How Udacity is Building a Digital Workforce for the Future
Over the next 10 years, McKinsey predicts that 1.2 billion people will be disrupted by technology. While new jobs are being created in advanced digital fields, existing jobs are ending with the rise of automation. What’s stopping employees from applying and filling new roles? A severe lack of training in new, digital skills.
Until Udacity, that is — the fastest, most effective way to get employable job skills online.
As a talent transformation platform, Udacity is changing lives, businesses, and nations by training people in careers of the future (such as data analytics, machine learning, cybersecurity, cloud computing and more). On the latest episode of Y in the Valley, Udacity’s CEO Gabe Dalporto details how his unique background, executive experience and lessons learned along the way helped him lead Udacity towards creating a lasting global impact.
From failing to cash flow positive in three months
Before Udacity, Gabe joined Lending Tree in 2011 as the CMO. Within his first five weeks, the company lost $15 million and needed to turn it around — fast. His strategy was a blend of tactical moves, restructuring and hiring high-quality talent.
“It’s all about the talent. We were able to bring some great talent on, turn the company around, and start a growth path.” — Gabe Dalporto
He took over as president in 2015, then successfully grew the business further by implementing a strategy change for more lending categories (a move that lifted their product-market fit off the charts). Over a seven-year period, Gabe served as Lending Tree’s CMO, President and CFO and took their stock from $5 the day he started to $351 the day he left. Throughout his time there he found the reason for successful growth to be a phased focus approach: The early stage centered around getting the right talent in place, once they were executing well it was about strategy and finally acquiring the right companies to rapidly scale momentum and success.
After achieving this hyper-growth, Gabe wanted to pivot to something a little more meaningful to him.
Tackling a global digital skills crisis
As more and more industries become automated, a large number of people will lose their jobs and don’t have access to skill training for higher-paying, digital jobs. There’s unlimited demand for remote roles in fields like software development and digital marketing, but without effective, scalable training few can take advantage of the opportunity. The world is changing quickly, and traditional universities lack innovation in the curriculum taught for modern-day careers.
Furthermore, companies in the United States have a culture of firing then hiring — leaving little to no opportunity for retraining existing employees. Udacity is on a mission to shift the cultural mindset o realize that manufacturing talent is easier than hiring it, and there’s existing untapped potential in every company. With their state of the art, industry-relevant content, employees can level up on their own time and be fully qualified for those jobs in just 3–5 months.
Strategically driving societal and global impact
Before the global pandemic, Gabe and the Udacity team thought their big wins would come from the consumer market. However, they soon found that their platform has the potential to transform the workforces of enterprises and countries at scale.
“You’ve got to go where you can win, and our decision was to follow where we can have the biggest impact.”
The institutions that prioritize skill training can grow and scale faster in a pivoting digital-first world. Take Shell, for example. Updacity helped them skill their employees in data science across 70 countries. The global implementation of data science enabled them to build a machine learning model for live stream data that could predict failures and avoid outages (ultimately resulting in millions of dollars in savings).
Udacity isn’t just committed to helping those currently in the workforce — Gabe and his team aim to shape the future generation of workforces by empowering underrepresented communities with scholarships to train students for technical roles.
Gabe and the team at Udacity have built a measurable, scalable platform to train millions of people around the world at once, transforming economies and companies alike. What’s the secret behind their strategy? Listen to Gabe on his episode of Y in the Valley to find out.
Y in the Valley is a podcast featuring Silicon Valley’s leading founders and thinkers, shining a light on how they build companies, products and culture in a wave of accelerated change — hosted by Ashish Toshniwal, CEO and cofounder of YML.
