Right now, according to Burning Glass’ Labor Insight, there are over 1.5 million open jobs in the U.S. in fast-growing fields like data analytics, digital marketing & e-commerce, IT support, project management and UX design. We launched Google Career Certificates to help people learn the skills they need to qualify for roles in those fields, helping drive economic opportunity and mobility. Today, more than 70,000 people have earned a certificate and 75% of graduates report positive career impacts within six months of graduating, based on graduate survey responses in the U.S. in 2021.

But just as important as learning the skills to perform a new job, is learning the skills to land that job. This means knowing how to network, apply, build a resume and nail one of the most intimidating parts of a job search: the interview.

Interviewing in a new field can be hard, especially if you don’t have access to friends, family or mentors in the field who can help you practice and prepare. That’s why we’ve been collaborating with job seekers to start building a new tool called Interview Warmup that lets you practice answering questions selected by industry experts, and uses machine learning to transcribe your answers and help you discover ways to improve. Preparing for interviews will always take a lot of work, but we hope this tool can make it a little easier for anyone to become more confident and grow comfortable with interviewing.

With Interview Warmup, your answers are transcribed in real time so you can review what you said. You’ll also see insights: patterns detected by machine learning that can help you discover things about your answers, like the job-related terms you use and the words you say most often. It can even highlight the different talking points you cover in each answer, so you can see how much time you spend talking about areas like your experience, skills and goals. Your responses aren’t graded or judged and you can answer questions as many times as you want. It’s your own private space to practice, prepare and get comfortable.

Interview Warmup was designed for Google Career Certificates learners, so it has question sets specific to each of the certificates. But it’s available for everyone to use and has general questions applicable to many fields. Every question has been created by industry experts. We’re sharing the tool in its early stages so we can get feedback from the community, find ways to improve it and expand it to be more helpful to more job seekers, especially as one in four U.S. workers seek opportunities with new employers.

We’re excited about tools like Interview Warmup because they show how new technologies have the potential to help more people practice the skills they need to grow their careers and, as a result, support the development of the U.S. workforce. Alongside training programs like Google Career Certificates, these tools, resources and trainings can help increase economic mobility and make it possible for more people to make the move into fast-growing fields.

Try Interview Warmup now at grow.google/interview-warmup.

Since Grow with Google launched in 2017, we’ve traveled across all states, from Alaska to Florida, to help Americans get the digital skills they need to succeed. Along the way, we’ve partnered with local libraries, schools and nonprofits to offer free tools and training to help people get the right skills to find jobs they want, advance their careers and grow their businesses. We’ve also established a homebase, opening the Grow with Google New York City Learning Center in 2019 to offer free workshops and events to the community six days a week.

Though we’re no longer able to gather in person, that doesn’t mean the learning has to stop. We recognize that many people—particularly jobseekers and small businesses—are facing uncertainty and looking for digital skills training to help them increase their economic potential. So we’re announcing virtual programs from Grow with Google that can help. 

Today, we’re launching Grow with Google OnAir, where Grow with Google’s free programming will be online and available to everyone in the U.S. and Canada for the first time. 

We’ll offer digital skills training, interviews with career experts and programming from partners including Merit America and the National Congress of American Indians. Topics will include “How to manage your business remotely in times of uncertainty” and “How to improve your resume with four practical strategies.” 

After attending a Grow with Google OnAir workshop, attendees who are looking for more personalized help can register for a free one-on-one coaching session with a Googler. This has recently benefited people like Raquel, a veteran and entrepreneur in Virginia, who worked with Amy, a Googler and fellow veteran, to update her resume. Their brainstorm session gave Raquel new ideas for how to frame her experience. And Keith, a small businesses owner, worked with Paige, a Google marketer, to set up his Google My Business page.  

In addition to Grow with Google OnAir, which is available across the U.S., we continue to support our team of local Digital Coaches and our network of more than 7,000 local partner organizations, so that they can teach virtual workshops in their communities. We’ve been inspired by how quickly our partners have adapted to this new way of training, and by how much demand they’re seeing. For example, we recently partnered with America’s SBDC and the Small Business Development Center of Washington State to deliver a webinar focused on business resiliency. We’re thrilled that more than 2,000 small businesses participated.  

To date, Grow with Google has trained more than 4 million Americans on digital skills. We’ve seen firsthand how technology can create new opportunities for growth, and it’s our aim to ensure those opportunities remain available to everyone. Visit Grow with Google Events to find a virtual program that’s right for you.