Google Makes $100,000 Worth of Tech Training Free To Every US Business

Alphabet's Google will provide any U.S. business over $100,000 worth of online courses in data analytics, design and other tech skills for their workers free of charge, the search company said on Monday. Reuters reports: The offer marks a big expansion of Google's Career Certificates, a program the company launched in 2018 to help people globally boost their resumes by learning new tools at their own pace. Over 70,000 people in the United States and 205,000 globally have earned at least one certificate, and 75% receive a benefit such as a new job or higher pay within six months, according to Google.

The courses, designed by Google and sold through online education service Coursera, each typically cost students about $39 a month and take three to six months to finish. Google will now cover costs for up to 500 workers at any U.S. business, and it valued the grants at $100,000 because people usually take up to six months to finish. Lisa Gevelber, founder of Grow with Google, the company unit overseeing certificates, said course completion rates are higher when people pay out of pocket but that the new offer was still worthwhile if it could help some businesses gain digital savvy. Certificates also are available in IT support, project management, e-commerce and digital marketing. They cover popular software in each of the fields, including Google advertising services.

"I've bought a dog for two million dollars."

[Petr Blazek]

"Are you kidding me?"
"No, really. I paid with two cats, one million each, for it"

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

Tax writeoff?

Tax deductions don't work that way.

If you give something away, you can only deduct what you paid for it minus depreciation.

In this case, that amount is $0.

"Free of Charge"

[NicknameUnavailable]

E.g. "Donated to avoid paying taxes and making everyone else pay them in their stead."

Wow, much empty!

[jtara]

Well, THAT has attracted interest!

A handful of entry-level courses in pretty generic skills. And probably not of much interest to people here. The press release must have been low-effort, as the Reuters story left me wondering what they were talking about, so had to go searching for the Google page (using Google...)

It's a MOOC

[rantrantrant]

Coursera is a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platform so Google's offerings are MOOCs. They're like the corporate training CD-ROMs of the 1990s but put on the interwebs pipes with discussion forums to make them "21st century." The last time I looked at some user stats, the graduation rates were https://www.futurelearn.com/su... You can pay a small fee to receive a certificate of completion.

What trainees & employers will soon discover is that certificates from MOOCs don't provide evidence of learning, only course completion & that they can complete some multiple choice question & short answer question types, which are poor predictors of professional competence. Reasonable quality assessment, i.e. good predictors of professional competence, don't come cheap because they generally require highly skilled assessors & take several hours per trainee = expensive. Yes, many companies to training on the cheap but it has little to no impact on productivity, in fact it's a waste of money because of all the employee hours it takes away from actual work.

So as such, MOOC certificates can only ever really count towards continuing professional development (put MOOC certificates in that section of your CV/resumé rather than "qualifications"), which means show personal investment & good will towards your career more than anything else. If you want an internationally well-recognised trade qualification, the anglophone world leader is City & Guilds (UK based) https://www.cityandguilds.com/ [cityandguilds.com]

Re:

[Mrs. Grundy]

What trainees & employers will soon discover is that certificates from MOOCs don't provide evidence of learning, only course completion

This, of course, is also true of college degrees. Evidence of learning is the part that’s actually hard to determine until you put someone in a situation that requires them to know something. A much better approach is to try to find evidence of a learning mindset. Self-directed MOOC certs are a useful, if limited, data point for this.

Re:

[rantrantrant]

Universities, colleges, polytechnics, etc., do assess learning. You may not agree with their assessment constructs but that's a different issue, i.e. construct validity is determined by context, e.g. Can successful graduate from course A (in college) perform the tasks they learnt to situation/context B (in the real world). There are undeniably issues with some (many?) courses but nowhere near the same or similar degree of issues as with MOOCs. For example, where so called "soft skills" or coordinating skill

All centered around google workspace?

[Revek]

Google workspace is an overpriced train wreck. They keep increasing the price and offer less and less functionality. To the point we decided to forgo their garbage for our chromebooks. If we lose a few its still less than the cost of paying them to be able to remotely administrate them.

I took a month of data science

[piojo]

I took the first part of a series of courses on data science. It was enough to convince me that the field was interesting, but not for me. That fact was worth more than I paid for it. Though I don't think that's the kind of value they have in mind when they calculate the worth of courses.

Re

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