What’s the one metric that post-secondary schools love to use to improve their rankings and thus attract more students? Student employability.

Calgary-area startup Plus 5XP creates workshops that help students understand the job markets that are out there, rather than just following the flock into broad job fields.

Peter Croubalian, founder of Plus 5XP, is pretty direct when you ask what Plus 5XP is all about.

“I give you five years’ experience when you get a job,” he said.

Croubalian is a career coach consultant for universities. He helps their students get jobs. He said that while universities like to say they’re there for knowledge keeping and knowledge sharing, they’re driven by KPIs like the number of students that get jobs.

He said his approach is very simple: Teach the students about scarcity.

“Where I teach them is what we’re scarcity in the market for your role,” he said.

“Where you actually have scarcity effect where you can get a job quicker but also ask for a better purchase.”

The key to all of this is to help the students learn to find scarcity, Croubalian said. That includes research, trends, even how to trigger the LinkedIn algorithm to help find jobs that people are looking for.

“We do all the research … we do workshops. We do one-on-ones to validate, and then we teach them how to fish,” he said.

Learning the Alberta market

Croubalian has a good understanding of how to build and operate a startup. He’s already successfully exited one before he jumped into Plus 5XP. That’s helped provide him with a well-rounded base of skills to build this new venture.

He came to Calgary from Montreal in 2022. It was in Montreal where he first applied Plus 5XP at McGill University. Croubalian said he’s helped make them one of the top programs in Canada in terms of student placement, and fourth in North America.

The Alberta Catalyzer program, and the chance to learn about the market in Alberta is what drew him out here.

“We said, ‘OK, how can we go to somewhere where I can understand the ecosystem and then at the same time help the KPIs at the program,” Croubalian said.

While they’re continuing the core work of teaching students how to find jobs, Croubalian said they’re building a system that can eliminate much of the admin work that’s part of the career services world.  He said they can save time and costs for universities.

The goal is to bring a beta system online sometime this year.

Still, they want to continue onboarding universities – and their students – in a $1.7 billion industry that has a scarcity of its own: No one wants to touch the career coaching industry for students coming out of school, Croubalian said.

From there, with all the recruitment information, Croubalian said he’ll have a valuable database to draw from.

“I come from aviation. We were always taught understand the process, optimized process and control the value,” he said.

“So, if I control all the students, I have the supply chain of talent.”