Facebook Looks to Rival LinkedIn with Recent Launch

Mark Zuckerberg might help you land your next job.

Facebook launched its Learn with Facebook program, an initiative to get users more educated in a variety of fields and make them more appealing to employers. The company said the platform exists to rebuild hard and soft skills to return to the workforce.

Other countries have already had this program. It first rolled out in 2017 in India. It then moved to Germany and France in June 2018.

“Our opportunity here is to ensure people are ready, not just for the workforce of today but of the workforce of tomorrow, so that they’re equipped to fill those unfilled jobs,” Fatima Saliu, head of policy and Americas marketing, said Tuesday morning in one of Facebook’s New York City offices.

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Facebook has such confidence in this program that in June they pledged to have a million job seekers and small business owners using the program.

“This is a significant effort that we’ve invested in for a long time, will continue to invest in, and will continue to scale up as we seek to train people not just 1 million people by 2020 in the U.S. but more globally,” Saliu said.

Learn with Facebook isn’t the only way Facebook users can expand their job opportunities with the platform. Facebook has offered Jobs with Facebook to certain parts of Africa, and the platform has connected potential employers with employees through ads and groups for years.

While there aren’t extensive coding or programming classes on Learn with Facebook, it does help business owners brush up on areas they might struggle with. Currently, it offers 13 classes including social media marketing, digital marketing courses, basic hiring expectations, and how to develop a career for a promotion.

Those skills are all things small business owners would handle on their own, pointed out Gaurav Dosi, jobs product manager at Facebook.

Currently, 90 million businesses actively use Facebook to conduct some form of business.

“For small businesses, especially If you’re juggling multiple hats, you’re doing many things. You need a simple place, a free resource where you can go and do this. And that’s really what the value of the Facebook tool is,” Dosi said.