About
Providing learners with real-world projects.
Our story
Conceptualized as our co-founder's capstone entrepreneurship project at the University of Victoria, Riipen addressed an issue that they faced personally as students — the challenge of gaining relevant work experience, building a network of possible employers, and then demonstrating their skills to that network in order to find work that would help them start their careers. They were facing the graduation conundrum.
You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job.
Since inception in 2013, Riipen has expanded its reach internationally and has developed a state of the art technology platform that caters and provides significant competitive advantages for organizations and academic institutions while staying true to their original goal of supporting student development.
Riipen has enabled 149,000+ students at 680+ post-secondary institutions and training providers to partake in applied learning with 41,000+ companies. All of this leads us to our mission: Eliminate underemployment.
Our values are a part of everything we do
These values guide our day to day, and show up in everything we do as we work toward achieving our mission.
Learning
We believe in continuous learning. Learning is not something that stops when you graduate, and the future of work will require us to continue to re-skill and upskill throughout our careers and lifetimes.
Purpose
Our mission is to end graduate underemployment and empower emerging talent to gain relevant skills to find the jobs they love; as a mission-driven organization, everything we do should be in service of this mission.
Inclusivity
Our goal is to create and nurture a diverse, equitable, and inclusive working environment and team. We understand that diverse teams are high-performing teams. We want to employ individuals with a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.
Ingenuity
We empower employees to try new things and innovate. We understand that the best ideas at Riipen are going to come from our employees who are engaging with our customers, users, and stakeholders every day.
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Community
We encourage cross-functional collaboration and community building within Riipen. We have a Riipen Culture Council that organizes team social events, challenges, and community service activities company-wide.
Empowerment
We empower our employees to take on more decision-making, embrace mistakes as a path to innovation, and share ideas openly. We test employee ideas through frequent and rapid experimentation.
With these values in mind, it is important that we acknowledge that Riipen's headquarters are located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. We acknowledge this as a reminder to ourselves and others to respect the land that we are on and to nurture our sacred relationship to this land as well as to its First Peoples both past and present.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Focused on learning
Every new Riipeneer completes a comprehensive diversity, equity, and inclusion course as part of onboarding, and we refresh our knowledge annually with company-wide training.
Closing the pay gap
Rewarding those who are better negotiators or better self-advocators contributes to pay inequity. We review all our teams’ salaries at the same time annually so we can adjust salaries fairly and reduce the likelihood of unfair pay gaps. We publicly publish our company-wide salary bands and commit to paying fair market salaries for all roles.
Rainbow registered
We are proud to be accredited as a 2SLGBTQI+ friendly businesses by Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC).
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