Google announces new Career Certificates and 100k scholarships

This is great, as long as these certificates are valued by employers, since finding a job requiring these skills is all that matters in the end.

Yuk...

I’ve dealt with a lot of developers who basically collect certifications but sadly can’t even code a print statement. Compare this to people who I’ve worked with without a university degree and just studied on their own from books and tutorials who are superstars.

My money is on Google Certificates being gamed just like all other cert programs.

I like the initiative as I think it can make for a positive push, but I have my misgivings as well. It feels like a push into the bootcamp space and with it, I immediately wonder about accreditation in the legal education sense.

- How will schools view these certificates?

- Do they count as credits in any form?

- Is this just Google’s play into the certificate space like Oracle, etc?

I wonder because of this line:

> ... at Google we will consider our new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles.

This is coming not long after Google says that they don’t care about degrees anymore in their hiring process. A positive take on this statement would be that they are trying to signal to the rest of the industry that there are other ways for people to prove their skill other than university degrees. A negative reading is that Google is now simply moving towards using their own testing system as a signal for candidate screening.

As with many large companies, it’s hard to understand their motives underneath all of the PR.

I know someone I'd like to send this to. Did anyone see an application link? I didn't see anything about applying for the scholarship in the article.

Google has tried to do this before and gotten good press with as far as I can tell close to 0 results [1].

Their last program was basically just "office hours" on how to use Google Analytics in libraries across beset former rust belt cities.

They did have a consistent office hours for their one pilot program in New York that people could also call into, but it was mostly college kids who were brilliant, talented, and going to get a job anyway the couple of times I shadowed.

The saddest part was probably their previous partnering with Goodwill. 0 people were hired from this partnership. This was back in 2017 when it was hard to know, but that organization is under significant litigation now for practices such as paying sub minimum wage (sub $1) to mentally disabled employees, paying board members well in excess of 6 figures, etc.

I say this as someone who considers GCP their favorite cloud and consistently recommends it to customers where security is a priority.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/google-job-tra...