"Look at the nature of our content. It’s not about learning artificial intelligence. It’s about learning Microsoft Excel or learning how to hire great people. You don’t learn that in school—but guess what? When you get on the job, those are the things you’re really going to need.”
-- Dennis Yang, President and COO of Udemy
On Tuesday, online learning marketplace Udemy launched its latest platform, Udemy for Organizations, which enables companies or groups to create custom learning experiences. Education Dive spoke with President and COO Dennis Yang about how organizations can leverage Udemy's platform to provide an engaging skills-based education.
As Udemy's marketplace is career-oriented, companies can customize learning experiences by curating content from Udemy's library and branding it with company logos. And, in the same way instructors use the platform to create courses, companies can create bite-size content for job training. “It’s designed to do in minutes,” Yang added. “It doesn’t require developer skills.”
The platform would not replace corporate training programs but, instead, take them to a whole new level, enabling a level of interactivity that engages a younger, increasingly tech-savvy generation of workers. Yang said that "if you look at all the generations within a workforce, and as the younger ones get older, everyone has massive 'distraction factor.' The younger learners are a little more digitally competent but, as a result, they cannot sit through an instructor led session."
Yang noted that what people learn in college is no longer relevant to them at their jobs. "The world is changing so fast today" and "the pace of change is so out of control” that the workforce needs to "train relentlessly just to stay relevant.”
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