts

• Adapts its interface based on your current life stage

2. AI Mentor (ExelMind): Guidance That Grows With You

ExelMind isn't just another chatbot—it's a conversational AI companion designed to provide context-aware guidance throughout your journey:

• It understands where you've been and where you might go next

• Offers personalized advice based on successful patterns from similar journeys

• Connects dots between your skills, interests, and emerging opportunities

• Helps you navigate transitions between education, career, and entrepreneurship

3. Skill DNA Analyzer: Beyond Traditional Assessments

Traditional skill assessments are static and limited. The Skill DNA Analyzer:

• Maps not just what you know, but how you apply knowledge

• Identifies hidden strengths and untapped potential

• Spots precise skill gaps standing between you and your goals

• Recommends custom learning pathways based on your unique profile

// Simplified version of our Skill DNA pattern-matching algorithm
function analyzeSkillConnections(userSkills, targetRole) {
  // Transform raw skills into weighted knowledge graph
  const userGraph = buildKnowledgeGraph(userSkills);
  
  // Get optimal skill patterns for target role
  const rolePattern = getRoleSkillPattern(targetRole);
  
  // Identify matching patterns and gaps
  const matches = findPatternMatches(userGraph, rolePattern);
  const gaps = findPatternGaps(userGraph, rolePattern);
  
  // Discover hidden strengths (skills applicable but not obvious)
  const hiddenStrengths = discoverHiddenConnections(userGraph, rolePattern);
  
  // Calculate transitional learning path with minimum effort/maximum impact
  const learningPath = calculateOptimalPath(userGraph, gaps);
  
  return {
    matchScore: calculateMatchScore(matches, rolePattern),
    keyStrengths: rankByImpact(matches),
    hiddenStrengths: hiddenStrengths,
    criticalGaps: prioritizeGaps(gaps),
    recommendedPath: sequenceLearningModules(learningPath)
  };
}

How Exel connects your journey across different life stages and platforms

4. Universal Data Model: The Invisible Backbone

Behind the scenes, Exel's Universal Data Model ensures that your information is consistently interpreted across every touchpoint:

• Translates academic achievements into workplace relevance

• Converts workplace skills into entrepreneurial capability metrics

• Ensures that learning in one context enhances your profile in all contexts

• Creates a coherent growth narrative that evolves with each interaction

Job Exel Development Progress: click here

Where We're Heading

Exel is still under development, but our roadmap includes some exciting directions:

Cross-Reality Learning Environments

Imagine studying renewable energy engineering while virtually walking through a wind farm, with ExelMind explaining concepts in real-time as you observe them.

AI-Generated Career Avatars

Your digital twin can represent you in networking events, preliminary interviews, or simulations—learning from each interaction to better represent your authentic self.

Life Optimization Simulator

Before making major decisions, test different scenarios: What if you took that coding bootcamp? Changed industries? Started a business? The simulator shows likely outcomes based on data from similar journeys.

Skill Tokenization

A blockchain-based reward system that transforms learning and achievement into tangible assets that can be leveraged across the ecosystem.

The Development Journey

Building Exel hasn't been without challenges. The most significant has been creating a truly unified experience without overwhelming users.

Our solution? Progressive disclosure—introducing complexity only when relevant to your current context, while maintaining the connections to your broader journey.

We've also wrestled with some fascinating technical questions:

• How do we translate skills across different domains?

• What's the right balance between AI guidance and user autonomy?

• How can we respect privacy while creating valuable connections?

Each question has pushed us to more innovative solutions that we're excited to share as development continues.

Join the Journey

Exel is more than a product—it's a new approach to personal development that eliminates artificial boundaries between learning, working, and creating.

We're currently in closed beta with select partners, but we'll be expanding access soon. If you're interested in being part of this evolution:

• Join our waitlist for early access

• View StartUp Exel Dashboard for progress

• View Job Exel Dashboard for progress

• Contribute to our open challenges if you're a developer

The future of personal development isn't fragmented—it's fluid, connected, and intelligent.

And we're building it right now.

This article is part of my development journey series. Next time, I'll dive deeper into how we're designing the Skill DNA Analyzer and the technical challenges of creating truly portable professional identities.