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...
I worked with two good reporters to look into this. There is no documentation one can find at https://grow.google/partners/ or at https://google.org. Those websites lead to perhaps 200 significant links, and we scoured every PDF on the sites. Also we checked LinkedIn for those who had the IT Support certs. Nothing.
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.
It makes little sense from a career perspective to go though those certification training schemes without truly developing the competency they are aimed at promoting and also it serves to give certs a bad reputation even for people who pursue them in good faith.
Brain dumping is the process of memorizing the answer bank for a test. There are many sites for these kind of certification exams that provide brain dumps or answer keys to study.
- 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.
This a move which aims to expand the pool of candidates, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds. There are a lot of smart people who weren't able to go to university. If Google limited its talent pool to just those who have graduated from four year universities, they would miss many candidates (including me!).
For me the key question is this: what's will Google's job acceptance rate be for Career Certificates vs Bachelor's degrees? If they can get it to 1/4 the rate for a university education, then it seems like it has some value. Otherwise, this is all just a scam.
Good on them for the other things though.
It's all for publicity, improving their image, making those career certificate holders more likely pick Google products (for the companies they will work for)...
This is patently untrue; there are many internal pushes to hire from people without degrees; recruiters make a concerted effort to reach out to students at underrepresented universities (including historically black universities).
I myself work at Google. I don't have a degree, and barely completed any college.
This is welcomed.
