Bill Kerr: The pandemic has seen an explosion of online education and training. While enrollment in traditional post-secondary courses has declined, hybrid and remote classes have proliferated. Nontraditional certificate programs for everything from programming to teamwork are available from myriad providers. Low-cost and free offerings vie with full-tuition classes. The syllabus ranges from academic to business focused and project based. Remote online instruction are certain to play a more significant role post-Covid. What does this disruption mean for higher education, professional development, and skills training?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Leah Belsky, chief enterprise officer at online learning platform Coursera. Leah has worked at the World Bank and the National Institutes of Health. She also served on the Obama administration technology policy committee and the Council on Foreign Relations. We’ll talk about Coursera’s evolution from the massive open online course—or MOOC—environment of a decade ago to today’s fast-changing market for online education and skills training. We’ll also talk about online learning opportunities for women and frontline workers who’ve been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. How can students, workers, and employers benefit from the new wired education paradigm? And what are the main challenges in providing universal access to lifelong learning? Welcome to the podcast, Leah.

Leah Belsky: Awesome, thanks for having me, Bill.

Kerr: Leah, your background includes a lot of famous institutions, but they’re very diverse. Tell us a little bit about your professional path and how you came to Coursera.

Belsky: I studied philosophy and biology in college and spent the first few years of my career in Washington, D.C., working at the National Institutes of Health and the World Bank, and then veered to law school. And while at law school, I became caught up in a movement connected to the future of the internet and society, and that’s where I caught this start-up bug. And so my first big start-up adventure was actually with a company called Kaltura, which was creating an open-source video platform. I spent about six years there, as we penetrated the global higher education market, and then moved out to Silicon Valley and learned about Coursera. And it seemed to me to be a fascinating company that was trying to really change the way higher ed works. And I jumped onboard, and it’s been quite an adventure since then. I’ve been at Coursera almost six years this fall.

Kerr: Yeah, it’s been quite an adventure. Coursera’s grown substantially over the last decade. Tell us a bit about its main offerings and that growth path.

Belsky: When I joined Coursera, it had under $10 million in revenue. The company had launched as what we call a MOOC—a massive open online courses—platform. And it was started by two computer scientists at Stanford—Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. And when they put their courses online, they had hundreds of thousands of people sign up to join these machine-learning courses. And from there, that’s where the company started. And so the company raised a bunch of venture capital and decided to pull together over 150 universities and companies from around the world that would build out different types of learning products on the catalog. So when I joined, it was very early stage. The company had a lot of learners, but we were trying to figure out how do we monetize. And so the first way Coursera was monetizing was actually offering certificates—so collections of courses that became what we called “specializations,” and learners would buy these courses and get a certificate that they could put in their LinkedIn profile. And that was really the first part of the business. So Coursera, as a business model, has really evolved. There’s three main lines of business. There is an online-degree business, where we offer best-in-class online degrees to the world. These include things like an MBA from University of Illinois, a bachelor’s degree in software and computer science from University of London. And what’s unique about these degrees is that they are a fraction of the cost of an in-person degree, and they are flexible. So they’re specifically built for people who want to learn and work and live their lives. Another big part of the business, which has continued to be evolving, is our consumer business, where consumers buy various learning products. And a third part of the business is the enterprise business. This is the part of the business I lead, and this is where we partner with institutions—companies, governments, universities that want to take our platform and up-skill or re-skill their workforce.

Kerr: Yeah, and what is the rough breakdown—either headcount, revenues, student miles—across those three lines of business?

Belsky: The consumer business is roughly two-thirds of the business, and then the degrees and enterprise are the other portion. Degrees is the smallest part of the business but the fastest-growing part, the most recent.

Kerr: Yeah, as you began, the depiction of the two machine-learning classes, how has the range of content grown? And let’s even focus in particular on your enterprise segment. When you’re working with a company around a re-skilling program, what’s the typical range of content that they are interested in incorporating into the platform?

Belsky: So a lot of the companies that come to us are coming to us because they are concerned about digital transformation. They are worried that the talent in their company does not have the skills they need to fill the jobs of the future. They are worried about all sorts of new software and technology and data projects that they need to bring onboard and realize that they can’t go out to the market to hire many of the people that they might need. A classic story of one of our most early clients was AT&T. They worked with us to identify what are the job roles that AT&T thinks they will need in the future, what are the skills required for those jobs, and how do they enable their workforce to actually pursue these jobs and pursue these skills. We offer a skills development platform, so it includes courses in business and technology and data science and well-being and management. And we offer both skillsets. So, specifically, many companies have two different challenges. One is that they know their people don’t necessarily have the skills that they need, but they have a hard time identifying, what are the job roles that I might need for the future and what are the skills associated with those roles. And so we’ve built something called “SkillSets” where we can identify, for every number of jobs, what are the skills required and what is the content, what are the educational offerings that a learner should pursue in order to develop the skills for that role. And we’ve also built out academies—so a data science academy, a marketing academy, a finance academy—so that it’s really easy for business leaders who now are super concerned with their talent base to roll out educational offerings and track skill development among their employees.

Kerr: As you think about the return on investment, in a degree-type setting, one can imagine a pretty straightforward calculation, which is, does the individual’s earnings increase after the education and the degree obtainment in order to compensate for the costs that were put into that. For an organization—and the AT&T story is an amazing one, it had 100,000 workers that needed to be moved across their skillsets—how do you work on calculating the return to this online learning platform that’s been developed?

Belsky: Well, so the interesting thing is that, when we started in the corporate learning space, the primary thing that people were measuring was activity—so how many hours does someone spend learning, and how many courses do they take. Now, what’s the impact of that? It’s very hard to quantify. What we’re focused on is skills development. And because of all the data that we’ve collected in our consumer platform in an underlying skills graph that we’ve built, we can track development of skills. That’s one thing that we look at when we talk to business leaders about ROI. We look at, how has your employee base progressed in terms of the skills that they’ve developed over time, and how do the skills that they possess in key fields that you’ve identified—whether it be in finance or machine learning or in data management—how do those skills benchmark compared to other companies. And it becomes a useful tool, because you can go to a CEO and—say you’re an Adobe, you’re looking to develop machine-learning talent, and so you’re saying, “Well, what are the top companies in our industry that have the best machine-learning talent? How does the skillset of their engineers compare to ours?” And we are able to have that conversation. A second thing we did is, we recently commissioned IDC to look at the ROI of Coursera, and they looked at a couple of different dimensions. One is ROI based on the lowering of the training costs. So with online learning and with specifically skills-based online learning, it required 40 percent less training and education resources. They see that companies using Coursera have trained significantly more employees than through traditional training mechanisms, and so they actually calculated like a three-year ROI of 746 percent. We also look at reduction and attrition. So to what extent are you managing to retain key employees and neither need to fire them or let them leave? And the key companies that have worked with Coursera have actually reduced attrition by over 38 percent.

Kerr: Right, you showed a tremendous range of activities. It even sounded like one role was assessment—being able to see where the skills base of an organization is. A second part was benchmarking, compared to peer organizations on these key skills. To what degree does the enterprise segment end up being relatively bespoke-type offerings for clients versus there’s some common-core backbone that Coursera’s building to enable the enterprise segment?

Belsky: There are two types of organizations out there. There are organizations like a Cap Gemini or an AT&T that know exactly what skills they want to build, and so for them, what we do is, we customize and we help them select the content that they want. We never build custom content. What we’re basically doing is curating—what are the skillsets, what are the courses, and what are the key populations that they want to train? For other organizations, they know they have a problem, but they don’t know where to start. And so, for many organizations, we’re not doing any customization. We identify, you’re a pharma client, and we know what the key skills are trending in the pharma space, and so here are the key courses and skillsets we’d recommend your employees pursue. But you were right in the observation that you made. What Coursera’s doing as a learning company is much more than just delivering learning. We’re pulling together all the insight from learners that we have on the platform and have now the ability to identify what are the trending skills in different regions of the world, in different industries. And so we leverage that data to advise companies on the skills that they need to develop, and then we help them build the programs to do so, as well as measuring the impact of those programs.

Kerr: It’s amazing. So when you think about online learning, that’s been a core part of our pandemic experience—ranging from, in many families, the elementary school kids who were suddenly at home and in the bedroom next door, up through universities and graduate schools. For Coursera, what have been the most popular classes during the pandemic? And has that mix changed from right before the pandemic took us over?

Belsky: So one of the most popular courses during the pandemic was actually a course called “The Science of Well-Being.” And if you haven’t taken it, you should actually check it out. It’s one of those courses that every parent, every employee, everyone can get value from it. It’s taught by a professor from Yale University, and it basically talks through the different data-driven ways in which you can use psychology and use different behaviors to improve your happiness. But this is a course that took off during the pandemic. It’s also a course that we released [as part of] a collection during the pandemic to all our corporate clients called the “Employee Resilience Package.” And so, whereas traditionally, most of our corporate clients and most of our consumers were primarily studying career-related topics in business and technology and data science, we saw a huge rise in topics connected to positive psychology, connected to well-being. That was one big category. But the other category that took off was really just an acceleration of core skills content. So courses in computer programming and cloud fundamentals, in machine learning. And what we saw is that, what was unique about Covid is, at the same time that there were massive layoffs and companies were rethinking the future of their workforce, there was also significant digital acceleration. What happened during Covid is that companies started realizing that so many of the jobs and the people that they would lay off were unlikely to potentially return. And so many, many people hopped online and started learning.

Kerr: Yeah, when you think particularly about people that were pulling out of the workforce possibly to take care of family members at home and similar, one particular focal point has been around women and their role in the workforce, taking online courses and similar. Were you able to monitor or kind of build upon particular offerings for women in those positions?

Belsky: So interestingly, the fate of women during the pandemic has obviously been a big, big conversation. The National Women’s Law Center found that 1.8 million fewer women were in the workforce in March 2021 compared to February 2020. And yet, despite the decrease in the number of women in the workforce, what we saw is that there was actually a rise in the percentage of people learning on Coursera that were women. And in particular, we saw the percentage of women studying technology, science—STEM courses—grew from 35 percent in 2018 up to 47 percent more recently. I found that both an inspiring and interesting statistic—that on the one hand, women were displaced and I think continue to be displaced in a number of different ways, but women are doubling down, learning more, and also engaging more in technical fields.

Kerr: I’m curious. There’s also a large spike in entrepreneurship recently, which a number of economists and observers have been trying to figure out exactly what has been going on there. Do you see people related to entrepreneurship coming onto Coursera to develop particular skills for their business?

Belsky: So we do. One of our most popular specializations that continues to be trending is an entrepreneurship collection of courses from Wharton. It’s five courses that guide learners through how to develop, launch, fund, and grow their own business. And we’ve seen that over 140,000 people have completed this specialization. And it’s not surprising. I think if you look in the U.S. alone, the number of applications that people are filing for new businesses rose, I think, over 95 percent between July 2020 to present, compared to the year before. And now I think everyone’s talking about the great rising nation, people exploring new jobs, people rethinking their lives. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend in starting new businesses and doubling down on education required to start new businesses continues.

Kerr: Leah, let’s actually turn our attention a little bit inward here. We love to have executives think also about their own companies’ operations. And so I’d love you to spend a little bit of time talking to us about, how did the pandemic affect Coursera directly? And as a leader, what were some of the steps you took as the pandemic took root, and then as it went from being three months into six months into a year and beyond?

Belsky: There was a very specific moment for me when I realized this was going to be a long period that we were entering. It was just as people were starting to empty the stores in San Francisco, we were realizing something was going to change. And what we realized was that 1.8 billion students were suddenly at home because their schools had to close. And we realized, well, we have an asset. The first thing we did is, we launched what we called the “Covid Campus Response Initiative.” And we made our campus platform available for free to any institution in higher ed. So when I say “Coursera for Campus,” I mean, as I mentioned earlier, a big part of our business is providing the Coursera platform to universities who want to incorporate our courses into their core curriculum. And so we made that offering free, and we had over 4,000 global institutions sign up over those first six months of the pandemic and very rapidly became part of the core infrastructure of higher ed for a significant portion of global universities. The second thing we did is, we launched the Coursera “Workforce Recovery Initiative.” So we made the enterprise offerings free to any government around the world that wanted to provide education to people who were disrupted or unemployed during the pandemic. We had over 300 local governments sign up to use Coursera during that time, and over a million learners signed up to be a part of that Workforce Recovery Initiative. And then the last initiative we launched was, as I mentioned, the “Employee Resilience Initiative,” where we made specifically collections connected to well-being and personal development and learning available to our corporate clients. And those three initiatives, I would say both from a leadership standpoint as well as a business standpoint, changed a lot for Coursera. So from a leadership standpoint, a lot has been said that Coursera’s one of the first responders to actively take a big move and respond to the pandemic in the education space. It took a certain amount of ability to take risks. That type of support was from our CEO down through our board, who said, “We don’t care what happens to the revenues this year. If this is a time where Coursera can help a world in need, you should go for it.” And they, obviously, realized that having additional reach for our business was tremendous. I lead the enterprise business, so I was worried about what was going to happen to our revenues, what was going to happen to all the people we hired, and we’re now making their products free. And it turned out that we both accelerated our revenue, but we also started to get to know many, many, many more institutions that we wouldn’t have otherwise engaged with through our classic marketing and started building what we call a “Freemium” business model, where people can come to Coursera, our consumer site, and they can try our courses for free, or they can engage with us on the enterprise side and test the offering for free. So that was one—really just a big business model change and acceleration of the core business. The second big change for us during Covid was, I think, no different than a lot of companies went through, which was figuring out how to manage and lead a remote company. Now, interestingly, as an enterprise leader, I’m someone who always worked online with my team, because my direct reports are in India, in Europe, on the East Coast, West Coast, and Latin America. And so we had already been working virtually. But Coursera actually leaned hard into virtual work and very early on said this is not just something we’re going to do during Covid. We’re going to embrace the virtual and remote work culture, and we’re going to build a new workforce vision where less than 1 percent of our people will be office based. A big chunk in the middle might be near some of our local office hubs and campuses. But anyone, anywhere, can decide to work flexibly provided that it is a place where Coursera is incorporated and has a presence. And so a lot of this year’s journey has been figuring out how do we transition to a remote culture and also realizing what are the benefits that can come when you do follow that type of trajectory and build a different type of workforce vision.

Kerr: So, Leah, the remote-work/hybrid-work model that you described for Coursera was quite striking. Do you see that as being something that will be broadly accepted in the workplace? As Coursera is kind of gearing up for future enterprise clients, how do you see the post-Covid workplace shaping up?

Belsky: So I honestly, both in our world in Silicon Valley and with our larger corporate clients, we see a huge amount of variability in the way companies are embracing a post-Covid workforce. There are actually very few that I would say that are embracing a fully remote work culture the way we are, and I think people who aren’t are making a mistake. It turns out that, if you have a remote workforce, we see increases in productivity. We see an ability to recruit a much more diverse talent base, because you can get people from all different locations. It turns out that Silicon Valley doesn’t have the most diverse talent base, and now we’re able to hire people in Atlanta, in Chicago, all over the place. And it also—from a perspective of women and from other people who are trying to both work and live their lives—it creates more space for people to build their lives and build work into a life in a way that’s much more flexible. I look at myself. I have three kids. They are very young. They are two, six, and eight. And I was on a bit of a collision course. I was a leader in a fast-growing company, spending a significant amount of time on the road. I was spending two and a half hours every day commuting. And that’s not an easy balance to strike. Now my life is very different. We do imagine meeting as an executive team five or six times a year. I will probably visit each of the remote offices. But otherwise, I’m home, and I’m available to be part of my kids’ lives and to support them in the morning and to take off an hour here and there if I need to. And it’s just not something that would have been possible in the old way we worked. So I’m excited to lean into remote work. We’re beta testing a return to work of these new campus locations. We changed the way they are structured, so they’re much more focused on allowing people to gather. Anyone who has a meeting in an office, though, they need to be remote first. So they need to set up a Zoom. They need to prioritize the people who are out of the room, and we make a point, if any one person can’t be present, then we need to prioritize the people who are not there. That’s a big shift.

Kerr: One of the things you mentioned earlier was this great resignation moment that appears to be in our economy. Tell us a little bit about how Coursera’s engaged with frontline workers, helping them to refocus, move to that new career that we see a lot of people apparently transitioning toward.

Belsky: So it’s been fascinating to read the headlines, both to see the percentage of increasing the number of people who are resigning from work, but also the struggles that large companies are having in hiring frontline workers. And I think there’s a number of different reasons for that. Like one, it’s because people are starting to question whether the wages that they can work in some of those jobs are questionable. And second, for what I had said earlier, a lot of frontline work doesn’t actually put you on a path to a meaningful career. And so one of the things we accelerated focusing on in the business is actually launching programs specifically designed for people who are not in a job—or in a job and want to transition. And we call these “Gateway Credentials.” They are entry-level certificate programs in topics like project management, IT support, UX design. And they are designed for someone who has never had any experience in any of these technical fields to get a full-time job. To give you an example, one of our most popular programs is a program with Google. It’s called the “Google IT Support Professional” certificate, and we’ve had hundreds of thousands of learners enroll in these. And so what we’re currently working on is packaging up these certificate programs for companies who want to engage their frontline workers. And the promise that we think we can make to them is that this will give workers who take some of these frontline jobs an opportunity also to advance their careers with very specific learning paths that are connected to jobs—either in the company they’re currently working at or at another company. And we specifically picked learning paths for these gateway certificates that are connected to some of the most in-demand jobs in the country. And so we’ll see. We’re in the process of talking to a lot of these larger companies that have big frontline worker populations, and we’ll be excited to see how we can solve some of their retention and hiring challenges and support these frontline workers.

Kerr: Yeah. Continuing this theme, one often hears the phrase “education as a benefit.” And when you’re speaking to, let’s say, a first-time client, is that a good strategy? Is it a helpful strategy? Or do you believe that the offerings and the skills that you mentioned earlier that you’re developing need to be very tightly linked into the workers’ jobs and these career-path changes you just highlighted?

Belsky: I do think educational benefits are important. But for companies who approach learning as a benefit, what you often see them do is just put a bunch of learning out there or put a bunch of education credits out there and say, “There you go! Everyone can learn.” What that approach doesn’t do is solve the core business challenges of companies that actually want to advance their workforce and develop skills in specific fields where they need to compete. And so where we’re focused is on really helping solve the business challenges and helping companies develop a workforce for the future. So, if you look at the learning field more generally, I would say five years, when we got into this space, everyone was focused on learning, open learning. How do you get as many courses available and as many education benefits? Then the learning space was very focused on guided learning. How do you actually curate the selection of courses? Now we’re focused on skills development. How do you identify very precisely what skills your company needs to be competitive to meet the needs of the future? What job roles do those match? And how do I connect the skills? And I’ll tell you, it’s not easy if you are a frontline worker—or really, quite frankly, if you’re any employee—to figure out how to chart your own educational path. The goal with these gateway certificates and the goal with a lot of the learning programs that we partner on with companies is to create very clear pathways, so an employee doesn’t have to figure out what courses do I put together to build my curriculum. They can literally think, “What is a job that I can pursue that might suit me?” and then have the learning paths out there for them.

Kerr: Yeah, two big pieces about Coursera as an organization are, first, it’s a B Corp [Certified B Corporation] and we’ve had a few of those on our podcast, and second, you have recently gone public. So can you tell us a little bit about those choices and any implications they have for your business?

Belsky: Our mission has always been to transform lives through learning, and all our strategy and our practices and our business growth has been connected to figuring out how can we expand access to online learning. And so becoming a B Corp was really just redefining that and formalizing our commitment to reducing barriers to world-class education. It was exciting for us to both become a B Corp and then to see Coursera go public. I’m excited to both continue Coursera’s mission and also prove out that B Corps and companies that do also look at serving broader goals beyond just the financial bottom line are viable. And I’m hopeful that we will continue to inspire more and more companies to pursue the B Corp form.

Kerr: Very important in those goals are current diversity and inclusion initiatives. Can you tell us a little bit about the work at Coursera to approach and build both diversity and inclusion? And second, how do you address that with some of your customer organizations?

Belsky: For a lot of these topics, and for D&I in particular, we look at both how do we become a best-in-class company and diversify our own internal company, and then, what can we as a company do to help others build a more diverse workforce. And we’ve taken a couple of specific actions. One, like many companies, we have completely rebuilt our hiring practice. Now, when we open a new [requisition] for any position at a specific level, we have to start with building a pipeline of diverse candidates. As we do leadership hires, the slate of candidates needs to include a certain percentage of diverse candidates. In our company core goals that we build every quarter, we have key metrics that we drive against for diversity. We also thought a lot about what can we do as Coursera to help other institutions build more-diverse workforces and also help individuals who are diverse get better jobs. And so we’ve done a couple things. One is, we have partnered with a number of the historically Black colleges and universities to come onto the platform and have seen some recent announcements there. We have been spending a lot of time thinking about how do we diversify our professors who teach on the platform. And there are all sorts of interesting data that, when you have a professor who’s diverse, they are more likely to attract students who are also diverse as well. And we put together collections of courses connected to diversity and inclusion that we’re also making available for free to a number of our corporate clients as well. And what I enjoy about being in Coursera is that everything we do, we try to really measure and see if it has an impact. And so, when we first started working on D&I with even more fervor, we had a list of maybe like 15, 20 ideas that we could pursue. And so we picked a couple. But if these don’t work, we’ll look in other directions as well.

Kerr: You’ve also recently been in the news with your work with Goodwill [Industries] on the Rising Together coalition. Tell us a little bit about that.

Belsky: So Goodwill is an organization, an amazing organization, that specifically was focused on people who are severely impacted by the pandemic. They are one of the largest players in the workforce-development space. And so, in partnership with both Goodwill and Google, we rolled out 2,000 scholarships to help learners in need—people impacted by the criminal justice system, veterans, underserved high school students—and put together specific collections of content that were aimed at helping these populations of learners develop in-demand digital skills. And what’s interesting is, one of the reasons why the enterprise business matters—leave aside the revenue, and it’s a good business—is we find that there are many individuals in the world where they can’t just go to a consumer site and sign up and learn to be successful. There’s a very important role that an institution plays in helping learners be successful—whether that institution is a college or university, a nonprofit, a company. But Goodwill, in particular, does some very important things. They identify these learners. They recruit them. They have all sorts of services that they provide to learners, in addition to the courses. And so we’re excited about the partnership and are very much tracking how successful learners are in these programs, how many they complete, and what sort of career impact they see through learning on Coursera.

Kerr: Leah, with all of Coursera’s experience in online education, is there a way that you are sharing best practices with instructors?

Belsky: Pedagogy and having a perspective on pedagogy and building that into courses is actually a big part of what we do. We put out a set of technology tools, and then we have what we call a “teaching and learning team” that works with all our partners as they build courses. And we give advice on many, many different topics—from how you articulate the learning goals that are part of a course, how you break up a course into modules so that in every different lesson you would have both a video, some type of reading, and a summative assessment. And we also have a detailed system from, then, testing courses. So all the lessons in our courses and the courses can be rated, and if a course doesn’t get a certain rating along a number of dimensions, we don’t publish the course. So we see a big part of our role as enabling authors and teachers to build a best-in-class course using technology, bringing together all the best practices that we’ve accumulated over time. It’s very different from like a YouTube or a Udemy or any type of open-marketplace platform.

Kerr: Leah, what does lifelong learning mean to you? And how do you see the labor market adapting to the need for ongoing re-skilling and up-skilling?

Belsky: What excites me about being a leader at Coursera—and leading the enterprise business, in particular—is the opportunity to build a world where any individual at any point in their lives has an opportunity to pursue a new path, to learn the skills they need to learn, and to get a new job. And so, in order to do that, it requires having a couple things. One, people must be able to finance that learning. They must be able to get the guidance to figure out what type of learning would be best suited to their skills and what type of jobs would be best suited to their skills. And then they must have the time and freedom and flexibility to be able to learn. The current educational system in the majority of the world is built to train people from age five up through 21 or 25 or whatever it might be to learn. And then, after that, all the funding and institutional support stops. What we’re excited to do is partner with universities, with companies, and with governments to build a future institutional ecosystem for people to continue learning. So whether you’re an employee and you want to engage with your employer on the learning that you might pursue, whether you’re wanting to engage with your government and receive different benefits as a citizen, or whether you want to go back to university and access new types of programs that don’t necessarily require spending three years getting a new degree, we want to build that flexibility. And what we see in the enterprise business is, actually, it’s not only about laying the foundation so that any institution becomes a teaching institution, it’s also about building institutional networks and creating ecosystems where the governments can partner with companies, and companies partner with universities, and they give feedback on what are the skills needed in a particular region. I’ll leave you with one story. One of the most exciting clients that I feel really proud and inspired by is actually the New York State Department of Labor. They did a very large partnership with us, following working with us in the Covid response, to take Coursera and make it available to workers throughout New York. And what they did was really fascinating. They looked at the jobs ecosystems in different parts of the state, and they looked at the type of skills that workers need to develop to work in those jobs in different regions of the state. And then they partnered with both workforce-development boards and community colleges to make the Coursera learning available. And they put together both core career paths for some of the key jobs that are becoming more popular in the state—career skills, how do you interview, how do you build a resume, all these types of programs together. And I really see this as an example of one of the largest, most economically powerful states in the U.S. building out a real lifelong-learning infrastructure. So I’m inspired by it, and I hope that it’s a model that we can continue to support. And we’re seeing states throughout the U.S. and countries throughout the world following in a similar pathway, partnering between governments, local community colleges, and companies to build out a lifelong-learning ecosystem.

Kerr: Leah Belsky is the chief enterprise officer at Coursera. Thanks so much for joining us!

Belsky: Awesome! Thanks so much for having me, Bill.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.