Volly is a Skills Record for Students, an AI-powered platform that proactively captures what teens and young adults are already doing and translates it into language that employers, colleges, and the adult world actually understand.
Every student is building real, durable skills every day.
Volly makes sure they can prove it.
The workforce has changed. Entry-level jobs are shrinking. Degrees cost more and guarantee less. And the casual first jobs that gave previous generations their first taste of independence, the paper routes, weekend shifts, and summer gigs, have largely disappeared. Teens today are competing against adults for what's left, without the experience or the language to back themselves up.
Meanwhile, they're doing real things. They're leading teams, building online communities, volunteering, competing, creating, solving problems. They're developing genuine, durable skills every single day. They just can't see them. And they can't convey them.
Not because they're lazy or unprepared. Because the tools we gave them were never designed for the world they're living in. They're being evaluated by systems built for the 2000s while navigating a workforce shaped by 2026.
Volly is the fix. A living skills record, built from day one of high school and carried forward into whatever comes next, whether that's college, trade school, a first job, or something no one has named yet.
The casual first jobs that built previous generations, and gave them a foundation of documented experience, have largely disappeared. Teens aren't failing to show up. The structure that used to reward showing up is gone. A skills record is what fills that gap.
At the same time, schools are being held to new standards they have no infrastructure to meet. 42 states now score schools on career and college readiness outcomes. Transcripts were never designed to capture that. Neither were test scores. The accountability requirements exist. The measurement infrastructure doesn't. Volly is built to close that gap, from both sides.
Ask a teen what they learned from their internship. What skills they built through three years of competitive sports. What they gained from the Discord server they manage for 400 people. The honest answer the system gave them language for is a shrug. IDK.
IDK is not laziness. It is a skill awareness deficit. Students aren't failing to build experience. They're failing to see it, name it, and translate it into language that means something to the institutions evaluating them.
The IDK Problem has a name now. And Volly is the solution, not because we tell students what to think about their experience, but because we give them the tools to see what they've actually built and say it clearly. The movement exists whether or not someone downloads the app. But the app makes it real.
We write about this on Substack. Read "IDK Isn't OK Anymore" →
"As a mom of 2 teens, I sat across from my own teen and watched him shrug when I asked what he learned from his internship. IDK — I don't know, mom. That moment built Volly."
I work in workforce development and still couldn't help my own kids see what they were building. The existing systems were never designed to capture what they need for this working world they're entering.
This is not a kid who does nothing. There are weeks where he's rarely home after school. That's not a motivation problem. That's a skill awareness deficit. An entire generation is accumulating real, durable experience every single day and has no idea what it's called, what it's worth, or how to prove they have it.
The world they're walking into looks nothing like the one we prepared for at their age. AI is restructuring entire industries. Entry-level jobs are shrinking. The casual first jobs that gave previous generations their start have largely disappeared. And the systems built to evaluate young people were designed for a world that no longer exists.
We built Volly because no tool did what we needed for our own kids, and we knew we weren't alone.
Volly is not a resume builder. It's not a college prep tool. It's not test prep. It is a living, AI-powered record of real experience, built from day one of high school and carried forward into whatever comes next.
Students log activities in their own words. Any activity counts: sports, volunteer hours, jobs, clubs, gaming, creative work, internships, work-based learning. Volly translates every entry into professional skills language, tags real skills from a student-facing taxonomy, and builds a living record the student owns.
For schools, Volly's Skills Intelligence infrastructure maps what students are building to CTE pathways and career readiness frameworks, giving districts the evidence they need for accountability reporting and program outcomes. Learn more about Volly for Schools →
"Really? That counts?" That moment, a teen realizing their real experience has real value, is what Volly exists to create.
The student owns this record, not the school. It follows them through every program change, every pivot, every path they take. Transcripts belong to the institution. Volly belongs to them.
Volly was founded by two working parents who watched this problem play out in their own homes. The founding student team, our own teens, have been part of Volly since day one, logging their own experiences, testing the product, and making sure it actually works for the people it's built for.
"I wish I had this as a teen" is something we heard from many parents the moment they saw Volly in action. That response told us we were solving the right problem.
Abigail leads product and brand at Volly, bringing 10 years of experience in startups. A working mom of two teens who spends her days inside the workforce development world, she watches this skills gap widen in real time from both sides. The IDK moment, her own teen shrugging when asked what he learned from his internship, became the product. Volly is built on the belief that every student is already building something worth proving.
Oliver leads tech and partnerships at Volly, bringing the Skills Intelligence infrastructure to schools and districts. With 25 years of tech consulting experience, he talks to organizational leaders every day about their young talent hiring challenges and hears firsthand how wide the readiness gap has become. He is passionate about helping the next generation of the workforce after years of seeing how difficult it is for students and fresh graduates to find employment.
Our founding student team serves as Student Experience Coordinators, the real users who make sure Volly works the way teens actually think and talk, not the way adults assume they do.
A skills record is a living, portable system that captures the real skills a student develops through their activities, experiences, and work over time. Unlike a resume, which is assembled at a moment of need and often gaps or omits significant real experience, a skills record is built continuously from the first day of high school forward.
Unlike a transcript, which captures grades and course completion, a skills record captures what a student can actually do. It translates experience into professional language, maps it to the frameworks employers and institutions use to evaluate candidates, and gives students the vocabulary to talk about their own capabilities.
A skills record is not tied to a school. It belongs to the student. It travels with them through every program change, every gap year, every pivot in direction. It is the system that answers the question employers and admissions officers increasingly ask: not "what did you study?" but "what can you do, and how do you know?"
Whether you're a parent, a school, or a student, there's a place for you in what we're building.