Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of online learning platform Coursera, is my guest in this episode of the Work in Progress podcast.
Founded in 2012 by two Stanford computer science professors, the company is now one of the biggest online training platforms in the world. Early in the pandemic, Coursera decided to help people losing their jobs by launching its Workforce Recovery Initiative, a partnership with more than 30 state and local governments.
Through the governments, millions of unemployed workers were offered free access to more than 3,800 job-relevant courses and professional certifications through the end of December. The courses prepared them for certificates in technology, public health, and other industries.
“If you simply look at the representation of students who are taking these kinds of entry-level digital job training programs, these professional certificates on Coursera, they clearly are not your PhD students and masters degree students and people with MBA, these are folks who are trying to get into a new digital career, and frankly, they haven’t had a place to go or felt like they had something that worked in their lives, and it is a more accessible on-ramp,” Maggioncalda tells me in the podcast.
“This that’s just an on-ramp, it’s a first step. Once you get that entry-level job, you can if you want, continue to get a college degree online and that entry-level professional certificate could count as credit, or, online you could continue to take more and more advanced content so that you can continue to develop more advanced skills, and open up the career opportunities in front of you,” he adds.
Coursera’s work with the states and cities does not stop with the New Year. It is actively working with these governments to identify transition paths for those impacted workers, including targeted workforce development programs and scholarships through the company’s industry and social impact partners.
Working with Employers
We talk about some of the companies that are partnering with Coursera to help workers take that first step toward a good-paying career.
“It started with Google. They realized many years ago, in 2017, that they needed a lot more IT Support professionals. They also realized that they could really get a more representative workforce, they could make job opportunities available to people who didn’t have a college degree, they could learn the skills to do IT Support,” says Maggioncalda.
Google is now funding 10,000 scholarships for the Google IT Support Certificate to support veterans, refugees, and low-income students from select nonprofits.
“IBM has now launched a entry-level professional certificate in data science, no college degree, no background in data science required. Also in cybersecurity, so you can become a cybersecurity analyst by taking the IBM cybersecurity analyst entry-level professionals certificate, and then data analysts, there’s a lot of data analyst jobs.”
Salesforce also just launched the Salesforce Sales Development Representative Professional Certificate. “There are a lot of jobs in sales, and a sales development representative is someone who kind of tees up the sale for the sales executive to close.