In an attempt to encourage and accelerate the growth of India’s start-up eco-system, Google has partnered with Pluralsight and Udacity and announced a new scholarship program. In this scholarship program, Google in collaboration with Pluralsight and Udacity will train 130 thousand developers and students on the emerging technologies like Mobile and Web development, Machine Learning, AR/VR, Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud Platforms.

The scholarship program is an extension of the Android Skilling and Certification programme, launched by Google last year which aimed at training around 2 million Indian over the next three years.  Under this new scholarship program, Google is looking forward to providing around 100 thousand scholarships on the Pluralsight technology learning platform and about 30 thousand scholarships on Udacity. 

Google-Pluralsight-Udacity Partnership

Pluralsight on this partnership commented, “Working with Google, we have curated a set of courses, assessments aligned with four roles. In addition to this, we will allow a learner who subscribes to this scholarship to get their Pluralsight IQ on any skill that is available on Pluralsight. On Pluralsight the learner will get access to assessments, skill paths, channels apart from content.”

Talking about this association, Udacity in an e-mailed conversation with People Matters said, “This scholarship program is essentially taking our collaboration with Google one step further, as 30,000 students will now be able to access these courses at Udacity.The top 1000 students will earn an additional 6-month scholarship to our Mobile and Web Developer Nanodegree Programs, which will include mentorship, community support, and expert project reviews. This will mean that graduates from the courses under this scholarship and the courses, in general, will be well-versed and trained through our globally relevant and cutting-edge programs, making them future-ready and improving India’s developer ecosystem.”

Skill gaps in Technology:

In a 2017 Career Advisory Board tech skills survey, 60 percent of employers said most job applicants lack the technology skills key to success in their career. Moreover, 50 percent of employers indicated a tech skills gap in their current employee base.

Discussing the skill gap, Pluralsight commented, “Currently there are three types of skill gaps that exist:

Emerging Tech - these are emerging ecosystems of technology like AI/ML, AR/VR, IOT that are not yet mainstream. Companies are picking their creme la  creme to bid for their first set of projects in these areas and developing centers of excellence 

Digital Tech - these are incremental skills that companies can add to a base set of skills and make employees relevant to a new set of projects. Eg. Re-skilling a Python developer to implement machine learning algorithms, re-skilling a java developer to write code for data science projects.

Current Tech - helping employees go deep into technologies that are contributing a bulk of today’s revenues.

The movement of people will be from current tech to digital tech to emerging tech until emerging tech becomes mainstream and the whole cycle will repeat."

E-learning landscape:

On being asked about the trends and challenges observed in e-learning industry, Pluralsight shares three key trends in the e-learning market:

Fast and relevant assessments - developers need a constant and quick evaluation of their capabilities rather on point-in-time certifications. With Pluralsight IQ, we just take 5 minutes of a developer’s time to determine their level of competence in a tech skill with a 90% confidence level. 

Curated learning - once developers assess their current capability, it is important for a learning platform to curate content for them for them to get to the next level of competence. The platform must also allow for learners and companies to curate their learning paths 

AI-driven learning experience - online learning needs to be pull based and for that the experience of the platform must be appealing and must be entered around human factor studies. Pluralsight leverages directed discovery as a way to understand the day in the life of a developer before designing the platform experience. Pluralsight’s AI platform IRIS learns the interests, learning styles and behaviors of learners and creates a customised experience for each learner

The industry is the future of technical education and learning, as its basic structure makes it affordable, accessible, and mobile. However, we are not here to replace the traditional way of education. The traditional institutes have their place in providing foundation education to students. We see ourselves complementing the formal education space by providing opportunities for people to keep themselves relevant through continuous and lifelong learning, even after graduating from their traditional universities.”, shares Udacity.