College students can go
online for everything from a pizza to their textbooks for the upcoming
semester. Now there’s a web site that purports to help them get a better job
after graduation.
Skilledup.com is a portal for online
courses and practical training programs. With a sluggish economy and a tight
job market for college graduates, the site has been
designed to make it easy to find and compare course options through the use of
keyword searches. It claims to have more than 40,000 online courses from
hundreds of providers, and is working to include massive open online course
sites, such as Udacity and Coursera.
“If education doesn’t have
[return on investment], it probably doesn’t deserve to be called education,”
said Nick Gidwani, who launched the site Aug. 21. “There are so many kids out
there earning seven bucks an hour who can have a decent life in a short period
of time. … And this is one way to achieve that.”
Gidwani created the site
after watching two interns he had hired for $12 an hour land high-paying jobs
in just months after taking a series of low-cost online courses. The site was
his solution for workers to sort through all the possible courses available
online.
“There are so many kids
graduating these days who are smart and really computer-savvy, but don’t really
have any skills that translate on Day One,” he told eCampus News. “So many people spend
$100,000 on a college education and don’t have much to show on the first day of
work. That’s unfortunate.”
