Y Careers x Getmee: The Tech Built to Shape Young People's Futures

Getting a job is hard enough. For young people who learn or communicate differently, the gap between talent and opportunity can feel impossible to close. 

That gap is exactly what brought two leaders together. Amaresh Devanesen, Executive Director of Y Careers, and Balendran Thavarajah, Founder and CEO of Getmee, share a belief that every young person deserves a real shot at meaningful work. Sometimes all it takes is the right technology, and the right people, to make that happen. 

The result is Connect Different, an app built to support young people as they move into the workforce. Not just a tool. A pathway. 

The founder who built the tool he needed 

Balendran's own story is the reason Getmee exists. He arrived in Australia at 26 with no English and no formal education and spent the next two decades rebuilding his life from scratch. He taught himself English, worked his way into a computer science degree at Western Sydney University, and later became founding CTO of location tech company Bluedot. 

In 2020, he turned that experience into a business. Getmee is an AI-powered coaching platform that helps people build the communication, interview, and interpersonal skills needed to succeed in a new country or a new career. It's an AI coach in your pocket, built by someone who knows exactly what it's like to need one. 

Five years on, Getmee is supporting people across 16 countries. As Balendran puts it: 

"The connection was already strong because we were trying to do the same thing through technology. But what we were building was complementing yours. And that's going to change a lot of young people's lives." 

The problem Y Careers was trying to solve 

Anyone who's been through a traineeship knows how disjointed it can feel. A login here, an employer emailthere, a GTO portal somewhere else, and information scattered across all of it. The Y Careers team saw this fragmentation a

s one of the biggest barriers to building a genuinely well-designed traineeship program. 

The question became simple: how do we get everything a young person needs into one place? 

Connect Different is the answer. Learning, belonging, creativity, reward, support, micro-credentials, and onboarding, all in one app. And it's built to adapt to the person using it, so the experience always makes sense for whoever's logging in. 

The app also introduces JETT, an AI support companion trainees can ask questions any time.  

That level of support has a flow-on effect for employers too. A trainee who feels backed and set up to succeed is a trainee who sticks around, which makes the whole experience easier for the businesses that take them on. 

Built for every stage of the journey 

Connect Different is being developed across two personas so far: 

Y Careers Trainee – tasks, resources, coaching, and JETT, all built around the trainee experience, so support continues well beyond day one. 

Job seeker – a one-stop hub for anyone looking to start a job. Videos, resources, and the skills to learn and gain before stepping into a role, plus the job board right at their fingertips. No more digging through scattered listings or guessing what's needed to get job ready. 

Testing it with the people who matter most 

Before taking the app further, we wanted the people who'd actually use it to help shape it. So we ran a co-design workshop with a group of trainees, giving them early access to Connect Different and asking them to put it through its paces. 

Over two sessions, trainees were walked through the app's key features, from tasks and resources to JETT, then given time to explore on their own before coming back to share their thoughts. The feedback session was a genuinely open conversation: what stood out, what they'd change, whether they'd actually use it day to day. 

The response was overwhelmingly positive. When we asked trainees to describe their experience with the app in one word, they wrote: incredible, easy, direct, accessible, simple, curious, happy, resourceful. Real proof that when you build something with young people in mind, they can feel it. 

"I am so excited about the app, I could finally access everything I needed in one place instead of scrolling through emails." 
 

That feedback is already shaping the next round of development, because the best insight on whether a tool works for young people will always come from young people. 

Setting a new standard

No GTO has done this before. This is what happens when two people who've lived the problem decide to solve it together: real technology, built with the people it's meant to serve, changing the way an entire industry supports young people into work. 

That's the story behind Connect Different.