WEF launches tech-reskilling drive to retrain 1 million workers free

Addressing what it believes is a global skills gap in IT and job displacement resulting from automation, the World Economic Forum (WEF) launched an initiative that is seeking to reach 1 million people with resources and training opportunities by January 2021. The SkillSET portal is intended to help users acquire the skills and education to adapt to an increasingly digital workplace. The initiative was conceived by the WEF’s IT community and the founding partners are Accenture, CA Technologies, Cisco, Cognizant, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Infosys, Pegasystems, PwC, Salesforce, SAP and Tata Consultancy Services. The coalition has created a free platform of online tools with partner companies opening elements of their individual training libraries into one centralized portal, which is scheduled to be available in April.  

“This initiative brings together the capabilities and strengths of all of our companies to help educate the high-skilled workers needed for jobs now and into the future,” said Chuck Robbins, chairman and CEO of Cisco in a press release announcing the WEF initiative. “It is our obligation to make sure that people with jobs across every industry are given the means to learn new skills and remain competitive.”

The initial iteration of the portal is slated to include self-paced training material ranging from general business skills to introductory digital literacy, to more advanced topics such as cybersecurity, big data or the internet of things. The coalition that developed the platform also indicated in the press release that they “hope to motivate adults of all backgrounds to use the platform, especially those from low-resource communities or under-represented groups who have historically had less access to the IT industry.”

Online learning and updating one’s skills have been prominent in other efforts such as Google’s $1 billion initiative to provide free online training, as well as the popularity of Udacity or EdX. Interestingly, a 2017 Stack Overflow survey revealed that 32 percent of the developers who responded indicated that their formal education was not very important or not important at all to their career success, and 90 percent of developers consider themselves at least somewhat self-taught.