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Does a professional doing a short program on machine learning or artificial intelligence on Coursera to add to my existing skill-sets, it does make sense. However, will a learner really benefit through an online undergraduate or masters program? Can he / she get a job?
There is more opportunity to learn, get good jobs, be in powerful positions and provide for your family and community than ever before. A young person today has unlimited access to education no matter where you live or how old you are. This was not true five years ago.
It’s important to make sure that as platform owners we are able to turn learning opportunity into economic opportunity. Today, everyone has access to learning, but if you live in a community where there are no jobs, you can learn all sorts of things from Stanford, but it will be of no use. What the pandemic has done is that it has enabled 1.6 billion people to learn online. On the other hand, companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook are hiring remote workers who don’t necessarily live next to an office. So, you can learn whatever you want to and live wherever you want to. If you have the knowledge and skill that you can get online, you will have access to jobs that your parents never had access to.
How are you helping to create that economic plus learning opportunity?
It’s not just the kind of content, but also the credentials which matter. That’s the reason we spend a lot of time with top universities and businesses as we know their brands signal quality and have more attractive credentials. We go for high-quality content and credentials and try to find them in job-relevant domains such as business, technology and data. In terms of access to learning we make sure everything runs on the desktop. On mobile, every learner can download the courses and watch them offline even if they don’t have an Internet connection. We have designed our courses to a V-Pat standard, which is an accessibility standard for people who can’t hear or see well.
We have been focusing on entry level professional certificates. We started with Google IT certificate in 2018. The world is changing and is displacing a lot of jobs, but also creating a lot of them. Some of the jobs being created are available to people even if they don’t have a college degree or a background in that particular field. One example is IT support. It turns out you can do IT support even without a college degree or prior experience. You can learn the skills online. Google launched the four-course series Google IT Support Professional Certificate in 2018. Around 700,000 people have enrolled to date. Out of that number, 60% don’t have a college degree, while 50% come from under-represented groups. We also work with Google to line up companies that are looking to hire IT support people, and we connect graduates with these companies. We have around 150 companies on board. We can’t promise a job or an interview, but if you pursue the course, we can tell you that you have the skills the companies are looking for.
We have also realized for some people a professional certificate will be an honorarium to a college degree. Some of our university partners (University of London, North Eastern University, University of North Texas) have said they will award academic credit towards college degrees for anyone who has completed the certificate course. We call these ‘Degree Pathways’. We think this will flip things around and many young people will start with a professional certificate, get a job and while they are working, get a degree online. You don’t have to take out a bunch of loans or have your parents pay out their life savings. It also opens up more career opportunities.
We also offer IBM Data Science Personal Certificate, IBM Data Analyst Personal Certificate, Google Data Analytics, Facebook Marketing Analyst Personal Certificate, and Salesforce Development Representative Personal Certificate. We have been working with the American Council of Education to do credit recognition for entry level certificates. We are doing the same in India too.
How many people would have got jobs through these certificate programs?
We do a learner impact study after they complete these courses, and over 80% said it has had a positive impact on their careers. Over 2.2 million people have enrolled into these certificate programs.
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