Why Am I Learning This?: Edson Barton and Joseph Watt

The U.S. workforce landscape is changing as technologies advance and Artificial Intelligence continues to impact job and education territories. The education technology company, YouScience, is keeping up with the times, guiding students on how to prepare for college and advanced careers, while re-skilling and up-skilling a workforce for industries needing to fill jobs. On this episode, YouScience Co-founder Edson Barton and Joseph Watt, Vice President of ECMC Group, discuss how the two organizations are building on the education to workforce movement.  

Edson Barton, Founder and CEO of YouScience and founder of Industry Certifications

As a 25-year EdTech veteran, he leads YouScience as it revolutionizes the personalization of career education—bridging the edtech and talent tech markets and solving critical education-to-workforce issues such as the skills gap and program equity and diversity. By providing students a more direct and tangible way to connect their education to their future careers, YouScience improves academic outcomes including high school graduation rates and postsecondary enrollment and completion rates.

As a leader in the education technology industry, Edson has been quoted in numerous reports and media articles, most notably in Forbes, US World & News Report, MSN, and eSchool News.

Prior to leading YouScience, Edson was the CEO and co-owner of ProCert Labs, a standards alignment and validation organization, and served as a senior director with Certiport where he oversaw client activities for Adobe, Autodesk, Intuit, and Microsoft, including worldwide publisher channels. Additionally, he was a sales vice president for Imergent and the executive director for Kids Voting Utah.

Joseph Watt, Vice President at ECMC Group and Managing Director of EIF

Joe grew up in the rural Midwest, where he was inspired daily by his mother’s commitment to educating others, going above and beyond to reach her students, especially those who came from difficult family circumstances. After graduating high school with a class of 40 students, then joining a student body of more than 40,000 at the University of Illinois, and finally completing graduate school at Duke University, he has experienced firsthand the wide variations, challenges and ultimately, the transformative impact of education across a multitude of learning environments.

Shortly after joining ECMC Group, Joe co-led the creation of the Education Impact Fund, driven by the opportunity to utilize patient, impact-aligned capital to propel transformative educational outcomes. By investing in scalable ventures that are addressing educational inequities and empowering underserved and overlooked groups, Joe aims to further demonstrate the strong correlation between long-term impact and outsized financial returns, thereby, inspiring increased investment in impactful educational change.

Before ECMC Group, Joe’s experience spans corporate strategy, M&A, private equity and investments within the technology and education sectors. He is a graduate of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where he was an Impact Investing Fellow, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives outside of Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, son and dog.