Adobe rallies tech sector to launch Australian Skill Finder marketplace
Micro-skills marketplace Skill Finder is now live in Australia, giving anyone who wants to sink their teeth into tech the ability to access short courses spanning across a handful of tech categories.
Skill Finder was built pro bono by Melbourne-based Balance Internet. The idea for Skill Finder was born out of a hackathon the company hosted a few months ago, its managing director James Horne said.
The initiative is offered to users for free, with the upfront cost of Adobe Magento Commerce and Adobe Analytics provided by Adobe. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is providing cloud services to support the website.
Australian tech firms Atlassian, Canva, and MYOB, and New Zealand's Xero, as well global giants Adobe, AWS, Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Twitter are also contributing free courses and micro-skills.
Courses and micro-skills available span 12 categories and 144 sub-categories across creative graphic design, coding, artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, cloud computing, accounting software, business tools, and content marketing. The course levels range from basic to advanced.
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When visiting the site, users are guided by an "assisted user experience guide", called Jesse, to the most relevant courses based on information a person chooses to share about their professional background, current expertise, and future interest areas.
"Skill Finder is a free resource offering hundreds of online courses focused on digital skills and is available to any Australian looking to reskill or upskill in the wake of COVID-19," Adobe said in a statement. "Skill Finder will enable Australians to equip themselves with in-demand, immediately applicable technical and digital micro-skills from the world's leading technology companies, for free."
Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews is on board with the initiative, saying "digital skills have proven invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic and will only become more relevant and useful" as Australia continues to recover.
"We need to make sure Australians have the skills they need to take advantage of the jobs that industry will create," she said. "The broad selection of courses on offer through Skill Finder are what Australia needs to drive digital transformation and innovation, ultimately delivering growth and jobs."
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