Abstract:

Until five years ago:
- technology companies focused on building skills around their products.
-Clients used those courses to train their employees prior to starting a new role.
-Students completing their Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees used those courses after their studies or to move forward in their careers.

Since last year, some of the top 10 IT companies added strong focus towards subjects that have nothing to do with their own products.
Companies such as IBM and Google are building up programs that address basic skills such as Customer Relationship Management, Security, Big Data Analysis or even soft skills – independent from their own products.

The same companies are investing in undergraduate education as well as general education for the un- and under-employed, building technology schools and are training people in general skills to use the Internet.
Universities are starting to accept micro credentials from IT companies.

In this paper, we will dive into some examples and investigate the reasons for these developments. Furthermore, we’ll look into the positive impacts for companies, schools and universities as well as for everybody with or without a current job.

We’ll explore examples from IBM and Google building education, not related to their products, and one example of training unemployed people using New Collar courses.

To judge the examples and their impact on society we will
- Analyze the potential benefit for the companies creating new collar courses
- Evaluate the overall size of the potential market for new collar
- Finally, we will explore the benefits for each of the groups mentioned above and provide an outlook that not only helps companies to close their skills gaps, but also streamline certain skill increase.
- We’ll point out how schools and universities can benefit from thus in their preparation for the future.

Keywords:

Education, training skill gap, new collar, basic skills, industry, schools, university.