Global tech giants like Google and Facebook are offering free training as a form of marketing. This creates opportunities for training providers like Umuzi to leverage high quality free training content from leading tech companies to enhance our existing programmes as well as be agile and launch new specialisations quickly and cost effectively.
A great example of this is Umuzi’s current IT Technical Support specialisation pilot. Several partners have asked us for a new training pathway that leads to a professional tech career that is more accessible to applicants who don’t have a strong interest and aptitude for coding.
We started looking into IT Technical Support as there is a skills shortage both in South Africa and globally, and although it requires a strong familiarity with technology, it doesn’t necessarily demand coding skills. We have started piloting a small group of learners on a new Umuzi Tech Support specialisation we’ve built around a fantastic course developed by Google in partnership with Coursera: IT Support Professionals. It's not free but it seems like a very cost effective way to get into an entry level tech career.
This is part of a bigger Grow with Google campaign which has loads of high quality, free or affordable online learning options. Last week we spoke to some of the good folks at Google who shared that they are planning more courses, and a bigger roll out across Africa in 2021. They were interested in how we were using their learning material, and what additional support we were providing learners, as they have seen that many learners do require “hand holding” to complete these online learning programmes. Even among the best resourced and most sophisticated providers of online learning, it seems to be widely acknowledged that blended learning (online with some human support) tends to produce the best results.
A couple of weeks ago, Andrew, my co-MD at Umuzi, got interested in Digital Marketing as a skill set to support small / informal entrepreneurship. Google has also upped its game in the digital marketing space with Google Skillshop hosting their many courses. Facebook has a similar offering with Blueprint. Some of these courses are targeted towards professional users in larger organisations, while others are better suited for entrepreneurs and small businesses e.g. Google's offering for Small Businesses which focuses on how to set up an online business, advertise, use Google Suite, etc.
Andrew and I have been debating whether it would be a good fit for Umuzi to provide a Digital Marketing learning pathway to young people who could use these skills to help informal businesses and entrepreneurs to digitise their businesses.
Another interesting resource I found recently is from the makers of Trello and Jira, Atlassian. They've developed a whole bunch of practical team workshops in what they call their Playbook. There are practical templates for running retros, inclusive meetings, and dozens of other team activities.
Why are all these companies investing in offering free training? One of the main motivators seems to be a new form of marketing. They earn kudos for offering it as well as loads of free media, but more importantly, it affords the companies an opportunity to build deeper relationships with their users who engage with the training.
I can see three specific use cases where this training as marketing drives value for the companies offering them:
Driving product usage: the simplest and direct case is something like Google AdWords training: a tutorial on how to use Google’s product. It has a direct impact on revenue by growing the market (new users learn how to use the product) and increasing product usage (existing users learn more sophisticated features which means they spend more on advertising with Google).
Supporting customer successes by enhancing their experience: related to the above but perhaps less direct, training can help users to be more successful with their bigger goals. For example, the Atlassian Playbook isn’t centred around using Atlassian products (workflow management apps like Jira and Trello), but rather helping their users to achieve their larger objectives, like running more effective product teams.
Growing the market by offering a public good: Google’s IT Support professional certificate is even more indirect - Google is subsidising education to create more IT support professionals who may or may not use Google products. It helps the entire ecosystem (there is a shortage of IT support professionals and the traditional training providers aren’t producing them quickly enough). Google is so big and ubiquitous that it benefits from a more efficient, larger tech ecosystem.
In the increasingly cluttered attention space (who wants to see more adverts?) training also offers a relatively rare moment to capture someone’s full attention. It can also help with targeting - the specific appeal of the training hopefully leads to a narrow and valuable audience.
Not only is Umuzi benefitting from leveraging the tech giants’ free training offerings, we can also steal a few plays from their book. I sent an earlier version of this post around to our Umuzi staff, and Sheena our CTO had this to say,
“One thing I think would be really cool would be getting people introduced to tech careers when they are younger. They might prove that they are worth investing in or they might bring value in other ways. Worst case, we can possibly help young people get an idea of what is out there so that they make better decisions about what to learn and how to grow. ”
To this end, we’re busy working with UNICEF and GIZ to develop a free “e-learning nugget” on their Atingi platform, to help more young African women discover tech careers, which could lead them to apply to Umuzi or one of our African Coding Network partners.
Finally, some of the Umuzi team (Sheena, Ryan, Asanda, Mesuli, and Dario) have been doing IDEO’s Human Centred Design course (another great freebie) and using it to improve the experience of young people applying to Umuzi’s programmes. One of the emerging ideas is to make more of our training content freely available to applicants to support their learning before we are able to accept them onto a full programme. This could offer more value to the many young people who want to start learning, and give us better data to select the strongest candidates.