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Grow With Google VP on reskilling amid COVID-19

2021 Milken Conference: Google’s professional training programs.

Video transcript

- Meantime, sticking with tech as we've been talking about, Google for years now for a while has been stepping up its efforts when it comes to professional training programs to bring more underrepresented groups into tech. And for more on that, I want to get out to California here in Beverly Hills, Yahoo Finance's editor in Chief Andy Serwer is standing by with a guest who's very close to that effort. Andy?

LISA GEVELBER: Thanks a lot, Zach. That's right. I'm here with Lisa Gevelber of Google who heads up that endeavor called Grow with Google that you were just talking about. Lisa, great to see you.

- Hi, Andy. Thanks so much for having me.

LISA GEVELBER: OK, so tell us what Grow with Google is.

- Gow Grow with Google is Google's initiative to really ensure economic opportunity for everyone. We want to make sure that these opportunities that have been created by technology truly are available to everyone, regardless of your background and experiences.

LISA GEVELBER: And you founded this program yourself at the company?

- I did it's one of my favorite things for my whole career. I bet, so how-- tell us how you came up with the idea and how it was approved, and did it go up to the highest levels to get greenlit?

LISA GEVELBER: It sure did. So through Google's products actually, we make a lot of contributions to the world, including helping people be successful with small businesses. And so, we knew that economic opportunity was really important to the company and part of what we do every day with our products. But we wanted to do more.

And not just with our products or with the great philanthropy that we also do, but really make programs that would make a difference for people. So when we took a step back and thought about how do we make a difference in economic opportunity and mobility? We thought about, what are some of the biggest problems today?

And one of those problems is that 2/3 of Americans, which is about 80 million adult workers today don't have a college degree, and they feel really locked out of good jobs. And that really hurts their ability to advance in their careers. And sustain their families, but it also really hurts employers when there's this big mismatch between what employers need and what people know how to do.

So we decided to really try to solve that problem with a two-fold approach. One, help people get the skills they need for in-demand high growth jobs, but also, really work with employers to take down these barriers to employment that existed today. So we've been focused on how do we help people without degrees get into high paying high growth jobs.

- So give us some examples and what does this mean from a practical standpoint then?

LISA GEVELBER: Sure. So we identified four career fields to start with. All of which are in demand, high growing, high paying, and can be done from anywhere. These aren't jobs you have to move to Silicon Valley to get.

And they're all things that we knew we could teach people regardless of their educational background or experience. We could make you successful in these jobs, and there are things where Google has particular expertise. So we started with the job and we worked backward.

What were the skills you needed to have? What knowledge you need to have? All of them are built by Google experts. With dozens of years of experience in each of these fields, and then we vet them with employers. Top employers who are hiring in each of the fields and they helped us make them better.

So now we know we're teaching exactly what employers are trying to solve for. And then lastly, we really focused on how do we make sure this works for working adults who can't sit-in a classroom all day or be tied to a particular classroom schedule? So it's all online on demand.

- How is this work though, Lisa, connected to Google's core products and services, like search, mail, maps, Chrome, et cetera, and all that.

LISA GEVELBER: Sure. Well, we're not teaching our own products actually. We're teaching what you need to for these career fields and we're even teaching some of the softer skills and critical like workforce skills. Like problem solving, critical thinking, effective communication, team management.

We're teaching all those things because that's what it takes to be successful in the workforce today. So we teach for career fields. We teach how to become a data analyst, or an IT support specialist, user experience design, and also project management.

- So you could just go online and find this yourself and sign up and start training yourself with these programs?

LISA GEVELBER: Absolutely. That's the whole idea. It needs to be flexible so that it can work for working adults.

- And so, is this a business, or is it philanthropic, or is it both, or does it have a P&L? How does it work?

LISA GEVELBER: No P&L.

- OK.

LISA GEVELBER: No. This is part of our social good efforts at Google. We really felt like it was a way we can make a huge difference in economic mobility, and we're seeing that to be the case.

- But you have another full time job, then it's like the CMO of the Americas, right?

LISA GEVELBER: I do have another job.

- And that's what you do? You're the chief marketing officer of the Americas for Google?

LISA GEVELBER: I also get to be the head of marketing for Google's Americas region. Yeah.

- OK. That must keep you pretty busy too, do you have anything exciting going on there?

LISA GEVELBER: Oh my gosh. Well, there's so much exciting going on always around the world and it's really fun, especially Latin America. In the time that I've worked at Google, I've been fortunate enough to help build out the team there. It seem to so much change.

Even in the last few years with COVID, the digitization of things like small businesses in places like Brazil is unbelievable. More than 10 years I think of digitization happened in a year, and that means so many businesses have an easier time now finding customers because they've gotten online. And they have all these digital tools they can use.

Our research shows that over a third of businesses say, they would have gone out of business if it hadn't been for their digital tools, and 57% of businesses say that it was Google's tools that really helped them survive throughout the pandemic.

- One of the key areas that businesses are facing big problems right now is labor shortages. And I'm wondering what you're seeing there in terms of how that's impacting Grow with Google and also your other hat as the CMO.

LISA GEVELBER: Yeah. So when we started picking the fields that we were going to teach for the Google career certificates, we were really looking for things that were not only in-demand today but would be in demand for many years into the future, right? And so, all of the fields that we teach are places where there's real shortages. So for example, the four fields.

We teach and the career certificates have 1.3 million open jobs right now. That's also why employers are really signing up for our employer hiring consortium, because not only are they trying to do a good thing, which is bring some nontraditional talent into their organization, they need the people who are skilled for these jobs. This is real work that needs to be done in their organizations.

- And final question, Lisa, talk to us about AI. What Google is doing there and whether or not that conflicts with the goals that you're trying to accomplish at Grow with Google or whether, in fact, it's very much complementary.

LISA GEVELBER: Yeah. Well, if there's one thing that's constant, they say it's changed. And AI certainly going to bring around a lot of change. I think it already has somewhat. So that's why we're making sure that people have access to always learning these things and really fast, flexible, easy to access ways. We actually do some teaching of AI and ML today. And I think we'll be doing a lot more of that in the future.

- Lisa Gevelber of Grow with Google Thanks very much for joining us.

LISA GEVELBER: Thank you so much for having me.