Coursera's global CEO says companies now look for candidates with both offline and online qualifications

The advent of Covid-19 saw online learning platform Coursera clocking high growth, going from 47 million learners worldwide at the beginning of the pandemic to 77 million in just one year. Professionals acknowledged the need for upskilling and reskilling for better career prospects, with many management students and executives opting for a professional certificate along with a management degree, says CEO Jeff Maggioncalda.

BT: The last two years saw everyone investing in upskilling and reskilling themselves. Do you see this space changing with life returning to normal? 

A: This space has changed tremendously. And it’s going to be some kind of a new normal. What the pandemic did was it made virtually every campus in the world shut down. Now, what’s been interesting is that people are going back to campuses, but they are still learning online. There’s that permanent presence of online learning.

We also see a very interesting hybrid approach in terms of credentials. Before the pandemic, people would ask, ‘Do you have a college degree or not?’ And they would think about edtech and micro-credentials as being kind of competitive to a college degree. Are you going to go to college and get a degree, or are you going online to get an edtech micro-credential? 

What we’re seeing is that most students want both... We just did a big survey of students and employers. And when we asked employers if they would hire someone with a college degree or a professional certificate, they said they’d rather hire someone with both. It’s not just one or the other; it’s a hybrid. So, it’s going to be a new kind of world.

BT: Which courses are in demand in India? 

A: The most popular courses in India in the first half of 2022 (on Coursera) are: No. 1, Machine Learning by Stanford University. It’s one thing to learn how to program; but if you learn how to program in machine learning, that is where the money is. There are a lot of jobs, but there’s not enough skills. No. 2 is Google. This is the data analyst certificate. So, understanding how to do data analysis, data science... [there’s] lots of interest there. Programming and Python, Python project management, HTML, UX design are also there.

BT: What about management education? 

A: If you look at the three primary categories, we see the biggest interest in technology, data science, and business. If you look at the relative skill popularity of learners in India in terms of business skills compared to the rest of the world, what you see is that learners in India are overindexing compared to the rest of the world on investment management, data visualisation, Blockchain data analysis, and risk management. But I think there’s a lot of demand for courses in leadership, teamwork, communication, strategy, financial planning, accounting, and those types of skills.

BT: Can you broaden this further to highlight the new trends in management education? 

A: The biggest trend is multidisciplinary management education. We’re seeing many business schools integrating data and programming into their business curriculum. Tech skills are very important today, but also data. The reason why data is more important for everybody, and especially every B-school, is that every job, whether you write code or whether you do customer care support, every job requires making decisions. And decisions that are made using data are generally better-informed than decisions that are not. 

How many decisions are required to write code? Not many. How many decisions require you to have data? Almost every. How many times do you influence someone using data? It’s all reinforced by data. So, it’s important for B-schools to make sure that the students are learning statistics, data science, digital marketing. That sort of leads to datadriven decision-making. That’s something we’re seeing across the board. 

Another thing that is very consistent is the idea that you can bring in experts to teach your students different disciplines. So, you’re learning business, but you’re going to do something in data science. You don’t need to have all your B-school professors learn data science. You can bring in courses on data science from professors and make those available to your students. So, there is multidisciplinary learning, facilitated through online learning to bring in expertise from other institutes. 

Another big trend is practical learning. Many Bschools are not only lecturing on principles, they’re bringing in interdisciplinary data and computer science courses and hands-on projects—so that students do write code, and they do actually build analysis using Tableau, using Python and other more quantitative hands-on tools.

BT: Do you notice these trends across Europe and the US, or in India as well? 

A: Everywhere, I would say. What’s most different about India is the number of young people who are going through universities. The National Education Policy (NEP) sets out a target of 50 per cent GER (Gross Enrolment Ratio). The NEP recognised that to meet that demand, India is going to need 3.8 million new teachers to serve about 35 million more students. There’s no country in the world that has that kind of demand for education. 

If you look at the key hallmarks of the NEP, No. 1 is to integrate online. I think the government has done a really good job of anticipating what needs to happen to meet that demand for education— online learning, multidisciplinary learning, making things more affordable, and increasing employability by integrating industry-oriented micro-credentials, increasing flexibility. 

So, it’s not just a four-year college degree; it’s a college degree and other credentials that you earn along the way. And then, finally, internationalisation. That’s not only about bringing other countries and experts to help learners here, but also taking Indian universities to the rest of the world. If we look at what’s been happening with courses authored by Indian universities on Coursera, 50 per cent of the learners in those courses are not in India. So, I think India is both bringing in outside universities and industry, and also exporting the best of what its universities have to international students. 

BT: Who do employers prefer—one who has studied at a B-school or one who’s upskilling and reskilling? 

A: We did a survey where we asked employers what’s your likelihood to hire a candidate if both candidates are university graduates and one has a professional certificate while one doesn’t. What is the likelihood that you’d favour the one who does have micro-credentials? [And] 20 per cent of the people said that they’re 80 per cent more likely to hire if someone does have a professional certificate.

BT: Earlier, engineering students used to pursue an MBA and apply for high-profile jobs. Today, a lot of them are getting into start-ups. Are we questioning the relevance of an MBA today? 

A: Well, if you look at the US, the applications to lowerranked MBA programmes are much lower. We have a programme on Coursera from the University of Pennsylvania called Master of Computers and Information Technology. It’s a master’s degree in tech for people who don’t have a Bachelor’s of Science. So it’s really for people from various backgrounds. The university calls this the new MBA. So, I do think that MBAs that don’t train on data and fluency in tech, they’re not going to do well. 

My oldest daughter went to design school at the Royal College of Art… the best design school in the world. And I said to her: you might want to learn Python, [and] some data science skills. So, she took the Wharton entrepreneurships [programme], a specialisation to complement her design degree because the design school wasn’t multidisciplinary. And she ended up starting a company. 

My youngest daughter was a freshman at Duke. My advice to her for becoming a product manager was to get a degree in computer science and double major in soft skills. So, she got a double major in computer science and cultural anthropology. And then, she was in a leadership programme. That kind of multidisciplinary background is what employers are looking for today.

BT: How can working executives upskill themselves in data analytics, among other skills? 

A: It depends. If you want to switch careers, then you’re going to have to do something that is a little bit more substantial. And has a credential. You could go back and get a Master’s, but that is a little bit of time and quite a bit of money. You can now get them online. For instance, BITS Pilani is offering a three-year Bachelor’s in Computer Science. 

But suppose you don’t want to get a Bachelor’s [because] that’s going to take too long; you can get a professional certificate. So, you could get an IBM certificate that’s about 130 hours—it’s not three years, but it’s not 15 minutes [either]. 

If you’re a business person and you want to get something which is a little bit more robust and data analytical, you can get the Google certificate in data analytics. So, I do think that these longer-form credentials, whether those are college degrees or professional certificates, will give you not just the skill but the credential to switch careers. What’s nice about this is that working people no longer have to go back to a university campus and don’t have to quit their job. 

What’s changing the most is not necessarily the fundamental skills and knowledge that you need, like getting good communication skills to be a project manager and the ability to run Gantt charts. What’s changing are the tools that you use. Universities are very good at durable foundational skills and knowledge. And then, we can complement it with these higher-velocity tool training projects.

@nidhisingal