Nearly 40 million Americans are unemployed, and a recent study that examined more than 66,000 tech job layoffs found that sales and customer success roles are most vulnerable amid COVID-19. In response, some quarters of Silicon Valley are abuzz about a long-standing technology: reskilling, or training individuals to adopt an entirely new skillset or career for employment.
As millions look for a way to reenter the workforce, the question arises: Who really benefits from reskilling technology?
That depends on how you look at it, said Jomayra Herrera, a senior associate at Cowboy Ventures. Reskilling for a well-networked manager looks a lot different than it does for someone who doesn’t have as much leverage, and the vast majority of people fall into the latter. Not everyone has a friend at Google or Twitter to help them skip the online application and get right to the decision-makers.
Beyond the accessibility offered by live online classes, she pointed to the difference between assets and opportunities.
“You can give someone access to something, but it’s not true access unless they have the tools and structure to really engage with it,” Herrera said. In other words, how useful is content around reskilling if the company doesn’t support job placement post-training.
Herrera said companies must give individuals opportunities to test skills with real work and navigate the career path. Her mother, who did not go to college and speaks English as a second language, is looking to pursue training online. Before she can proceed, however, she has to surmount hurdles like language support, resume creation, job search and other challenges.
All of a sudden, content feels like a commodity, regardless of if it has active and social learning components. It’s part of the reason that MOOCs (massive open online courses) feel so stale.
Udacity, for example, was almost out of cash in 2018 and laid off more than half of its team in the past two years, according to The New York Times. Now, like other edtech companies, it is facing surges in usage.
In early March, the company launched a nanodegree on product management, claiming it will “groom the next Sundar Pichai.” Read in between the lines and it is clear that Udacity is going from training the masses to specializing in skills. Monthly nanodegree enrollments have seen a fourfold increase since March 1, Udacity told TechCrunch.
The company also has Udacity hiring partners who will hire alumni that have completed work on the platform
David Blake, the co-founder of Degreed and Learn In, similarly says in order to best help the unemployed population, reskilling companies need to focus more on securing hard-to-get jobs first, then providing educational content. A six-month course on computer science is useless if people take it and then struggle to find a job after.
“People retreat into education historically in recessions but you have to question the wisdom in that,” Blake said. “You have to make sure the return of investment is positive and well-aligned to employment otherwise it is not a good intervention.”
Blake continued to say that while tech needs to find a way to support the millions of unemployed individuals, one way to do so is integrating upskilling into the currently employed. Upskilling is different than reskilling in that it helps currently employed individuals level up within their current job role by becoming further specialized, like a project manager mastering Salesforce, for example.
He also said employers in the United States need to have a more benevolent social contract between employers and employees. Like not laying people off the moment a downturn hits, but instead lowering salaries or more creatively cutting costs.
Blake pointed to this type of cultural priority as part of the reason Japan’s jobless rate is 2.6%, while the United States’ jobless rate is hovering around 13.3%.
“It will keep people employed and keep them oriented toward employment,” he said.
Prepandemic, the benefits of investing in retraining are obvious: higher retention, less money spent on recruitment and employee satisfaction. The real struggle, in a market saturated with options, is finding which program to choose.
Internal mobility is a focus for one of Blake’s companies, Degreed, which upskills employees into higher roles. The company announced a $32 million deal, led by Owl Ventures, last week for its career mobility tool.
Guild Education, which has raised $228.5 million in venture funding to date, has long tackled education benefits for employers in a creative way. The company partners with more than 100 nonprofit, accredited universities to bring education to employees, debt-free.
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin(opens in a new window)
Guild’s real magic is that it helps companies offer education benefits through tuition assistance, instead of the more common tuition reimbursement. Tuition assistance is more inclusive for low and middle-income Americans, according to CEO Rachel Carlson, because it accounts for people who can’t front money or put tuition on credit cards or take on debt. She added that tuition assistance helps frontline workers take on educational opportunities, too.
In the wake of mass layoffs, Guild has launched an outplacement service to help companies offer educational training as part of severance packages to those cut. It’s a step from the company to go from beyond just internal mobility to external mobility, too.
Guild is making it easier for individuals to access education, either through severance packages or tuition assistance, tackling the hard question of who will pay for retraining in a downmarket?
Jan Lynn-Matern, founder of Emerge Education, said online vocational schools or bootcamps have an opportunity here to innovate their programs, which will be in more demand than ever before.
“In this new world, do employers have to carry some of the burden? No one has cracked this yet but we think we will see new models where employers cover the cost of education for new talent and existing employees, wholly or partially,” he said.