Podcast
Podcast
- 18 Aug 2020
- Managing the Future of Work
Google expands college-alternative tech skills training
Joe Fuller: The coronavirus pandemic is bringing the future of work forward, accelerating trends like automation and remote work. It's also highlighting the acute shortage of workers with state-of-the-art digital skills. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are stepping in to provide training and certification, not just in their own products and services, but the general skills needed for a variety of digital jobs. Many of those positions have historically required that the candidate holds a college degree. This new way of training offers an alternative pathway into in demand, good paying jobs for previously excluded workers. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I'm Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. I'm joined today by Google's Lisa Gevelber and Natalie Van Kleef Conley. Lisa is vice president of global marketing for Google and Natalie's product lead for the Grow with Google training programs we'll be discussing today. They're here to talk about Google's growing commitment to online certificate programs, which the company says will prepare participants for high paying tech jobs in three to six months and relies on Google's internal learnings as to how to prepare workers in areas like data analytics, project management, and customer experience. They're extending the reach of these programs into classrooms by offering them free of charge to community colleges and high school, career and technical education programs. Lisa, Natalie, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.
Lisa Gevelber: Hey Joe, thanks for having us.
Natalie Van Kleef Conley: Hi, Joe.
Fuller: I'm curious, what prompted Google to get in the training business? What problem were you trying to solve to that intervention?
Van Kleef Conley: At Google, the challenge we face in finding qualified candidates to join our own IT support team really inspired the creation of our IT Support Professional Certificate Program. So, back from 2014 to 2016, I used to run Google's IT Residency Program, which staffs the majority of Google's internal support function globally. And we really struggled to find qualified candidates for the role. But we also knew that qualified didn't have to mean having a four-year college degree. And in fact, the majority of IT support jobs in the US don't require a traditional college degree. So we partnered with a non-profit organization for low income young adults in the US called Year Up and built a long-term training and hiring pathway into IT support roles at Google so that included a six month work based learning experience, two summer IT internships, and then the full-time IT residency program role. And the foundation of the effort was launching a full scholarship program for our Year Uppers at Google to get their associate degree at a local community college in IT. The stats were really against us, though. The typical graduation rate for low income students at a two-year college is just 13 percent, but two years into our program, 87 percent of our Year Uppers on average were accepted to these internships and on track to get their degrees. So this was really powerful evidence for us that (a) IT is a really teachable field and (b) if we, as Google, could prioritize skills-based trainings over traditional degree requirements, we could create real paths to jobs. So we wanted to make these opportunities available to anyone anywhere. And IT support is one of a few fields that's high growth, high paying. The median annual salary is around $55,000 a year and so we developed this very hands-on online training called the Google IT Support Professional Certificate, which is designed to bring truly beginner, novice learners into entry level job readiness in about three to six months. So the program is available on the Coursera learning platform. It's exclusively developed by Google and it covers all of the fundamentals of IT support that you'd need to land that entry-level job. And it's part of Grow with Google, which is our company's initiative to create economic opportunity for everyone.
Fuller: Gerald Chertavian, a graduate of our school and founder and CEO of Year UP, has been a gift on this podcast. And certainly, their model of intervention, partnering with companies has been one of the really interesting innovation for entry-level jobs. Can you tell me a little bit about who this population is in terms of their demographics? Because that's an extraordinarily higher rate of program completion than we see in a lot of other programs.
Van Kleef Conley: Sure. So the IT Support Professional Certificate is the number one most popular certificate on Coursera. We reached 275,000 global enrollments. When you look at our US learners, the program has always reached a higher percentage of nontraditional learners. So 58 percent self-identify as Black, Latino, female, or veteran. Forty-five percent are in the lowest income tertile in the nation, reporting an annual income of less than $30,000. And 61 percent have less than a college degree.
Fuller: Certainly one of the raps on the advanced university supported platforms have been that they're essentially providing further opportunity for people with high levels of educational accomplishment to either pursue personal interest or pursue credentials that will enhance their career prospects. Now, you announced in mid-July of this year, 2020, a significant expansion of your programs, adding three more. Could you talk to me a little about those and what motivated that?
Gevelber: So, Joe, as you know so well, Covid has caused such mass unemployment—and people without college degrees are much more affected in economic downturns. So we knew this was a really unique moment in time where we thought Google could help rebuild an economy that really works for everyone. And so we doubled down on the efforts and Natalie was just talking about. We always knew that we could train people for high paying, high growth jobs in career fields beyond IT. And we used all of the learnings from our IT support program to build three new career paths. And those paths are in the fields of data analytics, user experience design, and project management. And we chose those fields specifically because each of them is growing at over 10 percent a year and they're high growth, high demand jobs. And they all have entry-level median incomes of over $55,000 a year. So these are good high paying jobs in three important growing fields. And we knew that at Google, we have the subject matter expertise to really create on-ramps into these jobs for people without college degrees. And that's what the world needed. They just needed a pathway to help people get there. If you talk to HR professionals, you'll know that many of them will tell you that in their job [requisitions] they write things like bachelor's degree or equivalent, but it's been super hard for people to define what “appropriate equivalent” is. So at Google, we've decided that these certificates are what we'll consider equivalent to a four year college degree if you are entering these fields. We think we're paving the way for lots of other employers to do the same.
Fuller: Well, that's one of the powerful things about a company or an industry recognized credential that it cuts through the fog of using proxies like college degrees as a basis for evaluating candidates. And this particular model seems to be doubly effective because it's got a company with Google's credibility in the technology space endorsing the credentials, which presumably something third-party employers will find pretty compelling.
Gevelber: That's right. We use Google employees as the subject matter experts—people who have decades of experience in these fields—to design the actual training. But then we also work with employers who employ folks working in these fields to ensure that the training we provide will meet the needs of the employers. So it's really built not only from the job back, but also from the employer back, to ensure that we're really making these people job-ready, whether they choose to work at Google or at any other company.
Fuller: Was this principally motivated by Covid or was this in the works before Covid to build on your success with the IT certificate?
Gevelber: No, we always knew we wanted to build on the success we'd had with IT support.
Fuller: Now, you've been expanding the distribution channels for this curriculum beyond Coursera to include [career technical education] CTE programs and community colleges. Could you talk a little bit about that and what motivated it?
Van Kleef Conley: Yeah. I'm a Harvard Ed School graduate and spent a lot of time there studying the community college system, so it's always been compelling. I recently read an article in the Washington Post that really struck me. It reported that 14 percent of community college learners in the US are homeless, and one in three go hungry while pursuing a degree. Think about that. I mean, a community college learner is then facing this decision of prioritizing getting an education over having a meal or a roof over their heads—and it seems like an impossible one. So, given that community colleges have unparalleled reach in their communities and they play such a critical role in workforce development, Google.org provided a grant to JFF, an education and workforce development nonprofit, to bring the IT Support Certificate to a hundred community colleges across the US this year. We're also excited to bring the Google Career Certificates to career and technical education or CTE high schools throughout the US. That will start with the IT Support Certificate this fall. Attending a CTE high school really increases on-time graduation, usually between 7 and 10 percent points, with larger impacts for disadvantaged students. These schools, of course, have strong articulation agreements with colleges. So those who are planning to attend a degree program after taking the IT Support Certificate at their high school can pursue 12 college credits—the equivalent of four college courses—through the American Council on Education's ACE credit. So this gives them a credit for prior learning pathway, designed to provide a faster and a lower cost route to a degree.
Fuller: How’s one of these programs different if it's being delivered through a community college? Is it just the Coursera online content but it's recognized as receiving course credit at the high school or at the college, or are there more hands-on instruction with docents or faculty from the schools involved?
Van Kleef Conley: Yeah, the latter's exactly right, Joe. It's an instructor-led training environment where a faculty member will teach the curriculum to a cohort of students. And, of course in the days of COVID, this is done virtually now in most cases.
Fuller: Does the curriculum include anything on what are called, in various places they're called “soft skills”—a term I dislike because I think it's deeply deceptive of how hard these skills are to acquire—but also called ”power skills” or “professional skills”. Or is it pretty much just the hard technical skills you need to advance in these areas?
Van Kleef Conley: No, we thought well beyond the technical curriculum across the certs [certifications]. So research consistently shows the importance of social networks in labor market outcomes, and learners from overlooked backgrounds often face these challenges with the job search and interview process due to lower social capital. So we were really keenly aware of this from the beginning. To support learners in their career search, we embed job prep resources throughout the curriculum. So for example, we offer a suite of Google created resume and interview role play videos tied to the content. We have downloadable IT support specific resume templates, particularly for those who might not have an educational background or work experience in the field. We offer free simulated virtual interview practice. And then once learners complete the program, they have access to a job board, which features local and national IT support employers. And we also make career coaching and job placement support available through a leading staffing agency that has an emphasis on acquired skills and aptitude, versus work history and degrees and so forth.
Fuller: So it's really providing the type of surround services that we read so often as being necessary but are often unavailable in institutions like community colleges, which are hard pressed to provide a deep curriculum and highly competent instructors let alone the type of career counseling and other tools that you're talking about.
Van Kleef Conley: That's exactly right.
Fuller: Talk to me a little bit about how you've gone about trying to get other employers interested in viewing these candidates and viewing them as qualified. Now, these are positions that are often in demand across the country, so there's kind of a natural supply, demand imbalance. But are you doing more proselytization with other employers, and how are you going about that?
Gevelber: So, while companies have been committed for a long time to trying to diversify their workforces, they needed a few more tools. One of those tools, I think, is this idea that there's now an equivalent pathway for people beyond a college degree, or instead of a college degree. With IT, we have some partners from all different industries. As we've said earlier, we're trying to ensure that our graduates can access jobs all over the country. So we have retailers, like Walmart, but also, like Best Buy,—their Geek Squad is a perfect place for the IT support graduates to go. But we also have employers like Bank of America and the Cleveland Clinic. So you can really see that employers, no matter what industry they're in, recognize both the need for IT support and the need to access this diverse talent pool. It also helps that, especially on the new certificates, we've gotten lots of input from employers about what they really need for these jobs. So I think a lot of them feel like we're building this training program for them. We're building a way that they can ensure that when candidates complete this, they have the skills that that company already knows they need.
Fuller: When you view this through the lens of a hiring manager or a HR department, how do you think that this is going to help them hire people who look like the communities they serve? And what have you heard from them as you've engaged with them about what they're looking for in a certification like this?
Van Kleef Conley: So throughout the online training and new certificates to come, learners will engage in a very dynamic mix of hands-on interactive assessments. So they can troubleshoot and practice just like they would on the job. The second is, hiring managers are most certainly interested in a very diverse workforce, which adds to the culture or the bottom line of an organization. And so we were laser focused on building a diverse and inclusive curriculum, talking about the digital divide. We incorporate over 50 nontechnical videos into the content, which showcases the personal stories of Google employees. Learners will meet an IT specialist turned security engineer from the deaf community, several female executives, and a veteran of the US Navy. They talk about coming from humble beginnings and struggling with impostor syndrome, and relying on grit and determination to achieve their goals. So, in my days as the hiring manager for our entry level IT support talent, we knew the single determining factor in success in an ever-changing career field like technology is that grit and determination. We try to really inculcate that into the curriculum, and we try to reward that throughout. So for example, learners have several attempts to take a pretty high-stakes, hands-on lab.
Van Kleef Conley: Because they might not get it right the first time, but we want to reward that perseverance. So in general, our curriculum and our approach, as is true of hiring managers, is rooted in this basic belief that there should be access for all.
Fuller: As you've engaged K through 12 systems for CTE schools and community colleges, how have you found that relationship? A lot of employers say they're trying to collaborate with local educational resources, but find it very, very difficult to get aligned with the educators and to really even know who to engage.
Gevelber: I think the beauty of this is that it's a standardized curriculum, so you don't have to rely on particular faculty member at this or that high school, or even community college, because we've built it from the job back with input from employers. And because, as Natalie said, it's super hands-on and has a real test for mastery built in, as an employer, you know it's good. You know that it's going to meet the needs that you have, and so you don't need to rely on the local school to develop their own curriculum. The beauty of this is that it's transferable and standard.
Van Kleef Conley: I would just add that the curriculum has this sort of modularized and flexible design, which has been really central to our ability to scale across multiple institutions, but it also recognizes the needs of individual colleges and faculty. So, because the IT support certificate, for example, is broad and can map to a wide range of different courses and programs, this allows faculty and institutional leaders more options to integrate or reformulate it so they can offer it as part of one course or multiple courses on the credit side or on the noncredit side. So this way the faculty can really drive the pedagogical approach, whether that's flipped classroom, or blended learning or so on and so forth. So Google's role is as the content provider, but we have, of course, great reverence for how the faculty deliver in their classrooms.
Fuller: Natalie and Lisa, one of the things I often hear from employers that are not in the technology industry when we talk about certification and getting industry recognized credentials, is that technology is an anomaly, because there are the Googles, and the Sales Forces and the Microsofts that have such influence in the space and are defining the space in terms of those technological credentials, they're nearly universally applicable. But if you're in the hospitality business, or in the food service business, or in the retail business, or even an advanced manufacturing, there aren't those very high, common denominator, universally accepted specifications. If you were advising another company that might not have that kind of core technology to build their curriculum around, what's the secret sauce to building a program like this in your view, and what would you urge them to try to pull together in terms of resources if they're going to try to emulate what you did?
Gevelber: The skills we're teaching are universal regardless of the specific employer profession, and they're not unique to technology in any way.
Fuller: So if you were advising a company in a different industry how to get on the path to create a program that it could have this type of impact, what would you tell them are the three or four steps they should consider taking to both investigate the possibility, and then to go about creating something that would have some acceptance in the marketplace, both from learners and from employers?
Gevelber: I think the most important thing that we did is we started from the jobs first. We're trying to prepare people for jobs, so we deeply understood each of these roles and did a thorough job task analysis to understand what employers want. But then that wasn't enough—it's not textbook. And we went to actual employers and had them iterate with us and revise the curriculum to ensure that it meets their needs. And I think regardless of what kind of job another company might be making a certificate for, it's critical to start with the actual job first and understand employer needs as well to ensure that what you're building is truly a pathway to job and not an academic exercise.
Fuller: Often employers are hesitant to either contribute to the creation of an industry based credential, or to even train their own employees because of the fear that they'll be paying to educate someone who will then go and work for a competitor. And that's often stated as a reason that companies don't want to pursue the type of investment that you've made. How do you think about that? What would your response be if I were employer and said, “that's why I don't want to follow in your footsteps?”
Van Kleef Conley: While it's early, I think this new ecosystem is emerging of providers and standards that are really framed around skills and competencies. And truly realizing the potential of that ecosystem will require thoughtful collaboration across a wide set of players: employers, educators—learners of, course—non-institutional providers of education. And so, we're in a world of growing collaboration and the blurring of these traditional boundaries. And if we can't shift the paradigm from competing for talent to coming together to jointly develop the pipeline needed to build the workforce, it's all a zero-sum game.
Fuller: One of the things we've been studying at the Managing the Future Work Project is the impact of new educational tools and interventions, whether it's online education or a deeper study into how people actually learn and how skills are developed. You started relying on the Coursera platform. What have you learned about online and remote instruction and what it takes for it to succeed? And also, how do you port it to places like community colleges, where you can add that element of customization and hands-on training?
Van Kleef Conley: I think we put a lot of effort and behavioral science into encouraging learners to persist through the program, and a lot of that is enabled by the Coursera platform. The IT support certificate, for example, has over 400 technical videos, 150 assessments. It's really rigorous. And so for example, we developed motivational pop-up prompts that surface at these known drop-off points in the curriculum. So a learner might get a prompt that says, "Heads-up, only 54 percent of learners pass this lab on the first try. Keep at it." We also ask learners to sign a commitment device at the start of the program that outlines their personal learning goals. And if they're dormant or inactive for a certain amount of days, we'll resurface that commitment device. And then we point our learners to online forums. So Coursera has these online forums where learners can connect to do meet-and-greet threads or get help from one another. And so we see 900 discussion threads on average per month for the IT support certificate. We have a very activated learner base, and they use these forums to essentially leverage the peer effects from them to get support, tips, and encouragement from one another. So we find the behavioral science quite fascinating and really lean into that to help our learners along.
Fuller: That's a pattern we're continuing to see as we pursue our research, that there are elements of social networking that provide opportunities for both coaching and peer-to-peer emotional support. That there are some fairly simple to implement tools that really kind of help people express their self-efficacy, remind them of their goals, help them get over temporary hiccups in their ability to continue on their course of study, which historically might have been permanent detours. It seems to me that we're really beginning to get a definition of what it takes to help a learner, particularly those that haven't had the type of advantages that have accrued to people who followed the normative and celebrated path of completing high school on time, going into a degree program, finishing it promptly with marketable skills on the back end that lead them automatically into the into an avenue that disproportionately leads to personal financial success and economic independence. Now, one other thing I'm also interested in is you made a commitment to scholarships to support these learners. Is that in lieu of them taking out student loans or using things like Pell Grant capacity, or how is that going to work and how are you going to administer it?
Gevelber: First and foremost, we wanted to ensure this credential was truly affordable to everyone. And Google doesn't charge for these credentials at all. Coursera takes a small fee for hosting it on their platform, but everyone is eligible who has need for a scholarship. So we work with various nonprofit partners, and we provide scholarships through them, but we also recently announced 100,000 additional scholarships for these certification programs to ensure that anyone can afford to do it. Coursera's fee is essentially $49 a month, and we see that most learners complete in three to six months. So if you were to pay for the whole thing, it's likely $150 to $300 in cost, but we'll make sure that if folks need it, we're there to help.
Fuller: So can you tell me a little bit about the outcomes you've seen relative to the IT certification at least, which has been in the market for a while? It seems like enrollment and completion statistics are really impressive.
Van Kleef Conley: Sure, so 80 percent of our learners in the US report that the IT support professional certificate has helped them advance their job search or their career within six months when we ask about that. So that could include finding a new job, getting a raise or starting a new business. So we're really pleased to see those outcomes. And we continue, of course, to provide soft skill and job placement and coaching supports to help enable that.
Fuller: Over what duration are those additional supports available? Is that something that you envision continuing to provide well into someone's career, or is that just related to that initial placement?
Van Kleef Conley: We do offer the supports from the very start of the program through completion. That's when our partners who provide the career coaching and placing support, when those services kick in. But we also recognize that IT support isn't just a job, but a career path. And so this IT support certificate isn't a terminal certificate. And so in January, we launched this follow-on program called the Google Automation with Python Professional Certificate, which is a new six-course program that provides beginner level training in Python, which is a very in-demand programming language by employers, in fact.
Fuller: Yes, it is.
Van Kleef Conley: So it builds on these IT foundations, and it's designed to help learners take their career to the next level, which we think is quite important as we've talked about the importance of lifelong training.
Fuller: Let's talk about lifelong training for a moment because a lot of people having said, "That's what we need," then frankly, express a lot of skepticism that we're well configured to do it, or in fact, that the typical worker has got the demeanor and attitude and self-efficacy to make the commitment required to rescale and upscale.
Gevelber: I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that people are amazing learners first and foremost. And they know that they can turn to online tools to learn anything. I mean, just look at YouTube. I learned to change my headlight the other day by just watching a YouTube video. And so I actually think the internet has become a great equalizer and also a really empowering tool for people. And I think career training is no different, right? People know that if they want to learn something, something on the internet is going to help them do it. And I think that what's new here is all of the great behavioral science work and other things that Natalie mentioned earlier, really just help people along in the right ways. One of the things we haven't really talked about today is we also do provide partnerships with nonprofits around the country who do provide real wraparound support. One of the most impressive examples of this is some work we've done with Merit America. And they have over 90 percent completion rate of our IT certificate in less than three months’ time, part time. So people are completing and completely changing their lives by completing this certificate in three months or less, working with Merit America. So I think it's unquestionable that people are just fundamentally great learners, and what's new is that someone's actually taking the time to put together a program that makes sense that really truly prepares people for jobs. And we've made it accessible online for everyone to use.
Fuller: Let's talk about the curriculum for a moment. Is this curriculum built around Google technology, its platforms and offers, or is it broader than that?
Van Kleef Conley: The content is aligned with the broader needs of the industry. So rather than focusing on proprietary, enterprise-specific technologies, the Google Career Certificates, the content, the products, the platforms are completely Google agnostic. So they're really just designed for learners to jumpstart their careers at any company across any sector.
Fuller: Well, Lisa and Natalie, thanks so much for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast and sharing these exciting developments at Google. I think the position you've taken—the way you've gone about it—could really be a role model to a lot of companies.
Gevelber: Thanks, Joe.
Van Kleef Conley: Thanks for having us.
Fuller: For more information on Google's Career Certificates, you can visit the website grow.google/certificates.