Author Archives: The Official Google Blog

Score big and try Google News for the Rugby World Cup

Rugby World Cup on Google News

Grab your flags and jerseys: The 2019 Rugby World Cup, hosted in Japan, is running from September 20 through November 2 this year. The tournament, which began in 1987, is held every four years between the top 20 international teams. They’re competing for the illustrious Webb Ellis Cup, named after William Webb Ellis, the alleged inventor of rugby. This will be the ninth Rugby World Cup and will mark the first time the tournament is held in Asia, and Google News is helping you get access to all the biggest moments. 

When you search and follow the Rugby World Cup on mobile, our interactive tournament wheel will transport you straight into the action. Follow your team through the pool stage, knockouts and finals with live coverage of every match including post-game reactions and analyses, player stats, injury reports, win probabilities and more.

No matter where you are or what device you have, we’ve got you covered. Our experience will be available across iOS and Android platforms across all 50+ languages we cover.

This feature also compliments our efforts across Google, specifically for YouTube, which will feature comprehensive match highlights from World Rugby and official tournament broadcasters, as well as interviews, a daily review show and behind-the-scenes action.

Will your team win? Join in on the scrum and find out with Google News.

Google Play Pass: Enjoy apps and games without ads or in-app purchases

Google Play has always been about connecting you to the best apps, games and digital content out there. Since everyone plays a little differently, we’re introducing a new way to enjoy many of these digital experiences: Google Play Pass.

Play Pass is a new subscription service that gives you access to more than 350 apps and games that are completely unlocked—all free of ads, in-app purchases and upfront payments. Play Pass offers a high-quality, curated collection of titles from Stardew Valley to AccuWeather, with new apps and games added every month.

Play Pass is coming to Android devices in the U.S. this week, and we’ll be bringing it to additional countries soon. You can get started with a 10-day free trial and subscribe for just $4.99/month. And for a limited time, you can get Play Pass for only $1.99/month for your first twelve months, then $4.99/month (see full terms).

Apps and games you already love, plus more to discover

The Play Pass collection spans hundreds of titles, from games that help you unwind to apps that power productivity. We think the creators of Monument Valley put it best: “Play Pass helps encourage people to try new experiences they would not have otherwise," says Maria Sayans, CEO of Ustwo games.

You’ll find well-known apps and games like Terraria, Monument Valley, Risk, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and AccuWeather. And others you might be less familiar with that are just as amazing, like LIMBO, Lichtspeer, Mini Metro, Old Man’s Journey and many more. With new additions every month—including titles like This War of Mine and Cytus coming soon—there’s always something new to discover.

Google Play_play pass.gif

To make all of these apps and games easier to find, we’ve added a new Play Pass tab for subscribers. Play Pass apps and games can still be found throughout the Play Store–just look for the Play Pass “ticket.” All apps and games found on the Play Pass homepage or throughout the Play Store with the ticket are completely unlocked with your subscription.

Share with the whole family

Just like Google Play Family Library, family managers can share their Play Pass subscription with up to five other family members. Each family member can access Play Pass individually, so your experience won’t be affected by what others download. Play Pass also has a great selection of family-friendly content—from Toca Boca classics to the My Town series—so the whole family can enjoy.

Get started

Once Play Pass is available on your Android device this week, you can start your free trial by simply opening the Play Store app, tapping the menu at the top left, and looking for “Play Pass.”  Learn more about Play Pass—and have fun! 

Our commitment to ensure a sustainable future for all

Today is the start of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This year the UN is placing a large focus on climate change, so we’re here to share details about Google’s longstanding and ongoing investments in sustainability. Along with our own actions, we’re committed to partnering with governments and other companies to ensure a sustainable future for all people. 

We are focused on sustainability across all of our products and services. We’ve been a carbon-neutral company since 2007, and our work to support renewable energy remains a huge focus for us. (Last week, we announced the largest ever purchase of renewable energy by any corporation.) As our business continues to grow, we have expanded the breadth of our efforts to drive positive environmental impact, and make smarter and more efficient use of the Earth’s resources:

Hamina

Our data center operating in Hamina, Finland. This facility is one of the most advanced and efficient data centers in the Google fleet.  

Designing efficient data centers 

Google’s data centers power products like Search, Gmail and YouTube for billions of people around the world. For more than a decade, we’ve worked to make Google data centers some of the most efficient in the world. On average, a Google data center is twice as energy efficient as a typical enterprise data center. Compared with five years ago, we now deliver around seven times as much computing power with the same amount of electrical power, and we're applying machine learning to drive energy efficiency even further.
Energy

Solar project that currently serves Google operations in Chile.

Advancing carbon-free energy

Combating climate change requires a clean energy economy, which is why we’ve invested to become more energy efficient and to match every unit of energy we consume at our facilities around the world with an equivalent unit of energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. In 2018, for the second year in a row, we matched 100 percent of our electricity consumption with renewables, and last week’s announcement increased our global portfolio of wind and solar agreements by more than 40 percent, to 5,500 megawatts—equivalent to the capacity of a million solar rooftops. We’ve long worked in partnershipwith energy companies, policy makers and other companies to drive access to renewable energy. We’re continuing to pursue a much greater, longer-term challenge: sourcing carbon-free energy for our operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 


Woklace

We aim to restore the local ecology while improving access to the outdoors for Google employees and the surrounding community.


Creating sustainable workplaces 

We’re committed to designing and operating sustainable workplaces for our employees. We start by applying industry-leading green building standards wherever possible, and this includes 13 million square feet of Google office facilities which have achieved LEED certification. We take a science- and community-driven approach to managing our campuses, with the aim of having a positive impact in the places where we operate, and we’re designing and building our offices with local environments, ecology and animal habitats in mind. We’ve also avoided over 6.6 million pounds of food waste since 2014 by bringing new technology solutions into our kitchens.

Empowering ppl

Google technology works to help create a more sustainable and resource-efficient world

Empowering people with technology

Our technology can help enable others who are working toward the same cause. By mapping the world’s forests, oceans and watersheds, we’re making it easier for scientists, environmental organizations and communities to understand how our planet is changing over time. Google Earth is used globally by millions to explore and understand our ever-changing planet and Google Earth Engine is focused on planetary-scale geospatial analysis, giving researchers access to Google’s massive cloud and computational capabilities. We continue to work to enable cities to drive meaningful climate action plans with our Environmental Insights Explorer and we’re applying AI to some of the world’s biggest challenges, like AI-enabled flood forecasting. We recently announced we’re expanding flood forecasting efforts in India, where 20 percent of flood fatalities occur.
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Our ambition is that every product we build will leave people, the planet, and our communities better than we found them. 

Building better devices and services

Google Shopping and Google Hardware are also helping people make decisions that lessen our impact on the planet. Starting today, when you buy a product on Google Shopping or purchase Made by Google hardware, we’ll offset the carbon emissions generated from that product being shipped to you. This means that for every metric ton of carbon dioxide produced in shipping, we will ensure that the same volume of emissions is removed. 


Stadia, Google’s all-new streaming gaming platform, has joined the Playing for the Planet Alliance and will work closely with the UN to support various gaming-related sustainability initiatives in the coming years. Stadia is powered by Google Cloud, which means when it’s available later this year, it will be 100 percent carbon neutral. We also are undertaking significant work to ensure that the hardware we sell is sustainable. 

Sharing our progress and looking forward

You can read more in our newly released 2019 Environmental Report. Every day we’re humbled by people who turn to our products to understand how they can have a meaningful impact on our world. Increasingly, people are searching for ways to take action on climate change and other environmental issues, and we want to ensure our products help people achieve their goals. While we have a lot to be proud of, there’s a lot more work to do.


Doing more to protect your privacy with the Assistant

We believe you should be able to easily understand how your data is used and why, so you can make choices that are right for you. Recently we’ve heard concerns about our process in which language experts can listen to and transcribe audio data from the Google Assistant to help improve speech technology for different languages. It's clear that we fell short of our high standards in making it easy for you to understand how your data is used, and we apologize.


When we learned about these concerns, we immediately paused this process of human transcription globally to investigate, and conducted a full review of our systems and controls. Now we want to share more about how audio recordings work, and some changes we’re making: 

Your audio data isn’t stored by default

By default, we don’t retain your audio recordings. This has been the case, and will remain unchanged. You can still use the Assistant to help you throughout the day, and have access to helpful features like Voice Match. 


To store your audio data, you can opt in to the Voice & Audio Activity (VAA) setting when you set up your Assistant. Opting in to VAA helps the Assistant better recognize your voice over time, and also helps improve the Assistant for everyone by allowing us to use small samples of audio to understand more languages and accents. You can view your past interactions with the Assistant, and delete any of these interactions at any time. 

Updating our audio setting 

We’re updating our settings to highlight that when you turn on VAA, human reviewers may listen to your audio snippets to help improve speech technology. If you’re an existing Assistant user, you’ll have the option to review your VAA setting and confirm your preference before any human review process resumes. We won’t include your audio in the human review process unless you’ve re-confirmed your VAA setting as on. 

More privacy protections for our transcription process

We take a number of precautions to protect data during the human review process—audio snippets are never associated with any user accounts and language experts only listen to a small set of queries (around 0.2 percent of all user audio snippets), only from users with VAA turned on. Going forward, we’re adding greater security protections to this process, including an extra layer of privacy filters. 

Automatically deleting more audio data

The Assistant already immediately deletes any audio data when it realizes it was activated unintentionally—e.g., by a noise that sounds like “Hey Google.” We understand it’s important to get this right, and will continue to focus on this area, including implementing additional measures to help us better identify unintentional activations and exclude them from the human review process. Soon we’ll also add a way to adjust how sensitive your Google Assistant devices are to prompts like “Hey Google,” giving you more control to reduce unintentional activations, or if you’d prefer, make it easier for you to get help in especially noisy environments.

One of the principles we strive toward is minimizing the amount of data we store, and we’re applying this to the Google Assistant as well. We’re also updating our policy to vastly reduce the amount of audio data we store. For those of you who have opted in to VAA, we will soon automatically delete the vast majority of audio data associated with your account that’s older than a few months. This new policy will be coming to VAA later this year. 

We believe in putting you in control of your data, and we always work to keep it safe. We’re committed to being transparent about how our settings work so you can decide what works best for you. To check your current settings and learn more about the controls available, visit the “Your data in the Assistant” page.

Google.org helps Nesta bring skills training to trade unions

Throughout history, technology has changed the nature of work. This has created new opportunities and jobs, but there are also concerns about technology’s impact on job security and displacement. Google.org’s $2 million grant to Nesta, a global innovation foundation, will set up partnerships with trade unions in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. The program will provide training to workers whose jobs are changing rapidly as a result of automation or digitalization—for example, people working in administrative roles, manufacturing and the service industry. 


Nesta will deliver training through a new program called FutureFit, which will help workers get the skills they need to adapt to changes in their workplace. Using training methods such as nano learning—where trainings are broken down into small chunks—and gamification, the program will shed light on learner behavior and motivation. This evidence will be used to inform future training.


While research from McKinsey shows that automation can actually increase the total number of jobs in the countries covered by this project, a recent poll showed that 40 percent of the Swedish workforce worries about not getting access to the training they need to compete in the future job market. And the OECD found that people in jobs most at risk from automation do less training than workers in jobs at low risk. 


The Nordics and Benelux countries are the perfect places to try Nesta’s techniques and build on Google.org’s engagement with nonprofits to equip people with the skills needed for the future labor market. The countries in the region are digital frontrunners, and have a tradition of investing in lifelong learning. We know this from Google initiatives we’ve introduced to the region: In Sweden, we toured the country with the national Swedish Public Employment Service to train thousands of people in digital skills. In the Netherlands, we worked with the trade union CNV to re-skill workers in transport and logistics. And in Denmark, we teamed up with the major trade union HK to educate administrative workers as “digital change agents.” Across Europe, we’ve now trained five million people in new skills. Since May 2018, we’ve also been building on the Digital Frontrunners program from Nesta, a collaborative program to help senior policymakers create a more inclusive digital economy.


In Finland, Nesta will run a pilot program with The Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK), Finland’s largest labour confederation. The program will focus on helping workers whose professions are undergoing high rates of change due to technology, such as administrative roles or manufacturing. SAK President Jarkko Eloranta put it this way: “A third of employees in Finland find modern technology a source of anxiety at work, so learning opportunities of this kind should be part of regular duties at all workplaces. Employees need new digital skills to embrace smart technology at work.”


We’re committed to providing one hundred million EUR in grants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the next five years to better understand the changing nature of work, and to support nonprofits that help people navigate a changing labour market. The Nesta program will be a great addition to that effort, and we hope the grant will help to ensure that workers are equipped with the skills needed to support them in changes to their everyday work lives.

Unleashing digital opportunities in Europe

Today I am in Helsinki, Finland, to meet with Finnish Prime Minister Rinne to discuss his priorities for the European Union Presidency, from building sustainable economic growth to achieving a carbon-free future. 


The Nordic countries are great examples of how the internet can help drive economic growth. As part of our vision to build a more helpful Google for everyone, we are supporting Europe’s digital ambitions in two ways. 


First, by continuing to invest in sustainable digital infrastructure across Europe. Today, I announced that we plan to invest 3 billion euros to expand our data centers across Europe over the next two years. That will bring our total investment in Europe’s internet infrastructure to 15 billion euros since 2007. Our investments generate economic activity for the region and support more than 13,000 full-time jobs in the EU every year, according to a study published today by Copenhagen Economics.


As part of this new investment, we plan to invest another 600 million euros in 2020 to expand our data centre presence in Hamina, Finland, bringing the total investment by Google to 2 billion euros since 2009. Our investments will support approximately 4,300 jobs in Finland per year on average, over the next two years and beyond.


Our Hamina data center is a significant driver of economic growth and opportunity. It also serves as a model of sustainability and energy efficiency for all of our data centers. 


This week we took another big step in our commitment to sustainability globally, by making the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history. 


Today I’m announcing that nearly half of the megawatts produced will be here in Europe, through the launch of 10 renewable energy projects. These agreements will spur the construction of more than 1 billion euros in new energy infrastructure in the EU, ranging from a new offshore wind project in Belgium, to five solar energy projects in Denmark, and two wind energy projects in Sweden. In Finland, we are committing to two new wind energy projects that will more than double our renewable energy capacity in the country, and ensure we continue to match almost all of the electricity consumption at our Finnish data center with local carbon-free sources, even as we grow our operations.


If infrastructure is the backbone of a strong digital economy, people are at its heart. The second way we can help Europe harness its opportunities is through investments to reskill the workforce for the new digital economy. 


The Nordics have already shown strong leadership. For example, Finland is educating 1 percent of its population on artificial intelligence. But AI is only one area where more education is needed—in the next 10 to 15 years, 90 percent of all jobs will require some level of digital skills. That’s why we launched Grow with Google, a global effort to provide free trainings designed to help people find a job, advance their career or grow their business. In Europe, we’ve already trained more than 5 million people in digital skills, both online and in physical classrooms.  


A couple weeks ago, we opened a Grow with Google skills hub, called a Digital Garage, in Helsinki. Today, I’ll have the chance to meet with several students who have already attended courses there. I look forward to discussing the challenges facing job-seekers today and the importance of digital skills in the fast-changing job market.


To help even more people prepare for future jobs, Google.org, our philanthropy arm, is making a grant worth $2 million to Nesta, a foundation focused on innovation. With this grant, Nesta will organize training partnerships with trade unions in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. 


At Google, we feel a deep responsibility to ensure that everyone can benefit from the opportunities that technology creates. That applies not just to job training but the development of responsible innovation, as well. For example, last year, we announced a set of AI principles that guide our work and the types of projects we’ll pursue.


This isn’t a job for one company, or one region, alone. Today, I’ll be joining a roundtable with stakeholders from across the Nordic countries, hosted by the Finnish government in our Google skills hub, to discuss how we can work together to advance these priorities. We will also discuss the role of smart regulation and global frameworks to guide the development of AI and other emerging technologies. 


We look forward to partnering with governments and other stakeholders in the months and years ahead. Together, we can make sure every European benefits from a strong and sustainable digital economy.

Our biggest renewable energy purchase ever

Sustainability has been one of Google’s core values from our earliest days. Over the years we’ve worked hard to reduce the carbon footprint of our operations, build products with people and planet in mind, and drive change at scale through our supply chains.


A cornerstone of our sustainability efforts is our commitment to clean energy. We’ve been a carbon-neutral company since 2007. In 2017, we became the first company of our size to match our entire annual electricity consumption with renewable energy (and then we did it again in 2018). As a result, we became the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world.

Today we’re taking another big step by making the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history. This purchase is made up of a 1,600-megawatt (MW) package of agreements and includes 18 new energy deals. Together, these deals will increase our worldwide portfolio of wind and solar agreements by more than 40 percent, to 5,500 MW—equivalent to the capacity of a million solar rooftops. Once all these projects come online, our carbon-free energy portfolio will produce more electricity than places like Washington D.C. or entire countries like Lithuania or Uruguay use each year. 

cumulative capacity of google's renewable energy portfolio

Our newest energy purchases will increase Google’s existing renewable energy portfolio by more than 40 percent.

Our latest agreements will also spur the construction of more than $2 billion in new energy infrastructure, including millions of solar panels and hundreds of wind turbines spread across three continents. In all, our renewable energy fleet now stands at 52 projects, driving more than $7 billion in new construction and thousands of related jobs.   


To ensure maximum impact, all of our latest deals meet the rigorous “additionality” criteria we set out long ago for our energy purchases. This means we’re not buying power from existing wind and solar farms but instead are making long-term purchase commitments that result in the development of new projects. Bringing incremental renewable energy to the grids where we consume energy is a critical component of pursuing 24x7 carbon-free energy for all of our operations.


Current wind and solar projects

Clockwise from top left: Wind and solar projects that currently serve Google in Sweden; North Carolina; the Netherlands; Oklahoma; and Chile.

These 18 new deals span the globe, and include investments in the U.S., Chile and Europe. In the U.S., we’ll purchase energy from 720 MW of solar farms in North Carolina (155 MW), South Carolina (75 MW), and Texas (490 MW)—more than doubling the capacity of our global solar portfolio to date. In South America, we’re adding 125 MW of renewable energy capacity to the grid that supplies our data center in Chile. And tomorrow I will be in Finland to share more detail on our sizeable new projects in Europe.


These renewable energy purchases aren't only notable for their size. Up to now, most of our renewable energy purchases in the U.S. have been wind-driven, but the declining cost of solar (down more than 80 percent in the past decade) has made harnessing the sun increasingly cost-effective. Meanwhile, our Chile deal marks the first time we’ll buy power in a hybrid technology deal that combines solar and wind. Because the wind often blows at different times than the sun shines, pairing them will allow us to match our Chilean data center with carbon-free electricity for a larger portion of each day.

Before and after new agreements - Americas

The agreements announced today will bring additional large-scale solar and wind farms—representing more than $2 billion in new energy infrastructure—to electric grids worldwide

Beyond our own operations, we’re working to make clean energy mainstream and break down the barriers for those who want to purchase renewable energy. Today we’re announcing two new grants from Google.org to provide further support for organizations that expand access to clean energy for all businesses—from flower shops to big-box retailers to startups. We’ll provide a $500,000 grant to Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA) in the U.S. and a 500,000 euro grant to RE-Source in Europe. These grants will help fund the development of new purchasing models, provide training and resources for consumers, and enable more widespread access to clean power.

As you can see in our newly released 2019 Environmental Report, these are just a few of the ways we’re working to tackle climate change at a global scale. We're also investing in AI and other technologies like Google Earth Engine to scale these efforts beyond our walls. Our goal is to make sure technology can benefit everyone—and the planet we call home. With today’s announcement, we're one step closer to that goal.

Get more done with a little help from Google Chrome

There are a million and one reasons you open your browser every day, and keeping track of tabs shouldn’t distract you from your goals. With tab improvements and more options to customize Chrome, you’ll be equipped to take on the day. 


Chrome updates frequently to bring you new features and security improvements, and our latest version will help you get back into your productivity groove. Here’s an overview of new features coming to Chrome this fall. 


Keep tabs on your tabs


Ever lost track of tabs on your phone? Us too. Over the next few weeks, you’ll see Android’s new grid layout, which helps you select tabs more easily and preview thumbnails of the tabs you have open. (iOS users will already see this tab grid layout). 


There’s also a new way to group tabs on your Android device, which helps you keep track of the tabs that are open. To do this, drag and drop one tab on top of another in the new tab grid layout. After opening one of the grouped tabs, you can easily switch between the tabs in the group using the new tab switcher at the bottom of your screen. 

ChromeSocial_GroupTab_V03.gif

The tab grid layout and tab grouping capabilities make it easier than ever to stay organized in Chrome on your Android device

If you have so many tabs open on your laptop that you can’t read the page titles anymore (guilty!), you can now preview your tabs by hovering over them with your cursor. For now you’ll see the page title, and soon you’ll see a thumbnail of the page too. 

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Soon hovering over tabs will show the page title, and later this year the hover card will include a page thumbnail.

If you want to save a link from your phone so you can open it later on your laptop (or vice versa), you no longer have to do the “email yourself but forget to read it” thing. Now you can use Chrome to send a tab to another computer, phone, or tablet on which you are signed in and have sync enabled.

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Share tabs between your devices

Help from Google built in

Chrome’s address bar helps you get to your results faster than ever. Now on both desktop and Android, answers will show up inside the address bar where you type your query—whether you’re looking for results about sporting events or instant answers about the local weather or translations of a foreign word. 

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Get answers to your important questions directly in the address bar

Chrome automatically prompts translation when you need it, and you can access translation tools in the Chrome menu or from the address bar on desktop. 

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Automatically translate the web into over 100 languages with translation tools built into Chrome

Make Chrome yours

Your work environment impacts productivity and your mood. If plants and nature help you relax and unwind, change the background of your new tab page to a floral design. If you draw energy from the color yellow, use Chrome’s new color customization tool to change the color of your entire browser to the shade that brings you bliss. As for me, my browser color matches my hair—bright pink. 

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Make Chrome yours by customizing the background, color, and theme

These features help boost your productivity, but these aren’t the only features we’re adding this year. Look for updates later in the fall about more improvements coming to Chrome. 

Sharing stories and snacks at Take Your Parents to Work Day

When I was a kid, I loved when my dad took me to work at his office in downtown Milwaukee. He had good views for parades on the streets below, and had one of those handheld games with water and, like, little marbles that you’d try to move down chutes. He had a set of office keys that had this one super-cool blue key on it that, as far as I knew, was for some top-secret treasure closet, maybe? (Or the bathroom, probably.) I’d sit and play the game and watch some TV and hang out, while my dad did what I only assumed was Important Adult Stuff, and then we’d go home. Man, what good times!

Back in those days, I’d think about the times I’d be able to take my parents to my job someday. I didn’t think I’d be taking them to a tech company, but instead to the NBA games I’d certainly be playing in. But things change! People stop getting any taller! Dreams get … deferred! And though it wasn’t on the basketball court, last week, at Google, I finally got to return the favor and show my parents what I do all day.

Matt Teper with his parents

Showing my parents the Googleplex in Mountain View.

Trying out virtual reality

My parents tested out virtual reality at Take Your Parents to Work Day.

One of the many absurdly fun things this company does is offer a full-day event for Take Your Parents to Work Day. Thousands of Googler parents and parental figures come to Mountain View and sit in meetings, roam the campus, eat the food, see product demos and hear from our CEO. In the office, as you can see in the video above, they answer questions from colleagues about what we were like as a kid and tell their own stories of how they ended up here, on this day, proud parents of a Googler.

I have had the privilege in the last few months of taking my kid to work, and now, taking my parents. The sense of pride you feel in giving those you love a glimpse of this place—this company doing impossible things to help billions of people all over the world—that sense of pride radiates around you, everywhere you turn. Pride felt for our kids, pride felt by our parents and pride in ourselves for making all of them proud. It’s not the NBA, but it’s still very cool.

I have two daughters, and when they come visit me, they hang out and play around and investigate the Google-verse around them. They stock up on free candy bars and examine the famous T-Rex and slide down the famous slide. I don’t know exactly what their version of the blue key is, but I am sure they have one in their minds: an emblem, years down the road, they’ll look back on as they remember being “taken to work.” Someday, they’ll take me to work, at some place that doesn’t exist now (or to a National Women’s Soccer League game), and I will walk around beaming the way my parents did last week, along with the thousands more who joined them on campus, filled with love and joy and wonder, thinking: Man, what good times!

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The lessons Googlers have learned from their parents

To celebrate Take Your Parents to Work Day at Google, five Googlers share the most important lessons their parents taught them.

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We went to Google with our daughters for the day. Here’s what we saw.

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A new way for job seekers to stand out to IT recruiters

Almost two years ago, Grow with Google introduced the IT Support Professional Certificate, a program that helps people prepare for entry-level roles in IT, with no experience or degree necessary. IT support skills are highly teachable, and a four-year degree isn’t typically required to build a successful career in this field. We knew that if we could train beginners on technical skills, we could create paths to real jobs—both at Google and at other companies across the country. So we created a hands-on curriculum and made it available on Coursera to prepare learners for IT support jobs in under six months.

Google and CompTIA badge

Now, Google is teaming up with CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association, to provide a dual badge of completion. Employers widely recognize the CompTIA A+ certification as a valued credential for high-growth IT support roles. Now, learners who complete the Google IT Support Professional Certificate and pass the CompTIA A+ certification exams will have access to a new dual credential from CompTIA and Google: a badge that can be posted on LinkedIn to catch the attention of potential employers. 

One recipient of the dual credential is Leo Chui, who was a personal trainer for 12 years when he decided he was ready for a career change. “I have always been passionate about technology and I always wanted to work in that field, but I didn’t have a university degree,” he says. “I simply did not have the means to take on student loans in order to pursue my dreams and also keep a roof over my head.” Leo believes that the IT Support Professional Certificate aligns with the training in CompTIA’s certification exams. He says the training and the badge gave him the confidence to start applying for positions in the field, and he just landed his first IT job. 

With this dual badge, people who complete the Google IT Support Professional Certificate and receive the CompTIA A+ certification are better set up to share their skills with potential employers.