Google offers S’pore SMEs 15,000 free places for online learning as tech firms woo the sector

SINGAPORE - No talent, no budget and no time to find new customers in digital marketplaces.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore will receive help from Google in addressing these perennial bugbears, with the tech giant offering them 15,000 free places for online learning, and promising to make more available if reception is warm.

For a start, 300 companies can apply for the Google-sponsored openings through Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG) and tech association SGTech from Monday.

Firms can put up as many as 50 employees, and expect a response within two weeks of application, EnterpriseSG said.

Each employee can select up to eight courses, which could earn him or her eight Google Career Certificates (GCC) in areas such as IT support, project management, data analytics, user experience (UX) design and digital marketing.

Regular learners pay $49 a month for the same courses conducted by online course provider Coursera.

Mr Ben King, managing director of Google Singapore, said on Monday that its research found that six in 10 Singapore workers turn to government awareness programmes for information, explaining the public-private collaboration for the initiative.

Even though no prior relevant experience is needed to enrol in the courses, Google’s internal surveys show that seven in 10 of its GCC badge earners said they got ahead in matters such as pay rises within six months of completion.

Included among these courses for the first time are Google’s advanced modules in data analytics and business intelligence.

These modules offer hands-on experience in tools such as BigQuery, Python and Tableau, and open graduates to job roles such as business intelligence analysts and engineers, senior data analysts and junior data scientists.

The course curricula were made in consultation with subject-matter experts, employers, industry partners and trade associations, said Mr King. “The goal was to ascertain the skills that will be useful in the real world, and ensure that our content is relevant and meets industry standards,” he said.

Singapore joins countries such as the United States and United Kingdom – in which Google has launched its GCC programme for SMEs, which account for 71 per cent of the Republic’s workforce and over 40 per cent of its national output.

Google will also use part of a $5.3 million donation, made through its philanthropic arm Google.org, to The Asia Foundation for the training of 1,500 Singapore businesses in digital marketing and sustainable business practices.

Seventy per cent of the beneficiaries are expected to be firms run by women or under-represented communities.

Since the recent buzz caused by generative artificial intelligence (AI), tech players such as Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce and Oracle have notched up the race to roll out AI-powered, little or no coding, cloud-based solutions that can be easily integrated with various apps to target SMEs.

SMEs in Asean will spend almost $173.6 billion over the next three years on technology investments, according to customer experience solutions provider TDCX, with Singapore SMEs among the top spenders.

Earlier in May, enterprise software giant SAP announced new capabilities that help firms move estimates of corporate, value chain and product-level carbon emissions into real data, while also securely exchanging sustainability data with partners and suppliers.

Its president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, Mr Paul Marriott, said: “For SMEs, this will bolster their readiness for more stringent sustainability data reporting and compliance that will accompany governments’ accelerated efforts to achieve net-zero targets by 2050.”

Still, there are multiple challenges facing these companies.

“Meaningful and scalable AI adoption requires a strong digital core built in the cloud, and many SMEs are still nascent adopters of the cloud,” Mr Marriott said.

Mr KK Pan, Oracle NetSuite’s vice-president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, said: “Protecting margins and avoiding cash-flow issues are important for SMEs compared with their larger competitors because SMEs have fewer financial and human resources at their disposal.”

The firm is providing on-premise data migration to its Oracle Cloud, as well as free access to its cloud infrastructure, for firms to build, test and deploy applications for an unlimited time.

The momentum among SMEs to digitalise has picked up after the pandemic, said Mr Ang Yuit, vice-president for strategies and development at the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises.

But firms have to cut through the sales spiel – the “hidden gotchas” – to find partners who can really help them reboot their manpower and business processes, he added.

“What would help is that these training courses are unencumbered by lock-in to a specific solution, and are skills or knowledge that are truly portable,” said Mr Ang.

“SMEs are wary that sometimes free training courses are a means of marketing for the services of a company and these training courses may be tied to proprietary products.”