Kirstin Barth

Meet Kirstin Barth, the super cool kitesurfing, shark wrestling data enthusiast from South Africa. She has a kind heart and a strong desire to solve one of South Africa’s greatest challenges: the dismal unemployment rate of roughly 32% (for comparison, the United States’ is 3.9% – a 700% difference!) With a passion for data and a deep understanding of the job skills development sector, she co-founded JobTrendZA, a company dedicated to bridging the gap between learning and earning.

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Who is Kirstin?!

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That’s how I would ask that question – with energy and mystery and excitement 🙂. Kirstin is one of a kind! She casually kitesurfs on the weekend as a new hobby, while managing huge datasets during the day. Is there anything this woman can’t do?

Her background is in data analysis for the public sector, which gave her the insights to start JobTrendZA. But, to accomplish her goals with this project she had to learn an entirely new skill:  web scraping (with Python and Scrapy). #Curiosity is one of Rayobyte’s core values, and she takes the cake here!

If you ever get the chance to meet Kirstin, you’ll quickly discover that she has a huge heart and approachable personality. You can see this shine through in our interview, but Kirstin admits:  she really dislikes public attention. I had to arm wrestle here for the amazing photos of her on this post – fortunately for us all, I won 😉, and we get to experience all her awesomeness in both photo & video form! Catch the full episode here:

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From Learning to Earning

Kirstin’s passion goes beyond her hobbies, though. She started JobTrendZA with the intention to give the right data to the right people to help individuals go from “learning to earning, as fast as possible”. The problem she sees right now is that people are being educated at universities, and when they come into the job market there is no job for them! This divide, she believes, is due to a lack of data in the market and she intends to solve it with JobTrendZA.

The dashboard she’s building will be free and publicly available. I could repeat that 10 times, seriously. She’s that great of a person with such a desire to help others that she’s giving it away for free! We share similar values at Rayobyte by offering all of our proxy and scraping products for free for new users, in line with our purpose to “inspire everyone to bring their great ideas to life”.

With data in hand, employers and individuals, will be able to start making better decisions and, ultimately, move the country towards lower unemployment rates.

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Stay tuned

Kirstin intends to launch JobTrendZA in June 2024. It’ll be freely available at jobtrendza.com or you can find it through her consulting website at kululeko.com. And if you’re ever in South Africa watching the kite surfers – you can bet it’s her “vroooming” around.

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