Higher education and industry are teaming up to tackle the challenges colleges are currently facing to fill the new technology jobs talent pipeline. By sharing with others what they are doing, universities and businesses can inspire others to do similar things, and to start similar programs to both re-skill current employees and help train new college graduates.
"From the employer perspective, if there would be enough graduate students graduating every year with computer science degrees then we would not have a digital skills gap. We would have plenty of talent with the advanced tech skills that are needed for today's economy. But we know that's not true," said Jennifer Henry, Senior Vice President, Career Services at 2U, a global education technology company, during a panel discussion entitled From School to Work at CES 2021. 2U has been collaborating with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Boot Camp.
“This is part of a broader strategy for IBM around the transformation of the economy to a skills-based economy,” said Alex Kaplan, Global Leader in Blockchain and AI for Learning Industry Credentials Network at IBM, explaining why it is important for IBM to offer credential certifications.
The rapid change in the economy has forced both higher education and industry to adapt and embrace change. There is a need to rethink the approach to skills, the approach to the talent pipeline, and the approach to talent management.
It is imperative to create and sustain the workforce that meets the needs of the jobs of today and those of the future, Kaplan said. "Because it is not just about people entering into the workforce from college; it's also about the people in the workforce today. Our jobs are ever changing, and there is not an end side to that," he said.
A recurrent topic is about re-skilling. "We've got very talented people and we want to continue to re-skill them. We want to be able to provide them good insight into how they can manage, and they can grow their careers,” Kaplan said, adding that is where IBM's Digital Credentials program really came into play.
"As we took a look at how we were doing this historically, it became clear to us that we needed to have an enterprise with a global strategy around assessing and understanding the skills that people had. That we had to have the ability to provide people with very high-fidelity and clear pathways so that we could look at the jobs of the future and help our employees understand how they need to re-skill themselves, and then we needed to provide that education for them. This is why Digital Credentials became important,” Kaplan said.
The result was a very large internal training organization. Digital Credentials counts with over 2,200 different badges. "We have issued over three million of them since we began our program, and it has really been transformative for us as an organization in terms of making sure that our employees understand what their futures are and that they are getting all the training that they need. And it has really changed our culture, so we've become a very skills-oriented and skills-focused culture."
Combining the learning environment and offers in higher education and taking into account the changes in the market, Kaplan said they have also been given Digital Credentials externally, through a career path and pipeline or through a technology program. "We work with community colleges and high schools to help students be prepared to work for companies like IBM, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, and others.
The skills gap was what motivated Grow with Google, according to Jesse Haines, Director of Grow with Google. In fact, two thirds of all the new jobs created in 2010 required high or medium level of digital skills, and the media Americans had no or low level of digital skills, Haines said.
"So that's why Google has been supporting Digital Skills and programs creating pathways to help people secure jobs in high-tech fields, she said. Haines believes that an absence of a college degree should not be a barrier to economic security, especially when two thirds of Americans do not complete a college degree.
"What we've been trying to do at Google is to lead this pathway into jobs. At Google, we were struggling to hire good talent at open IT roles." The Grow with Google platform is developed by Google and Googlers. It covers all the fundamentals of IT support someone needs so they can get a job at any company.
Click here for Part 1: Colleges are Facing Challenges to Fill the New Tech Jobs Talent Pipeline