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Breaking down the cost barrier, opening tech upskilling to all

A conversation with Lisa Gevelber, founder and VP, Grow with Google
By Ramona Schindelheim
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In this encore episode of the Work in Progress podcast, first aired in April, my guest is Lisa Gevelber, the founder and vice president of Grow with Google, Google’s training initiative which is helping people gain tech skills for in-demand jobs in today’s economy.

Gevelber says there are millions of American workers without a college degree who feel like good jobs are out of reach for them, and Google wants to break down that barrier by training workers for skills that employers are looking for right now.

“The objective is really to make sure that the opportunities that are created by technology are truly available to everyone. It’s an economic opportunity program that really has two pillars, which is how do we help small businesses succeed, and then how do we help people reach their full economic potential regardless of their background, education, and make sure that they really have opportunities to get great, high-paying, high-growth jobs.

Gevelber explains that the career certificate program grew out of the company’s efforts to solve an internal problem—finding enough talent trained to do IT support.

“We built a specific training program so that we could successfully bring in non-traditional (non-degreed) talent and build out our own workforce. Then we realized that we had something really special and that we could share this with everyone. So, we created our very first Google Career Certificate in IT support and made it available to anyone—put it up on Coursera—in January of 2018. And it’s a super robust training program, it’s still the training program that we use at Google to train our own IT support professionals.”

More than 50,000 people have gone through the program, gotten the Google IT certificate, and are working in the IT field. “The good thing is so many of our students do not have a college degree and are just thriving in these jobs.”

Google recently added new certificates in three other high-demand fields—data analytics, project management, and user experience design, which is the creative field of how we all interact with websites or apps on our phones.

There are 1.3 million open jobs in the four Google Career Certificate fields. Says Gevelber, “Employers are out there looking for great talent and, ideally, also diversifying their workforces. After the training, Google works with more than 130 companies to place its graduates in jobs with entry-level salaries of at least $69,000 a year.”

Coursera charges a small fee for the training, which is taught online by Google professionals. “Each of our certificates can be done for $39 a month. Most people finish in three to six months, so the total cost for most people would be $120 to $240.

Gevelber says the Google Career Certificate training program is a “win for everyone. It helps job seekers get the skills they need for these in-demand, high-paying jobs, but it also really helps the employers fill their talent pipeline with non-traditional talent.”

You can listen to the full podcast here, or download and listen from wherever you get your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this podcast here.

Episode 191: Lisa Gevelber, founder & VP, Grow with Google
Host and Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, editor-in-chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.

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