Online Education Companies like AT&T and Google are expanding their partnerships with online education providers, creating new educational pathways to real jobs. It sounds cutting-edge, but the concept of a competency-based education that results in an institution-agnostic microcredential isn't new. For well over a century, industries have worked with colleges and universities through various types of extension programs to salt the workforce with better-qualified candidates. But in the Age of the Internet, for-profit online education providers such as Udacity and Coursera have tweaked that model by collaborating with companies to develop programs tailored to their specific needs. AT&T was one of the first companies to work with the new generation of online education providers to develop a credentialing program designed to fill a specific staffing gap. In 2014, the telecom company was in the market for "a ton" of entry-level front-end web developers, according to Udacity's then COO (now CEO) Vish Makhijani. "They knew exactly what kind of person they needed, so we knew exactly how to build a curriculum to generate those competencies," he said in an earlier interview. Together the two companies created the Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree program, Udacity's first branded microcredential. ("Nanodegree" is trademarked.) "We worked with Udacity to develop curriculum based on tangible hiring and training needs," said John Palmer, senior vice president and chief learning officer at AT&T, in an e-mail. "Our teams collaborated on determining what skills we needed now to address the needs of our business, but also what skills would be needed five to 10 years from now — not just at AT&T, but at other tech companies." Palmer believes that such competency-based programs will help AT&T and other companies "widen, develop and diversify the talent pipeline to address the shortage of current and future employees with technology skills." Udacity currently offers 16 tech-focused Nanodegrees ranging from a basic introduction to programming to an advanced program in machine learning engineering. The list of companies collaborating to develop and maintain those programs includes Facebook, MongoDB, GitHub, Amazon and Google, among others. AT&T collaborated with Udacity to develop three of those programs, but Google has been the most frequent collaborator to date. The company has worked on seven programs, including the enormously popular Android Developer Nanodegree. While the Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree created with AT&T is an example of a program originally tailored to a specific staffing need, the Android developer program was, from the start, more broadly aimed at expanding an ecosystem, explained Peter Lubbers, senior manager on Google's Developer Relations Team. "My team's mission is to educate and inspire developers, globally, around our platform," Lubbers told Campus Technology. "We want to reach as many developers as we can, and these programs provide an effective and efficient way to do that." About three years ago, Google launched its own experimental online course designed to teach the HTML5 markup language to web developers. It was a hot topic, Lubbers recalled, and the free course drew 50,000 students within the first two months. The company continued to experiment with online courses, but eventually concluded that it needed "a more holistic narrative" that would leave students with the ability to do an actual job.
Large companies are increasingly working with higher education providers to train future graduates to become prepared employees. Companies like AT&T have begun collaborating directly with online course providers such as Udacity and Coursera to create programmes that correspond directly with the jobs they're seeking to fill, according to a recent Campus Technology report. The companies are looking ahead at least a decade to anticipate the kinds of skills that will drive the workforce, sometimes tailoring for specific hiring needs, or creating broader programmes aimed at growing industries.