The world is facing irreversible changes shaping our societies along the way. Today, we witness the transformation of entire businesses and industries where every company is becoming digital. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025, as the adoption of technology increases.
Baltic states, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine benefited from skilling programs in today’s challenging times
Microsoft’s mission – to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more – has never felt more urgent. These times demand different thinking, concerted effort, and collective action in partnership with our community.
In the changing economy, skills and opportunities to pursue in-demand jobs are crucial. Microsoft is always working on making data and analytics available to governments around the world so they can better assess local economic needs. Employees use their own voices to advocate for public policy that will advance skilling opportunities needed in the changing economy. Therefore, a new initiative was made – committed to leveraging a range of resources to help people develop new digital skills and get back to work, secure a new job, or maintain the position they already have.
When global becomes local
Global Skills Initiative aimed at bringing more digital skills to millions of people worldwide has reached over 40 million learners – and still counting. This initiative combines existing and new resources from LinkedIn, GitHub, and Microsoft Learn, providing free training, employment data, and career support to benefit economies and businesses as well as helping people in building future-facing careers.
In the last three years, Microsoft has partnered with local universities, governments, customers, partners, incubators, startups, employment agencies, and NGOs to build foundational digital skills and provide access to high-quality, inclusive computing, computer science training, and education.
In the last couple of years, the society has learned a lot. More than 592,000 people from 24 Central and East European countries, including the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine benefited from skilling programs in today’s challenging times. Twelve thousand people from these countries completed learning paths and got the best practices for job searching and interview prepping to put their best foot forward.
With the highest growth in Data and AI demand, learning programming, storage, networking, security, deployment, IT administration, and managing systems have never been more accessible. Microsoft offices in many countries are working together on the Skilling Initiative and learning together with the participants of the program.
How Microsoft empowers society to achieve more
Learning programming, storage, networking, security, and deployment has never been easier. After finishing Software developer or Data Analyst courses by learning skills from LinkedIn Learning and Microsoft Learn, the long-wanted job is just around the corner. The LinkedIn research showed that in 2020, over 23.3 million jobs for these roles were posted on this platform.
Knowing how to use analytics, visualization, Microsoft Excel, SQL, BI, or Tableau is required to advance career and stay relevant in the changing economy. For instance, the Baltics Digital Skills Development Program progressed to the Virtual Internship Program, where students were given a chance to apply new knowledge in a real work environment and test their skills in different industries.
Sindija Strazdina, one of the participants of the Virtual Internship Program, familiarized herself with the PowerBI and used it to create her very first data analysis reports. She got a chance to see how data analysis worked in practice, where highly attractive and interactive PowerBI visualizations were developed.
Learning together is valuable, as well as learning from each other. Striving for growth and new experiences, people found their way to make a difference while sharing awareness of the importance of education.
Microsoft’s project to make opportunities for all and provide people with the cloud skills necessary to find jobs has been extended until June 20th, 2022. There is still some time left. Sign up and find the job you’ve always dreamed of!
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 opportunities for themselves, as well as their communities.
Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft
