Helping people find Pathways to their next job through Search

Last year at I/O, we announced a new job search experience so more people can find jobs that meet their needs. Since then, we’ve continued to improve and expand this experience. We’ve already helped connect over 100 million people in 92 countries to job listings, and we’re working to bring this feature to more countries by the end of the year.

We’ve also focused on this unique challenge in individual communities. A few weeks ago, we shared our commitment to help our nation’s military service members transition to civilian jobs with job search for veterans, a tool for service members to easily find civilian jobs that use the skills and experience they developed in their military roles.

But there’s more to be done. Forty percent of U.S. households struggle to afford ordinary expenses with their current income, while 46 percent of U.S. employers say they can't find employees with the skills they need. As industries change, a gap has formed in local communities: The skills in demand are not always the skills people have. And this gap is different in each community.  

We see an opportunity for Search to help bridge this gap by connecting job seekers with effective, nearby job training programs delivering the skills local employers need. So that’s the challenge we’re working to solve now: to help people find useful information about the skills and training they need for a job, and better connect them with local resources that can help them realize those opportunities. Here’s one story that inspired us along the way:

We want to help create more stories like Aaron’s for people everywhere and believe these opportunities should be more discoverable online. That’s why today we’re announcing a new feature within job search called Pathways—part of our Grow with Google initiative to ensure economic opportunity for everyone.

Here’s our aspiration for how this will work: When someone searches for jobs on Google, we’ll show not only jobs available right now in their area, but also information about effective local training and education programs.  

We’re starting a pilot of Pathways in Virginia, where we’re partnering with leading organizations in this ecosystem including the State of Virginia, the Virginia Community College System, local employers, and many others to make these local programs more discoverable through Search.

We’re also piloting with Goodwill, the leading nonprofit job training provider in the U.S. As part of our Pathways initiative, volunteer Google engineers will work with local Goodwill organizations to ensure their education and training programs are easily found on the open web.

What we learn from these pilots will help us develop new features and ensure information about programs are readily accessible to everyone in the U.S., and more countries in the future. We want to enable communities to thrive, and make transitions like Aaron’s possible everywhere.