Lisa Gevelber on Grow with Google, Career Certificates and Artificial Intelligence

In this episode of the Getting Smart podcast, Tom Vander Ark speaks with Lisa Gevelber, Vice President at Google and founder of Grow with Google. They discuss the transformative impact of Grow with Google, a program designed to provide alternative career pathways through online certificates in high-demand fields. Lisa explains the motivation behind the program, emphasizing the need to offer accessible and practical education options for the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees. She highlights the success of the Google Career Certificate Program, which offers courses in project management, digital marketing, IT support, user experience design, data analytics, and cybersecurity on the Coursera platform, just to name a few.

The conversation also discusses the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Lisa shares about the launch of the Google Gen AI for Educators course, developed in partnership with MIT. This free, online professional development course aims to help teachers understand and effectively use AI tools in their classrooms. The course covers practical applications of AI, such as customizing lesson plans and creating assessments, while also addressing responsible AI usage.

Additionally, Lisa and Tom explore the broader implications of generative AI on the workforce and the importance of skills-based hiring. Lisa shares insights on how AI is reshaping the nature of work and the steps Google is taking to support continuous learning and professional development for its employees. The episode underscores the potential of AI to democratize education and work, offering new opportunities for both teachers and students.

Outline

• Introduction and Overview
• Creating Alternative Pathways
• Structure and Impact of Career Certificates
• Skills-Based Hiring and AI Integration
• AI Literacy and Future Directions

The following conversation has been edited and abridged for readability

Introduction and Overview

Tom Vander Ark: I’m Tom Vander Ark and you’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I just am back from ISTE, a gigantic gathering of 12,000 tech-savvy teachers. In a session at ISTE yesterday, I pointed to two of the most important learning platforms in human history: Google Search, launched in 1998, and YouTube, launched in 2005. I still think they’re maybe the two most important learning and development assets on the planet, but add to that list Grow with Google, a multimillion-dollar commitment that Google made to supporting learning, particularly in tech pathways. Today we’re joined by the founder of Grow with Google, Lisa Gevelber. Welcome to the Getting Smart Podcast.

Lisa Gevelber: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Tom Vander Ark: Before we talk about Grow with Google, you have a great background in brand development and marketing. How did you go from developing brands to developing humans? What was the big idea back in 2017 behind Grow with Google?

Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, well, we really set out to solve an important societal problem. You were just referring to it in terms of pathways, which is that in the U.S., most Americans don’t get a college degree. About two-thirds of Americans don’t. But if you look at most of the good-paying jobs, jobs that pay more than $35,000 a year, more than 80 percent of those jobs say they require a degree. So, if you take a step back and think about it, that means about 80 million Americans are being locked out of some of the best-paying jobs in our country and maybe even some of the fastest-growing career pathways. We believe there’s no question having a college degree is life-changing. We just thought it shouldn’t be the only way you could change your life. So we set out to help create alternative pathways for people to enter these career fields.

Creating Alternative Pathways

Lisa Gevelber: We used a really thoughtful process to choose the fields we chose. We were looking for fields that were really in demand, where there were lots of employers who just couldn’t find enough people skilled for the particular jobs and that was expected to continue to be the case, where these were really good careers and good-paying jobs, and where Google had unique expertise to contribute. We could take Google employees who had been working in these jobs for decades and have them literally be the teachers and help people know what they had learned by really being in the trenches and doing the work. It’s not textbook; it’s taught by experts. We picked things that we knew people could learn in a relatively short period of time, three to six months usually. So we created the program called the Google Career Certificate Program, and it’s all online and on demand. We’re seeing more and more not only people who are entering their careers for the first time or people who are reskilling but more and more it’s being used in colleges and universities. It’s also being used in high schools. So it’s a great way for people to get exposure, try out, and learn everything they need to know to get into a high-paying career. It’s also amazingly great for school systems to think about as they continue to invest in helping make their students career-ready and job-ready not only for jobs of the future but also for the jobs that are there today.

Tom Vander Ark: Lisa, these are asynchronous learning units, and are they on the Coursera platform? Is that right?

Lisa Gevelber: That’s right. All of the Google Career Certificates can be found on Coursera. We offer them in six fields: project management, digital marketing, IT support, user experience design (which is like the design for websites and apps), data analytics, and cybersecurity. All of them are on Coursera and they’re all at your own pace, which is really interesting. But school systems are also integrating them right into the classroom. A great example actually is the Anaheim public school system. They’ve decided to integrate their programs right into the classroom offerings. For example, the data analytics course is taught as a part of the statistics and math courses for the upper-level students in high school. Even just within the past year, we had over 500 high school students in Anaheim graduate with a Google Career Certificate. The amazing thing about it is not only are those students now really ready to enter some of the best-paying fields in our country, but you can also use it for college credit because the American Council on Education (ACE) recognizes and recommends the Google Career Certificates for credit. Institutions like community colleges and some four-year schools will actually give those high school students credit for having done the Google Career Certificate—credit toward their degree.

Structure and Impact of Career Certificates

Tom Vander Ark: What’s included in a career certificate? Is that multiple units of study? Is it really linked modules in a pathway?

Lisa Gevelber: It is actually. As I said, it’s all created by experts who really work in these fields and it’s rigorous. I have to say if you’re committed to doing this, you really have to put your heart and soul into it because we want to make sure that when people do the program, whether they’re high school students or adults looking to enter or change their career field, they really know their stuff. And when they land that job, they’re going to be successful in it. So each of the programs is about 100 hours of study, including some hands-on activities that test for mastery. You have to get an 80 percent or higher on all the required assessments in order to earn the certificate. The good news is thousands of employers hire the graduates of the program and recognize the certificate for the value that it is. Some employers even consider it a really preferred hiring credential. We have an employer consortium of hundreds of big national employers where they post jobs directly into our job board. When you complete the certificate, if you’re ready to enter the job market and you’re not headed off to school, the jobs are already there in the job board for you to apply to and you’re already qualified for them.

Tom Vander Ark: It looks like some of the other categories that you’ve included are e-commerce, UX design, project management, cybersecurity. Those all seem like they’re high-demand categories, but for high schools and colleges, those are courses that are typically difficult to staff and offer. These feel like terrific options. You must have many people taking it outside of a formal setting as well. So it can be used in either way, right?

Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, the great thing about the program is it’s entirely flexible. For example, in the Anaheim public schools, they’ve built it directly into the curriculum. Teachers themselves built it into the curriculum, but in some schools, it’s either an afterschool or an extracurricular optional offering. Some schools are opening it up to parents, which I love, and then all the way up through continuing studies, community colleges, and four-year universities. As a matter of fact, all of the public universities in the state of Pennsylvania and Nebraska, for example, offer the Google Career Certificates to students in those universities. The University of Texas system offers it for any student as well. We’re really seeing pretty broad adoption, and among community colleges, I think there’s at least 11 states where every community college in the state offers the Google Career Certificates.

Skills-Based Hiring and AI Integration

Tom Vander Ark: Lisa, for 10 years you’ve been thinking about talent pipeline and the importance of degrees. I think you’ve tried to move the traditional degree more into the background and get smarter about skills and skills-based hiring. When somebody comes to you with one of these certificates, is that an important signal? Is that something that you would consider in addition to a traditional education transcript?

Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, absolutely. We love the Google Career Certificates here at Google. We were the first member of the hiring consortium for the certificates. As a matter of fact, our very first certificate, the IT Support certificate, was actually born out of a training program we had here at Google to bring in additional talent that didn’t have college degrees. We created a training program for ourselves, which then created a pipeline for people to work in IT supporting Google. So the people who do all the tech support for people who work here. It was so successful that we decided to package it up and offer it as a solution to this broader societal opportunity. For sure, we’re big believers in the program. As a matter of fact, there are thousands of Google employees currently taking the Google Career Certificates to either explore something they’re interested in or to change jobs within Google, for example.

Tom Vander Ark: So you had this program on rails and you’re adding new programs. Then some people in your shop developed these transformers and then generative AI came out. It’s really beginning to transform almost every sector of the economy. What have you been doing with generative AI to help both students and teachers learn about it and its application in these high-tech sectors that we’ve been talking about?

Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, the essence of the Grow with Google program is really making sure that the opportunities created by technology are truly available to everyone. We believe that educators and students, first and foremost, deserve the tools and the skills that will set themselves up for success. We’re really excited about the possibility of AI, and we see that excitement mirrored among students and teachers. There’s clearly a lot of people who are uncertain about what AI is about, but the curiosity levels are very high. If you ask teachers and look at teacher surveys, the majority of teachers say that they know AI will be a big part of the future of education. They’re just not all certain how to learn how to use it or exactly how to make sure their students use it well. So we thought this was a huge opportunity. Teachers are among the hardest working people on the planet. They not only spend a ton of time in the classroom and with their students, but they spend a lot of time outside of the classroom thinking about how to create great content and engaging activities and assessments and other things for their students. Those are great places where AI can be helpful. So we thought of AI as almost a teaching assistant. We really believe that if teachers knew how to use the tool, it could help them for sure save time and be more efficient around some of the administrative tasks that teachers need to do. But also really help them meet students where they are and address students’ interests and ability levels in ways that are interesting and useful both for teachers as well as for students. I’m happy to give some examples of how we think that works.

Tom Vander Ark: You developed a course on generative AI for teachers? Did you do that directly or with MIT?

Lisa Gevelber: That’s right. To bring this to life and really help teachers get some practice and get their heads around all the possibilities that AI can deliver for them and their students, we developed a professional development course for teachers. It’s called Google Gen AI for Educators. It’s a roughly two-hour course. It’s broken into modules so that the modules fit within a teacher’s planning professional development period. It’s a hundred percent free. It’s also online so it’s easy for teachers to access whenever they have time. It lives right in our Google Teacher Center, which is where a lot of teachers are used to coming to see resources from Google, or they can find it at the link grow.google/genAIforeducators. It’s all there for teachers to use, like I said, at their own pace, and teachers can apply to their own districts to get professional development or continuing education credits for having done the course.

Tom Vander Ark: That’s great. Just like your career certificates, that can be incorporated into school-wide or district-wide PD, or individual teachers can go out and do that on their own. It’s a great course, Lisa. I recommended it yesterday at ISTE, and we have included a link to it in a blog we released on AI literacy this week. So we appreciate your leadership there. We think it’s a great place for teachers to get started. Lisa, I’m working with a K-8 district not too far from Anaheim, and it makes me wonder about student AI literacy. What should that look like? Where should we start? Do we need to start in middle grades? How can we help students get AI literate or, as our friends in Orange County wish we say, AI fluent?

AI Literacy and Future Directions

Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, thoughts on that. First, I think what helps students the most is when teachers understand these things, both the benefits of using the technology but also the watchouts. Part of literacy is really understanding where there are issues with AI. Some of the ones lots of folks know about are things like hallucinations and bias, and there’s obviously some privacy and other concerns that people need to understand. That’s why we built a whole section of our course about AI responsible use. As you said, we built our course together in partnership with MIT, and that’s one way that folks can start getting their heads around how to help their students understand what to look out for. But I think even more exciting is this idea of what can the teacher use it for and how is it helpful to them. You know, a lot of teachers, even if they have one classroom, if you’ve got, I don’t know, 30 kids in that classroom, you might have three or four different ability levels within this group that you’re teaching. AI is great for helping you customize things like your lesson plans for different levels. You can just ask, for example, Gemini, Google’s AI tool, to help you customize the lesson plan for different ability levels or translate the lesson plan into additional languages. Or my favorite thing is you could take a science lesson and teach it in a whole fun new way. Teach this science lesson using sports analogies. So AI is great actually at all of these things. It can also help you create worksheets or assessments. I think our teachers work so hard, and there’s no substitute for the passion, knowledge, and experience of a teacher. But everyone can use a little helping hand, and I think AI is actually terrific for these things. Our course is, of course, product-agnostic. They can use any AI tool they’d like. We obviously showcase examples in Gemini, but it’s flexible for the teacher to use as they see fit.

Tom Vander Ark: Lisa, I watched Professor Ethan Mullock do a live demo yesterday. This is the third time I’ve seen him do it. I really think he’s the most important teacher in America right now. I just love how he’s reimagined teaching entrepreneurship and the way he’s inviting his students to use Gen AI to brainstorm ideas and then to deliver on those ideas. For me, it’s just really reimagining what project-based learning looks like. How, for you, is Gen AI reshaping how you’re thinking about the nature of work? Then I want to do a follow-up and ask about the pathways that you’ve developed, but just your early thoughts on how Gen AI is sort of reshaping the nature of work and what that means for you.

Lisa Gevelber: I think all of us have this opportunity to learn something new. It’s like when we first got the internet and we were all realizing what it could do and experimenting with it. As we’ve all seen, for the most part, the internet just keeps getting better and better. And so do these tools. At Google, I feel every day I learn something new about how to be better at prompting, which is also one of the things we teach in our course, and what it can do for me to be more productive. People share tips really actively here at Google, of course. So there’s all kinds of chat groups and stuff where people are always putting in some of the best ways they’re using it to save time or come up with new ideas. To make sure that everyone, regardless of whether you’re a teacher or in another profession or another industry, could learn these things, we actually made another course called Google AI Essentials. It’s a slightly longer course than the teacher course. It takes people somewhere between five and ten hours, depending on how they pace through the content, because it has good hands-on practice. That one is available on Coursera. It’s great for anyone in all different professions to really put your hands on the tool and start seeing what it can do. We show everything from how a small business owner could be using it to create a business plan or marketing plan, a new product concept, all the way down to how anyone could use it at work to summarize research to create new writing assets. We know that job seekers are huge beneficiaries of things like Gemini. It can help you draft a cover letter. It can help you come up with power words for your resume. It can help you practice interviewing and think of interview questions you can ask or that you may be asked if you just upload the job description of the specific job you’re looking at. Every day we discover new use cases, and the AI Essentials course is really handy for anyone, regardless of their profession or industry, to start to get their hands around how to use it.

Tom Vander Ark: How has that begun to impact your career certificates? Because AI is really changing each of those pathways. Have you had to go back and make some additions and edits to the career pathways just because they’re also changing quickly?

Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, as a matter of fact, we actually just ran a special promotion where anyone who’s doing our Google Career Certificate Program can also do the AI Essentials course for free as part of doing their certificate. I think that’s a great way for people to start to get the fundamentals. We’re certainly all early on this journey, and we wanted to make it easy and available for people to access the best-in-class basic course along with the career-specific course they were working on.

Tom Vander Ark: I wonder if you have a view into learning and development at Google and how it has changed the way you and your colleagues think about learning and development as professionals? Has it changed the way Google has supported the professional growth of Googlers?

Lisa Gevelber: I think everyone at Google is working to really practice using all these tools, for sure. It’s part of everyday life now.

Tom Vander Ark: The new challenge for school and system leaders is how to create that same culture of inviting teachers to learn with, as Professor Mollick would say, this co-intelligence—inviting them to use co-intelligence in the daily work that you do and to have fun with it. The beauty of Gen AI is that you can have a natural language relationship with this new co-worker. So it is an exciting learning curve for us all.

Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, for sure. I think in the past, if you wanted to get a computer to do something for you, in a lot of ways you had to know its language, right? You had to know how to code to make it do things. That’s actually what I used to tell my daughters is they had to learn how to code because they needed to be able to make machines do things they needed to do well. AI means that the computer now speaks our language because the AI uses natural language, so you can speak to it the way you would ask an assistant, for example, to help you solve something or do something, and it just does it essentially for you, or at least a first draft that you can then work with to improve. So I think one of the most exciting things about this technology is that it is a democratizing technology. This is not a technology for the experts. It’s a technology for everyone, and that’s what’s revolutionary about it, right? The computer now speaks our language that we speak as humans, and we can all use it to be more efficient, potentially to improve our productivity but also even enhance our creativity. We use it a lot here for idea generation, and I think teachers are doing that a lot too.

Tom Vander Ark: We are excited to see that. And as you said, most teachers are excited about and have had at least initial experiences in using Gen AI to support great teaching and learning. What’s next for Grow with Google? Anything on your product roadmap? Any new pathways or features that you can share with us, Lisa?

Lisa Gevelber: These announcements are still really fresh. People are excited and just getting going on them. We’re seeing incredible momentum among school systems. I’m really excited to see the number of school systems who have already raised their hands on Gen AI for Educators—the Miami-Dade County schools, the Anaheim public schools, the Albuquerque public schools, and even the secretary of education for the state of Oklahoma, who’s super excited about the transformational ability of AI in education, is recommending it in the state of Oklahoma. Lots of Oklahoma-based school districts are either adopting or considering adopting it. We’re just seeing more and more interest every day. So our focus right now is really helping get into the hands of people these offerings we already have, but don’t worry, we’re always thinking about additional ways to help people learn and to advance in their careers and their lives.

Tom Vander Ark: Google has been a terrific education partner with apps, with Google Docs, with Google Search. I mentioned YouTube, probably the biggest learning platform in the world. And now with Grow with Google, Google’s been a terrific partner for schools, and we really appreciate your leadership there. Thanks for joining us today.

Lisa Gevelber: Thanks so much for having me. I hope folks who are listening, if they’re interested, will check out the Gen AI for Educators course and also the Career Certificate Program, which can be found on the Grow with Google site, which is just grow.google.com.

Tom Vander Ark: We’ll include both in our show notes. We’ve been talking to Lisa Gevelber. She’s the VP at Google and the global head of Grow with Google. A terrific resource. Check it out. Thanks for being with us, Lisa.

Lisa Gevelber: Thanks for having me.

Tom Vander Ark: Until next week, keep learning, keep leading, and keep growing with Google.

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Lisa Gevelber

Lisa founded and leads Grow with Google, the company’s $1 billion commitment to economic opportunity. Since 2017, Grow with Google has helped over 9 million Americans and more than 90 million globally grow their skills, careers, and businesses. In 2022, Lisa was named in the inaugural Forbes Future Of Work 50, honoring leaders whose impact, reach and creativity has the potential to affect millions of workers. Lisa also leads Google for Startups and has led marketing for the Americas Region at Google for the past 13 years.  She has over 30 years experience in General Management, Marketing, and Product Management including over 20 years in Silicon Valley.  Her career spans from early stage startups to Fortune 50 companies, including Intuit and Procter and Gamble. 

Links

• Watch the full conversation here
• Lisa Gevelber LinkedIn
• AI Essentials Course
• AI for Educators Course
• Anaheim Union High School District 
• UT system
• Google Teacher Center