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>> Hello, everyone. My name is Seth Juarez and I'm
a Principal Cloud Advocate here at Microsoft.
I'm excited to be hosting
this Fireside chat with Kim Akers,
Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Worldwide Learning,
and Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera.
Welcome, Kim and Jeff.
>> Very excited to be here.
>> Great to be here, Seth.
>> Let's start with a round of
introductions, so people get to
know you. We'll start with you, Jeff.
>> I've been at Coursera for
about four years. I'm the CEO.
We're really excited to talk
about what we're doing at Microsoft today.
Kim and I were going to school together 30 years ago.
Kim, it's really nice to be back
together after so many years.
>> I'm Kim Akers and I'm
the Corporate Vice President of
Worldwide Learning at Microsoft.
As Jeff said, not only did
we go to school together for college,
but we actually had our first job together.
So pretty interesting to watch this come
full circle and both be in the business of skilling.
But what I do at Microsoft is I
basically do all of the skilling and learning
for not only our employees but also for our customers and
our partners and really anybody
who wants to learn Microsoft technology.
>> You're both super
heavily involved in the world of learning,
can you tell me why skilling is
so important today? We'll start with you, Kim.
>> Okay. This year,
it's been really tough.
It's really, I think, put
a spotlight in how important skilling is.
Regardless of what type of business you're in,
COVID-focused businesses to transform
way faster than I think any of them had anticipated.
As a result, the skills that
their employees needs are dramatically changing.
In fact, I was reading something recently
from the World Economic Forum and they're
forecasting that
about 150 million new tech jobs are going to be
created just in the next five years to
support all this digital transformation that's happening.
The other thing that I think COVID has
really done, has really put
a spotlight on how many people are being overlooked.
Right, so whether it's people of color,
people with disabilities, women,
people with less access to education.
We're missing out on
a whole swath of folks that are super talented. Right, and
Talent is everywhere really and
skilling is really that piece
that helps unlock that talent.
And we see at Microsoft over and over
again that when people have
access to education and skilling,
they create new economic opportunities
for themselves and for their communities.
>> That's awesome. Jeff, I'd love to hear
your thoughts on the importance of skilling as well.
>> Kim hit on so many great points.
Even before COVID, we've seen a world that's just going
faster and faster driven by
mostly technology and globalization.
And for companies to be competitive,
they need to adopt new technologies
and ways of doing things and
they need their employees to learn those things as well.
It's been a trend that's been going on for a while.
COVID really accelerated that,
so digital transformation has only increased in speed,
and it has been very tough for a lot of people.
What we're excited about is,
with online skilling,
anybody from anywhere can learn skills to do a job.
I think what's promising about post-pandemic,
for digital jobs, is
to a large degree they can be done from anywhere.
If you can learn from anywhere and you can have
job opportunities available to you
even if they're not in your local community,
it just opens up so much opportunity.
>> Kim, why don't you tell us a little bit about why
we're here today, specifically?
>> Microsoft's mission is really to empower
every person and every organization on the planet
to achieve more and part of how we
do that is really needing people where they're at.
In this particular case is really
meeting learners where they're at.
And one of the places that a ton of
learners are is actually on Coursera.
Right, I think Jeff will know the numbers exactly,
but last time I checked,
there were about 77 million learners
that we're going through at Coursera.
Initially, the partnership is going to focus on Azure,
and it's also one of
the products that we see when people are
interviewing for jobs that we see a lot of demand for.
So, it's a great first place to get started together.
>> You're right, Kim. We finished 2020
with about 77 million learners,
we're up to about 80 million now.
And one of the hot topics to learn
is not only Cloud computing but machine learning as well,
and especially the intersection
of Cloud computing and machine learning.
There's just so much going on there.
>> What can we expect from
the Microsoft courses that are now featured on Coursera?
>> The first one I'll start with is Azure Fundamentals.
This really gives you the fundamental understanding,
not only of the basic Cloud concepts of storage,
compute things like that,
but also the key Cloud services
and management tools in Azure,
so the core building blocks that you would
use to build your Cloud solution.
In addition, we also have
Azure AI Fundamentals and Azure Data Fundamentals.
The Azure AI Fundamentals
is really where you'll see a lot of
the intersection that Jeff was talking about earlier in
terms of machine learning and artificial intelligence,
things like computer vision, natural language processing;
all those things that you will learn
about from the Azure AI Fundamentals.
So, a great set of courses to really build
a foundational knowledge across core Azure, AI, and data.
>> That's super cool,
now let's talk about learning paths on Coursera.
I'm a huge fan.
Jeff, what do you have to say about those?
>> Well, yes. The content on Coursera
is a fairly broad catalog and like I said,
we have 150 university partners,
so a lot of the content has come from
universities like Stanford and Duke and Yale and others.
Then, we also have a number
of industry partners including Microsoft.
They both do their thing and obviously,
the industry partners are often going to
be more job-relevant a
little bit closer to the actual tools
created by those industry partners.
We have different package sizes.
There are about 4,600 courses altogether.
These are about 4-6 weeks long.
Then we have specializations,
which are series of courses.
The one that we're really excited about
is Azure Fundamentals specialization.
It's probably a multi-month,
maybe three or four-month program
that importantly helps people get ready
to take the Microsoft Certified
AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam.
We see a lot of people come to
Coursera to learn, to get skills,
but also to prepare for actually taking
certification exams, because on the other side of
those exams often are good jobs.
>> Certifications sound awesome.
Why would someone want to get those, Kim?
>> Well see, you just heard Jeff talk a little bit
about it and it really has to do
with certifications give you a way
to validate that you
have the skills that you're saying that you have.
If I think about what's happened
this past year around certifications,
for the Microsoft certifications, for example,
we've seen over 260 percent increase
in certifications just this past year.
It's really a great signal in terms of
the value that the market is placing on it.
We know that developers, for example,
are about 93 percent more
productive if they've actually gotten certified.
We also know that if you're out looking for
a job and let's say you have a LinkedIn profile,
but if you have a certification on your LinkedIn profile,
you get about 27 times more messages
from recruiters and other professionals.
Well, certifications really are a way
to demonstrate that you
actually know what you say you know.
>> This is really cool.
Empowering people through certification,
what else are we doing to empower people?
>> One of the communities that
I think you heard best mentioned at
the beginning that has been really
impacted recently is women.
In fact, if you look at recent studies,
one in four women have actually had to either downshift
their careers or actually
leave the workforce due to COVID.
That's why I'm super excited to
announce our partnership with Women in Cloud.
This is a community-led organization that's dedicated to
creating equal economic access in tech.
As part of this partnership that we have,
women who are part of Women in Cloud will be
able to get free Azure Fundamentals,
Azure AI fundamentals, and
Azure Data Fundamentals training via Coursera.
If you or someone
you know is interested in learning more,
go to the URL at the bottom
of your screen for more information.
>> This is really cool.
Let's go to you, Jeff, how does this fit into
your mission at Coursera and
your vision for the future of technical skilling?
>> Well, to some degree,
this is a continuation from
the first day that Coursera was founded.
It was started by two
Stanford Computer Science professors
and the first course that they put
on were machine learning courses.
At that point, the founder said,
"We need to make this a lot more
available to a lot more people."
It started really from a university,
but we've had industry partners and now Microsoft,
we're just so excited because
Azure just such an
incredible value creation platform
and job creation platform.
We just are excited to be part of
this process of helping people get the kind
of skills and the kind of education
that will be where the jobs are going.
There's a Microsoft study that I often cite that
says that today's job capacity is about 41 million jobs.
The study suggests that
another 149 million jobs
will be created in the digital realm,
but people really need to
get the skills to get those opportunities.
Our job from day 1 at Coursera was make
sure that people have the chance, the access,
to content like
Microsoft Azure Fundamental specialization
in order to get those job opportunities.
>> We also partner on Microsoft Viva.
Kim, can you tell me a bit more about what
Microsoft Viva is and
what this means for the learning space?
>> Just recently, we announced Microsoft Viva.
I would call it our employee experience platform.
It's really designed to help empower people and teams
really come together from
an experience perspective and out of the gate,
it's going to have four modules.
One focused on knowledge,
another focused on insights,
another focused on communication,
and then the last one which
really ties to this conversation is around learning.
We're working closely with
Coursera, so that their content can
actually be integrated into Microsoft Viva.
>> I think it's awesome that
both Microsoft and Coursera share the mission of
democratizing learning and helping
empower people to learn new Cloud skills.
It's been awesome getting to learn about
the Azure Fundamentals and other projects
down the pipeline,
where can folks go to find out more and get started?
>> Well, it's pretty simple. Go to coursera.org.
You can set up an account for free.
Anyone can enroll in
the Azure Fundamentals specialization for $49 a month.
As Kim said, the Women in Cloud,
they are eligible for a scholarship
to actually subsidize that as well.
We're making this available to as
many people around the world as we possibly can.
>> Well, this has been amazing.
Thank you both for being here today.
We're so excited about this partnership.
Make sure you check out Azure Fundamentals
live today on Coursera. Thanks so much.
>> Thank you.
>> Great to see you again, Kim
>> Great to see you.
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