By Shwetabh Mittal, Senior Director, Product Management
Automation and the COVID-19 recession have created a “double-disruption” scenario for workers that will drastically transform tasks, jobs, and skills for the foreseeable future. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, eighty-five million jobs will be displaced by 2025, and forty-seven percent of core skills will change for workers during this time. To remain competitive and drive innovation, business leaders are realizing the need to close the skills gap and reskill and upskill their teams.
We are in a new world of work where new skills are valuable currency. To help organizations better equip their teams amid this rapid change, we have pioneered a skills-first product experience that empowers organizations to deploy targeted skill development with tools that simplify content matching, drive engagement, and clarify learning ROI. We have launched Academies and SkillSets that identify target skill proficiencies required for specific job roles and provide personalized learning paths to develop those skill proficiencies. We have also updated our Skill Development Dashboards in order to deliver tailored learning programs to specific learner groups, measure and track progress in skill development, and benchmark learner skill proficiency.
Last week, our Product Management team hosted a webinar to talk through these new features, as well as our 2021 roadmap, complete with even more exciting updates set to release later this year. You can tune in on the webinar on-demand here. Without further ado, let’s dive right in.
Skill Development Dashboards
In October 2019, Coursera team launched the Skill Development Dashboards (SDDs), which provided an unprecedented view of skills tracking—the ability to measure actual skills developed to specific proficiency levels. Since then the Coursera team has been improving the way skills are tagged, measured, and represented.
The latest version update to the Skill Development Dashboards involves the introduction of new skills in communication, marketing, finance, HR, technology principles, technology tools, math, and statistics. You will be able to do the following:
- Measure skill development across business, technology, and data domains with 66 new skills areas for a total of 101 trackable skills
- Continue to understand the impact of technical upskilling programs through the introduction of specific skills and tool tracking in technology and data science areas, from Computer Science, Security Engineering, and DevOps to Python, AWS, SQL, and HTML/CSS
- Capture organization-wide learning trends with a skill summary page that includes views of skill proficiency distribution and time to mastery
- Analyze specific skill metrics, including what content develops what skills, through our new Skill Breakdown dashboard
- Report on the ROI of soft skill programs with tracking enabled for Leadership, Strategy and Operations, Business Psychology, Communication, and more.
The introduction of these trackable skills pave the way for additional skill-first products, including SkillSets & Academies as well as diagnostics and more granular reporting for program management.
SkillSets and Academies
SkillSets are turnkey, job-based learning programs that develop target skill proficiencies with world-class courses and hands-on Guided Projects. SkillSets make it easier to understand the skill development results of your technical upskilling programs and quantify the impact of data and digital literacy programs. With SkillSets, skills come first. Your employees will see content recommendations that help them get to the next level—and they won’t be weighed down by content they don’t need to learn. Choose from over 100 SkillSets that encompass high-impact jobs like cloud architects, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and in-demand skills like being data-driven, Python-proficient, and Tensorflow-specialized, and more—or deploy SkillSets across your entire organization with Academies, our complete skill development solution for in-demand capabilities.
Get the future skills you need, by job role with SkillSets
Worry less about what the constantly evolving business landscape means for your organization’s skill needs. SkillSets surface the most relevant Coursera courses and Guided Projects to develop target skill proficiencies for specific jobs.
- Select from over 100 SkillSets that develop critical and evergreen skills for key jobs in your organization
- Deliver skill-first learning for over 40 jobs, including business analysts, data scientists, designers, financial analysts, HR professionals, IT specialists, machine learning engineers, marketers, operations specialists, product managers, and more
- Develop over 50 types of skill proficiencies, from being data-driven and AI-aware to being TensorFlow-proficient and Spark-specialized
Deploy targeted learning programs with ease
Each SkillSet features world-class content delivered via AI-powered curations that are already reviewed by experts, so you can spend less time worrying about mapping content to learners and more time on your overall learning strategy and launch plans.
- Configure the SkillSets to match the job titles in your organization
- SkillSets that you create or configure will be branded with your organization’s logo
Track and measure skills developed
SkillSets make it easier to understand the skill development results of your technical upskilling programs—and even quantify the impact of data and digital literacy programs.
- See how many learners are progressing in a SkillSet
- Track collective learner progress toward that SkillSet
- See which learners have attained their skill goals
Accelerate skill acquisition with personalized recommendations
With SkillSets, skills come first. With personalized recommendations tailored for their current skill level, your employees will see content recommendations that help them get to the next level—and they won’t be weighed down by content they don’t need to learn.
- Dynamic content recommendations help learners get from their current skill level to the target skill proficiency.
- Learners only take what they need to achieve those skill targets; course completions are optional to finish a SkillSet
- Learners can track progress toward their skill goals
Open the talent floodgates
Feel confident hiring faster and more efficiently from diverse talent pools knowing that with SkillSets, you can develop and retain critical talent in-house.
- “Hiring data scientists and data engineers can be very difficult. We believed we would [be more successful] if we developed existing top performers into data professionals.” —Pedro Uria-Recio, Head of Axiata Analytics
- Research firm IDC found that Coursera customers realize +38% retention and +20% employee mobility
- Research firm IDC found that Coursera customers can train +94% more learners
With these new features, we hope to give you the capabilities you need to enhance your learning programs and deliver stronger learning outcomes. Be sure to watch our webinar replay for additional information (and demos) on all these new features. Happy learning!
