Learn with Facebook: Can it Fill the Digital Skills Gap? | Editor’s Picks - eLearningInside News

Last fall an article in Forbes highlighted how workers who want to stay ahead of the employment curve must take the personal initiative to update their skills through constant learning, says Sherman Morrison, writer and editor based in Keene, New Hampshire.

Photo: Maurizio Pesce, Wikimedia Commons.

After all, the “half-life” of job skills has dropped from 30 years back in the 1980s to a mere five years as of 2014, and might be even less these days. People looking for opportunities to boost their digital skillsets now have a wide variety of options, including the new Learn with Facebook eLearning initiative. Its developers hope to train 1 million people and small businesses in digital skills by 2020. Will this Facebook training initiative make a significant dent in the growing digital skills gap?

The Growing Digital Skills Gap: Facebook Training Initiative has Launched 
A study by the Korn Ferry Institute says the industries facing the biggest challenges include the following, with estimates of growing world-wide worker shortages through 2030:

• Financial and business services: 10.7 million workers short
• Technology, Media, and Telecommunications: 4.3 million workers short
• Manufacturing: 7.9 million workers short

In the technology, media, and telecommunications industry, the specific problem is the lack of relevant digital skills. Companies are struggling to keep up with digitization, with 54% of companies reporting problems in filling positions with properly-skilled workers.

In a paper by Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute and LinkedIn, digital skills are categorized as “soft” skills or “hard” skills...

It’s hard to imagine how only 13 lessons for a grand total of 101 minutes of eLearning could bridge the digital skills gap. Granted, this is only the initial set of offerings in the Facebook training initiative, but will victory be declared if a million people take these courses? To have a real impact on the digital skills gap by 2020, Facebook will need to scale their efforts rapidly with more diverse offerings. The current slate of lessons is little more than a rather light introduction for each area, with an unsurprisingly heavy dose of using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram (owned by Facebook).
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Source: eLearningInside News