Canadian businesses face two persistent challenges: important projects that get pushed aside and difficulty finding and assessing emerging talent. Riipen helps address both by connecting businesses with students through real-world, classroom-based projects.
Riipen is a Canadian work-integrated learning platform that helps institutions build career-connected campuses by embedding real-world, employer-driven projects directly into courses. Since its inception in 2013, Riipen has helped institutions move beyond fragmented experiential learning initiatives toward a scalable, institution-wide model where learners gain relevant work experience as part of their education. Through the platform, employers of all sizes connect with students across disciplines to collaborate on meaningful, real-world projects.
Its scale is considerable. Riipen has enabled over 32,000 students to complete more than 4.5 million hours of work-integrated learning, working with 150+ post-secondary institutions and a network of employers now numbering in the tens of thousands.
The Problem It Addresses
Riipen was built to help bridge the gap between education and employment, creating stronger connections between what learners study and the experience they need to succeed in the workforce. Roughly 43 percent of recent graduates are underemployed in their first job after post-secondary study—working in roles that did not require the education they completed. More troublingly, 67 percent of those remain underemployed five years later.
Dana Stephenson, Riipen’s CEO, identified the cause in the curriculum model itself: students complete theory-based coursework without applied experience, then enter a labour market that expects experience they had no structured opportunity to acquire.
“The uncomfortable truth is that the current model [of work-integrated learning] will not get us to universal access,” Stephenson said, “the institutions that will lead in the next decade of higher education won’t be those that help a few students find internships. They’ll be those that build the infrastructure to make work-integrated learning universal, embedded, and genuinely accessible for every student.”
Riipen’s mission is to end graduate underemployment by embedding genuine industry work inside the student journey, giving students credit-based exposure to the workforce as part of their degree rather than as something to arrange on top of it.
Free for Employers
For small businesses, the detail that matters most is the price.
Riipen gives businesses access to a forward-thinking student talent pool to complete projects at no cost. For a small company, that is a genuinely unusual proposition — capable, motivated people working on a real business challenge, supervised by faculty, with no fee attached.
Every business has projects it is ready to start. Marketing plans that have been waiting months, market research that nobody has time for, a process that needs documenting, or a website that needs assessing. Students bring a fresh perspective alongside capacity. A business exploring a growth opportunity gains insight from people close to the demographic it aims to reach.
How It Works
Riipen’s process is designed to make participation simple for employers, minimizing the time and administrative effort required to turn a business need into a meaningful student project.
An employer creates a free account and posts a project — essentially a description of what they would like students to work on. Riipen then handles matchmaking with educators whose courses fit the work.
The platform provides end-to-end support, including project ideation and design, technical support, student onboarding, and partner matching. It offers project management and communication tools that facilitate collaboration, integrates with learning management systems, and provides a secure environment that respects the privacy requirements of both institutions and external partners.
Projects are typically embedded in capstone or project-based courses, where students work in teams on real problems for academic credit.
What Students Gain
For students, Riipen delivers employable skills, applied experience, and resume-building work before graduation.
Participants apply classroom knowledge to add genuine value to organizations across industries, build professional networks, and gain exposure to what their post-graduation work might entail, which often clarifies career direction as much as it builds capability.
The company frames the outcome as putting students on a fast track to a thriving career upon graduation.
Growth and Expansion
Riipen has continued to develop its offering, launching Career Connected Campus, a uniquely scalable and integrated work-based learning ecosystem that guides students from early skill awareness to advanced, employer-validated experience. It goes beyond traditional avenues such as internships and senior capstones by allowing faculty to integrate employer-designed assignments into existing courses.
That extension matters because internships, while valuable, are limited in number and unevenly distributed. Embedding experience in coursework reaches every student, not just the fraction who secure a placement. The platform serves organizations ranging from multinationals to small and medium-sized enterprises, and has expanded well beyond Canada into the United States and other markets.
Why It Matters for Canadian Business
Small businesses in Ontario face a recruitment problem rooted in information. Hiring junior staff is risky because a resume reveals little about how someone actually works, and the cost of a poor hire falls heavily on a small team.
A Riipen project functions as an extended, no-cost introduction. An employer sees how students think, communicate, and deliver over the course of real work — and students who perform well become obvious candidates.
Meanwhile, the business completes a project, and a young person gains the experience that determines whether their first job matches their education.
For Ontario employers with a project sitting undone and an interest in the talent pipeline, that is a rare arrangement where everyone gains.
Learn more at riipen.com
