- Thanks Brad and welcome.
Before we start, I want to address a topic
that is front and center for us as a society;
racial injustice, and inequity.
There's absolutely no place for hate,
bias or racism in our world.
The cracks of injustice and inequity in our society
hinder progress for everyone and call on us to act.
Last week, we announced a multi-year sustained approach
to address racial injustice,
focused on our culture at Microsoft,
our ecosystem and our communities.
Change begins by looking inward.
It's what our employees, customers
and partners expect from us and what the world demands.
We are committed to doing our part
and acting with intention.
Today. I want to focus on another source of inequity
and what we are doing about it.
COVID-19 has created both a public health
as well as an economic crisis.
As we move from the initial emergency response phase
to the recovery phase to the re-imagine phase,
determining what should be rebuilt,
what should be redefined,
we need to ensure that no one is left behind
and address the needs of those most impacted by this crisis.
For us, this starts with reflecting on the role
of a corporation to create profitable solutions
to the problems of people and planet.
At Microsoft we're focused on empowering every person,
including the more than 1 billion people with disabilities,
every worker, knowledge workers, firstline workers,
every business, small or large,
every industry from agriculture to retail,
every community, rural or urban,
every country developed or developing.
Everywhere we look, we see relentless ingenuity and drive.
People are contributing in new ways,
in essential roles, which have been overlooked
and undervalued to keep our society and economy functioning
amidst this pandemic.
And during this time of change, people are hungry to learn,
gain new skills and grow their economic opportunity.
It's been forecasted 800 million people
need to learn new skills for their jobs by 2030.
COVID-19 has made the skills gap even more acute.
It's exacerbating economic inequity,
people of color, people with disabilities, women,
early in career workers, and those who have
less formal education are bearing the brunt
of this unemployment crisis.
For those who still have jobs,
it's changing not only how they work but what they work on.
Every job will increasingly require digital skills.
In the next five years, nearly 149 million
new tech jobs will be created
in fields like software development,
cybersecurity and machine learning.
Talent is everywhere but the opportunity is not.
Over and over again, we see that when people
have access to education and skilling,
they create new economic opportunity for themselves
as well as their communities.
Take Tiara Phillips a phone support worker in Chicago
after being laid off,
her first concern was providing for her two children.
She trained as a Cloud support specialist
knowledgeable in Microsoft Sequel
and is now employed full-time.
- Having those tech skills,
I am better prepared to go into any field
or any job that I decide to.
- Take Diana Cohn, a visual artist
and a mother in Pasadena, California.
After hearing loss, she needed an accessible tool
to learn new skills.
With LinkedIn Learning courses,
she was able to start and grow her own design business.
- I never thought a busy mom like me
could switch careers so quickly, but I did.
- And Yacine Souki in Paris, France,
who after the death of his father
had to provide for his family.
After enrolling in our AI school,
he found a new career as a data scientist.
- To me, it's exciting to learn every day,
new things, new technologies, and I'm like a newborn.
- As a platform and tools company,
our identity is rooted in empowering people
like Tiara, Diana and Yacine.
And over the last few months in particular,
we have seen people around the world
turn to our platforms to learn new skills.
We create technology so that others
can create more technology.
And our partner ecosystem employs more than
17 million people doing just that.
Microsoft Learn helps anyone obtain certifications
in our technology and the usage was up 475%
in the month of May compared to a year ago.
LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network.
With LinkedIn Learning, anyone can access
more than 16,000 online courses
from how to manage compassionately to basic Python.
In May alone, people watched
382% more hours of content than they did a year ago
and GitHub is the home to more than 50 million developers.
GitHub's Learning Lab provides hands on tutorials
for both aspiring as well as experienced developers.
In May, usage was up 900% year over year
but we know we can and must do more.
That's why we are bringing together these assets
to reimagine how people learn and apply new skills
to help 25 million people who have lost their jobs
due to COVID-19, acquire digital skills
for jobs of the future.
There are three pillars to our approach.
First, we've used data from the LinkedIn economic graph,
which is a digital representation of the global economy,
to identify the ten most in-demand jobs
like IT technician, data analyst
and customer service specialist.
And we are launching free learning content
from across Microsoft, inclusive of LinkedIn and GitHub,
for these roles which anyone can access
in multiple languages.
Second, we will match people's skills to the right jobs.
We are providing access to low cost certification
and free job seeking tools.
And we are partnering with nonprofits
to provide additional support for those who need it most,
including people with lower income and people of color.
And third, acquiring new skills doesn't stop
when someone gets a job.
Just like every company today
has a system of engagement with CRM
or a system of record with ERP,
they'll require a system of learning,
creating a continuous feedback loop
between the work, skills and learning required
to succeed at the task at hand
and the credentials to accelerate career advancement.
A new Microsoft Teams app will help organizations
skill and upskill employees
surfacing learning content in the context
of their day to day work.
By applying our technologies and partnering
across the private and public sectors,
we believe we can make progress in closing the skills gap.
The novelist, Doris Lessing once defined learning
as being able to understand something
you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
It's this inherent capability within all of us
that we want to unleash
so collectively we can build a better future for everyone.
And with that, I'll hand it over to Brad.
Thank you very much.