In response to the new demands emerging from the crisis, the technology industry must still deal with essential needs like looking for qualified workforce.

International Business Machines Corporation recently launched "Open P-Tech", a website that offers employment options for workers with base skills for free. Users pick different fields and then get to learning before they apply for their new-collar job of choice. This way, they develop the required skills to work in digital-driven companies through nonconventional education paths.

Jobs of the future here now

Because of the growing unemployment rate across the globe, these new-collar jobs might offer a new career path that could have easily been disregarded during the pre-coronavirus economy. Then again, at the time, there lacked a general foresight into the likelihoods of illnesses ravaging economies and ruining healthcare systems enough to consider employees working from home.

The company's Senior Education Manager Cliff Archey said that this initiative would allow workers without prior knowledge of the industry gain the necessary skills online during application, by which time they would earn a "baseline digital badge" validated by IBM. He added that it would be a good way to begin the career development journey for jobs that required cloud computing, artificial intelligence, digital design, and others. The choice of calling the type of job as "new collar" was derived from the usual classification terms like white collar or blue collar workers.

Archey said that people frequently referred to this type of employment as jobs of the future, but he assured everyone that the reality was, the future was "here now".

He concluded that having basic knowledge about how digital-driven companies worked would greatly help people in the future, especially for those who are tech-savvy with cybersecurity and user-centric management systems.

If new-collar types would go into the job market and validate their skills through IBM, then lots of different industries would acknowledge these skills and hire them.

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Training the talent for the future

Digital transformation executive Guillermo Miranda at IBM Corp. said that the first responsibility of the company would be to ensure the safety of their employees and the continuity of the businesses for their clients. As global head of corporate social responsibility as well, Miranda stated that launching the new-collar employment would eliminate the mindset that earning a university degree would be the only way to launch yourself into a successful career in the marketplace.

Which was why P-Tech was developed as an online learning system for students to earn a high school diploma, an associate degree recognized by IBM, and gain work experience relevant to the digital field. As a way to support the initiative, partners of the industry planned to work with school districts and community colleges to promote this program by creating solid job opportunities that would provide a consistent framework for the employees in the company to work with.

Miranda said that the organizations would pool in their efforts to "train the talent for the future".