Terms of service

1. Acceptance and eligibility

You may use UpSkillZone only if you are at least 18 years old and capable of forming a binding contract under the law of your jurisdiction. We do not knowingly serve minors, and the platform is not designed for under-13 users in any country.

Some features are unavailable in jurisdictions where outcome- based education contracts, deferred tuition, or income-related agreements are restricted. We may decline enrolment, refund tuition, or suspend access in any jurisdiction subject to OFAC, EU, or UK sanctions, or in any country where local consumer-protection law prohibits the model. You are responsible for confirming that your use of the platform is lawful where you live and work.

If you accept these terms on behalf of a company (typical for Employers), you represent that you have authority to bind that company to this agreement.

2. Account responsibilities

Each account corresponds to a single human identity. You may not share login credentials, run an account on behalf of another person, or operate more than one account for yourself. Mentor calibration scores and learner credentials attach to a real person; account-sharing breaks that guarantee and is treated as a material breach.

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password, hardware security key, and any signing keys we issue to you. Notify us promptly if you suspect unauthorised use. Activity performed through your account is attributed to you unless you can demonstrate, on the balance of probabilities, that it was not.

3. Tuition and outcome credit

Learners pay tuition at the tier disclosed during enrolment. Tuition is charged up front unless a deferred-payment schedule is documented in your enrolment agreement. All amounts are stated in U.S. dollars and exclude any taxes your jurisdiction may impose.

UpSkillZone’s defining commercial term is the outcome-credit clause. If, within 90 days of you starting a role obtained through a UpSkillZone hire attestation, the hiring employer signs a structured attestation that the role failed to stick (whether through involuntary separation, role-fit termination, or documented performance mismatch), you become eligible for outcome credit. Outcome credit is applied as a refund to your original payment method up to the amount of tuition paid for the cohort that produced the matched credential, or — at your election — as a credit against tuition for a future cohort within 24 months. The 90-day window starts on the role’s documented first day. Resignations, role changes initiated by the learner, and terminations for cause (gross misconduct, fraud, or violation of an employer’s acceptable-use policy) do not trigger the clause.

Outcome credit is the sole tuition-related remedy we offer. It is not a guarantee of employment, salary, or career outcome.

4. Job Twin academic integrity

Job Twin is the structured-practice environment in which learners produce the artifacts that mentors grade. Submissions must represent your own reasoning and your own work. You may use language models, search engines, code-completion tools, and reference material the same way a working professional would — for ideation, syntax lookup, and rubber-ducking — but you may not submit LLM-generated artifacts represented as your own analysis, code, or writing.

Submissions are scanned by similarity-detection and provenance-checking systems. When a submission crosses the configured similarity threshold against either prior submissions or known model outputs, it is auto-flagged for mentor review. Confirmed integrity violations result in (a) loss of credit for the affected artifact, (b) on a second finding, removal from the cohort without outcome-credit eligibility, and (c) a permanent annotation on any credentials we have already issued to you.

5. Mentor terms

Mentors engage with UpSkillZone as independent contractors, not as employees. The complete mentor agreement — including payment cadence, intellectual-property terms, conflicts policy, and the off-platform-poaching prohibition — lives in MENTOR_AGREEMENT.md in the platform repository and is incorporated here by reference.

Calibration is the mechanism that keeps mentor grading credible. Every mentor must maintain a rolling inter-rater agreement (Cohen’s kappa) of at least 0.7 against the platform’s calibration set. Mentors who fall below the floor enter a remediation queue and are temporarily removed from grading until they re-calibrate. Mentors who cannot re-calibrate after two attempts are off-boarded; this is structural to the credential, not a performance penalty.

6. Employer terms

Employers must register and verify a corporate domain before they can post outreach, query the talent search, or sign hire attestations. Domain verification is a one-time DNS-based check; we do not accept generic webmail providers. Outreach sent from an unverified employer account is discarded by the platform without delivery.

UpSkillZone charges a take-rate of 12% of first-year base compensation on every signed Ed25519 hire attestation. The take-rate is invoiced on the role’s documented first day and is non-refundable except where the same hire triggers an outcome-credit refund to the learner under section 3 — in that case, the take-rate is refunded pro rata. Employers must use the talent search and outreach surfaces in accordance with the anti-discrimination terms set out in HIRING_TERMS.md: filters tied to protected characteristics are prohibited and structurally unavailable, and employers may not off-platform-pipeline candidates to circumvent the take-rate.

7. Credential lifecycle

A UpSkillZone credential is a cryptographically signed assertion that a named learner met a named achievement rubric on a given date. Once issued, credentials are non-rescindable. We will not retract a credential because a downstream employer disliked the outcome, because a mentor changed their mind, or because the platform’s relationship with the learner ended.

The single exception is fraud: if we determine, after a documented review, that the underlying artifacts were fabricated, plagiarised, or produced by someone other than the named learner, we will revoke the credential. Revocation creates a public entry in the platform’s Status List 2021 revocation registry; downstream verifiers will see that the credential is revoked and the structured reason class. The credential JSON-LD itself remains addressable for audit.

8. Disputes and arbitration

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising out of or relating to your use of the platform that the parties cannot resolve informally within 30 days will be finally resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules. The seat of arbitration is Wilmington, Delaware; proceedings may be conducted remotely.

You and UpSkillZone agree that disputes will be brought only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class or representative action. Either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual-property rights or to enforce the credential-revocation registry without first arbitrating.

9. Intellectual property

The UpSkillZone platform code is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The license file is shipped with the source repository and applies to the platform source, schemas, and reference clients. The Apache-2.0 grant does not extend to our trademarks, the wordmark, or the visual identity.

Learner-produced artifacts — every Job Twin submission, essay, repo, and design file you upload — remain your property. We hold a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, render, and transmit those artifacts solely so that mentors can grade them, employers you have opted in can view them, and the platform can display them on your public talent profile. We do not train models on your artifacts.

UpSkillZone is the issuer of credentials and holds the Ed25519 issuer signing key. Custody of that key is a structural responsibility of the platform: we cannot delegate it to a learner or employer without breaking the verifiability of every previously issued credential.

10. Acceptable use

You agree not to: (a) scrape the public skills directory or talent profiles beyond the published rate limits — those limits exist so the directory stays useful, not as a polite suggestion; (b) impersonate another person, claim credentials you do not hold, or misrepresent verified skills on your talent profile; (c) attempt to extract private signing keys, calibration sets, or rubric internals; (d) use the platform to harass cohort members, mentors, or employers; or (e) interfere with the integrity of the credential-revocation registry.

11. Termination

You may close your account at any time from the dashboard settings. Account closure removes your private profile, revokes outstanding session keys, and stops all platform communications within seven days. Tuition that has already been recognised is not refunded on closure unless the outcome-credit clause has been triggered.

Issued credentials persist after account closure: that is the point of a portable, verifiable credential. Their public verification URL remains live so that previous employers and downstream verifiers can continue to confirm authenticity. You may request that your name on the credential be replaced with a stable pseudonymous handle; you may not request that the credential itself be deleted unless you also waive any reliance interest by parties who have already verified it.

We may suspend or terminate your account for material breach of these terms, repeated integrity violations, or a good-faith determination that continued access creates legal risk for the platform or other users.

12. Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms from time to time. Material changes — anything that alters tuition, the outcome-credit clause, the take-rate, the credential-lifecycle commitments, or the arbitration provisions — take effect no sooner than 30 days after we post the revised terms and notify registered users by email. Continued use of the platform after the notice window constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept a material change, your remedy is to close your account; previously issued credentials and unresolved outcome-credit claims survive that closure.