Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup, Scott discussed on Bloomberg Businessweek
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All right, Charlie, thank you so much. I want to get back to our guests. Jonathan Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup, still with us on the phone from Washington, D.C. Scott. Barnes is general manager of training at Amazon Web Services to with us on the phone from Seattle. And we're talking about the clad we're talking about cloud skills. We're talking about what's needed. So I mean, what are the initiatives that you, as a result of working with Gallup, doing a survey doing some research, what are the initiatives that you guys are thinking about to make sure that you have the right skilled workforce? Yes, it was a couple of things starting with kind of broad based. We announced in 2020 our intent to train 29 million people in cloud skills for free by the year 2025, we're making great progress against that and that's a whole bunch of different programs that are accessible really to anyone with an Internet connection and an interest in learning. So digital courses and other programs that are designed to help folks get the skills they need to be successful. I think on the other end of the spectrum, we're trying to bring really compelling experiences to our customers to help land those skills. So we launched as an example, a video game earlier this year where learners actually are in an open world environment, getting hands on keyboard building services on AWS can understanding in real world scenarios. How they might apply these skills on the job. So it's a really diverse portfolio, trying to meet learners where they are. Hey, Jonathan, how much of a gap do we have here when it comes to skills fluency in the U.S.? I mean, I mean, how bad is it? We hear about this all the time, and we hear about it a lot in the context of companies looking for employees. But what about big picture when it comes to economic development and kind of keeping up with the world? Well, one way to quantify is look at vacancies relative to the number of workers looking for jobs. And by that measure, it's the hardest to fill line of work in the economy. And that's consistent with rising wages for software developers, people with digital skills, people with cloud architecture skills. And that certainly shows up in our data and our global survey we found that in high income countries, you get basically $30,000 more in annual salary if you have advanced digital skills compared to people who don't use digital skills. In terms of how the U.S. stacks up, what was I think one of the more interesting findings that came out of this is that there's a very high percentage of workers around the world and many middle income countries that have advanced digital skills and those countries are investing heavily in the companies that are going there or being started up there. Investing heavily in many cases in digital skills and you see that you see those benefits not only for the workers, but for those companies where the likelihood that they introduced a new product is roughly twice as high if the company uses advanced digital workers compared to just basic digital workers. If they run most of their business on the cloud, they're also much more likely to say they introduced a new product. And revenue growth is much more likely to be higher. We found other things. So huge benefits to both companies and workers. All around the world. Well, it's interesting. And I thought the research that you guys did together, and I'm just reading from a release, advanced digital skills like cloud architecture and software development at an estimated $6.3 trillion annually to global gross domestic product and organizations with high levels of digital skill usage report annual revenues that are approximately a 168% higher than companies that do not use digital skills. So saving some final thoughts, Scott, for you. I mean, I think about our audience, it's an investing audience. We increasingly Tim, I feel like every conversation we have, we talk about the digital world and the skills that are needed. So what do you think our audience kind of needs to keep in mind, Scott? Well, I think that they want to evaluate the ways in which companies they care about are taking care of their customers and really when we think about the metrics that matter for digital businesses that kind of mean time to value for introducing new products and new features, the ability to listen to customers and respond quickly is really a key metric for success. And of course, all the other parts of the business matter. But in order to do that, if you're going to be successful in reducing time to value, you've got to have fluency across the organization on digital, right? Everyone needs to speak the same language. Then you've got to invest in the people you have. The folks that have been in technology for their whole lives, but now need a new toolkit to be successful in today's digital world. And on the cloud. Well, and I think about the programs you're doing and we constantly keep talking about people going out to the workforce and then getting training as they go so that they meet the demands of what employers need. Hey guys, thank you so much. Have a great weekend. Jonathan Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup, joining us from the nation's capital and Scott barneson, general manager of training at Amazon Web Services on the phone from Seattle. I want to get back to a top story right now. Yeah, we're following a report from Dow Jones that says that Rupert Murdoch is exploring recombining Fox corp and News Corp.. We say recombining because he split them apart back in 2013, so I guess you could say potentially what's old is new again. We've got Bloomberg news entertainment editor Chris Paul Mary on the phone from Los Angeles right now. Chris, give us some historical context here. Why, you know, less than a decade after breaking up these assets and sending the print to one and sort of TV and entertainment assets to another. And yes, a lot has happened in that time in the last 9 years. A media company such as News Corp. and a Rupert Murdoch. Look at recombining these assets. Well, those two businesses have changed a lot in those 9 years. The original idea was the print was having a lot of trouble. All of the online ads were disappearing. And the growth engine was capable TV and Fox News and so the idea was to separate that and then get that higher value for that business. And then the Murdochs tried to grow that again. They need to run against Time Warner, which was ultimately unsuccessful. And after that, the whole, they felt they weren't big enough at Fox to compete with Disney's and Netflix's in that. And so they sold most of their entertainment assets to Disney. And then it became a very different business. It was really just Fox News, Fox broadcast score really just focused on news and sports. And so at the same time, the News Corp. business actually was revived. The Wall Street Journal was one of a handful of newspapers that has really seen significant growth in digital subscriptions. And so and they've also diversified they bought out access to real estate in realtor