LinkedIn’s head of consumer products Ryan Roslansky, speaking on stage at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit conference, explained how the company’s Lynda.com acquisition could allow it to redefine online education “at scale across every city and every skill.”
On the learning side, specifically, there is fundamentally a flaw in the education ecosystem that we know very well.
Above: LinkedIn VP Ryan Roslansky and Re/code's Kurt Wagner talk at VentureBeat's Mobile Summit.
Image Credit: Michael O'Donnel / VentureBeat
Roslansky told Recode’s Kurt Wagner[emphasis ours]:
that we know very well. 50 percent of college graduates are graduating under-employed or unemployed. Student debt has now outpaced credit card debt in the U.S. And there exists a ton of jobs that just aren’t being filled on the flip side. …
In order to go and solve that problem, you need a couple of assets: You need to know all of the professionals in the world, all of the jobs available in the world, and all of the companies. You need to know what skills are required to fill those gaps, you need the coursework to make that happen, and it just happens that we have all of those assets. And we’re very passionate about our ability to put those assets together, and to start to help fix some of the skills gaps that exist … and get people into the right jobs.”
[For example,] here’s coursework to get you trained up as a Python developer, because, by the way, there are 30 jobs right now that are waiting for you — or someone like you — to go through this coursework for that job. We can do that at scale across every city, every skill … the piece that we missed out of all of that is that really good coursework that an employer could stand behind .
You can watch the full interview below.
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