Dive Brief:
- Google expanded its Grow with Google digital learning program to include an IT Support Professional Certificate at 25 community colleges. It has enlisted the support of 14 companies, which say they can't fill IT support positions and will consider students who complete the program.
- The course, which will be offered online through the Coursera learning platform in collaboration with colleges in seven states starting this fall, has already enrolled 40,000 students. The Grow with Google initiative offers courses such as Get Your Business Online and Applied Digital Skills.
- Graduates with the certificate will be able to directly share their information with about 20 top companies, including Bank of America, Walmart and GE Digital.
Dive Insight:
Google estimates there are 150,000 open IT support positions with starting salaries of about $52,000, many of which do not require a college degree. The course will train workers in about eight months and use several hands-on assessments that require participants to troubleshoot a tech problem as if they were on the job.
There was only a 0.03% growth in IT jobs in May and experts are blaming the lack of talent. Organizations in need of a skilled IT workforce are unwilling to create, let alone advertise, jobs that don't have candidates to fill them. In the last year, fewer than 45,000 IT jobs were added because of stagnant growth and restrictions on hiring immigrants.
But colleges and universities are preparing their curriculum to adapt to one of the most demanding fields of the time. About 71% of experts agree that tech companies partnering with education institutions is the best solution for the widening skills gap.
Other companies and leaders in Silicon Valley are also working to bolster the tech workforce through increased tech education. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is working with for-profit university Southern Careers Institute to create Woz U, an institute for training tech workers online.
IBM also announced last year it is expanding its partnership with a dozen more community colleges to train workers. The partnership allows prospects to train for roles, including application security analyst, data scientist and cloud enterprise developer, without attending a four-year university.
To accelerate this sort of collaboration, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation recently launched its Talent Pipeline Management Academy, which encourages employers to become involved much more directly with education systems to ensure they produce people with needed skills.
Some analysts say colleges have a shortage of faculty trained to teach the needed courses, and some critics of fast-paced, tech-based changes in education say they are hindered by the lack of hiring and the need for more resources.
