South Florida's delivery of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Employer Provided Innovation Challenges — the largest, best-measured, most consequential cohort the program has run.
The TPMA Gap Analysis found South Florida's projected tech openings exceed retained local graduates by nearly ten thousand workers over the next decade — and 70.2% of employers name a lack of qualified candidates as their biggest recruiting challenge. Its recommendation: micro-internships, hands-on and paid, were the region's most underutilized fix. EPIC is that fix at scale — 60 paid project hours per student, real employer challenges, one distinct challenge per employer.
2024 talent deficit by occupation family — retained graduates vs. openings (TPMA)
Read the full Gap Analysis →
100 students placed through 24 distinct employer challenges in one year — while completion, employer NPS, and team ratings all climbed. Across all 27 employer surveys collected to date, 100% rated learner-solution relevance 4 or 5 out of 5.
Not classroom theory — production platforms, computer-vision systems, RAG applications, and a robot that made the local news. Filter the wall:
Community resource discovery platform with AI-driven matching — live at pattern.cc, integrated with the company's production platform and serving its first users. Built with employer-provided Cursor and Claude Code credits.
AI Power Automate flow that classifies, names, files, and tags every document on upload — the governed foundation for MCM's internal AI tools.
Full workforce platform prototype — auth, candidate/employer workflows, job search, resume upload — in React/Next.js, Node, PostgreSQL. Being finalized for launch.
Intelligent aviation-maintenance planning on Azure AI Foundry; students independently pivoted services to better parse operational data. Five-week hybrid Sprinternship with FIU.
Data dashboard, SEO overhaul, five rebuilt priority pages — plus an unrequested species administration system. Two students extended on signed contracts.
Students restored Luna, a bilingual wayfinding robot, in a professor-led capstone — then added AI capabilities during EPIC. Covered on broadcast TV.
Browser-based AI 3D building configurator on a deliberately vendor-split architecture (Firebase, FastAPI on Railway, Cloudflare R2, AWS) — the cohort's largest team.
Computer-vision system that grades and identifies sneakers from images — working model plus functional web interface for the circular-economy mission.
AI-generated video previews of hospitality roles with a reusable prompt-template system, improving candidate fit before application.
Retrieval-augmented Q&A over city data with Semantic Kernel (C#), vector-store retrieval, and SQL RAG.
Multi-class audio classifier that distinguishes alarm protocol sounds — delivered in a compressed three-week accelerated format.
Two onboarding redesign rounds validated with 13 real users, plus a full app map for beta. Student retained as Growth Research Intern.
Three leadership dashboards, a secured web app, and “Archangel Copilot” — an AI revenue assistant with a verification layer that refuses to issue any report whose numbers can’t be traced to the database. 9 datasets reconciled against 25 existing reports; 145 automated tests. Built end-to-end by one student.
29% of the cohort had never had a work-based learning experience of any kind. Those first-timers gained more career-goal clarity (+0.27 vs +0.17) and left more likely to pursue a related career (87% vs 80%) than their experienced peers.
50 matched before/after pairs. Developing Others +10 pts was the biggest gain — real teamwork surfaced strengths students didn't know they had.
Solution relevance rated 5.0/5 by every survey respondent. Employer NPS of 9.4 — the program's highest. And in closeout meetings, employers committed to what happens next:
| Company | Implementing deliverable | Continuing project | Extended students | Referring partners | Future participation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FEAM | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Patterned | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wahoo Bay | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| TriMerge | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dreamaker AI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Archangel | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Nine 8-week extensions through the Blackstone Internship Program at Miami Dade College, plus FEAM's full team via Break Through Tech. Student names abbreviated for privacy.
Four employers put their own dollars into student stipends, establishing the shared-cost template. Program-to-date, EPIC has raised roughly $50,000 in funding for stipends and operations.
Three cohorts of 50 — spring, summer, fall. Employer demand already outruns capacity (20 project requests competed for Spring's 13 slots), four partners are queued for multi-cohort continuations, and the Blackstone pathway gives every cohort a built-in bridge to paid work. Expansion conversations are underway to bring the model to K-12 — and EPIC's Miami work keeps traveling: the Fall Canela Media project headlined the Chamber Foundation's June D.C. showcase, and the Summer Syneurgy build was featured at Talent Forward: AI + Work.
The 2027 plan. Same playbook, triple the throughput.
