Chris Holman speaks with Peter Schottenfels, Communications Manager with Google, and he's based in New York City. They discuss how Google is bringing their tour of Grow with Google to Michigan's capital city.
Why Lansing? Well, Google is excited to bring the Grow with Google Tour to Michigan’s capital. With a growing downtown and as a center for government, education, and manufacturing, Lansing is on the move. Lansing ranks as one of the best Midwest cities for recent college graduates and is home to several respected organizations doing incredible digital skills work that we are so excited to work with. 
Chris and Peter cover what's been the impact of GwG in the other communities where this has been done: The Grow with Google initiative helps people across the United States grow their skills, careers, and businesses by offering free tools, training, and events. Thousands of people have come through our trainings in our events so far and are taking the digital skills they learned into their jobs and businesses and returning to google.com/grow to continue their learning.
What can someone attending GwG expect? As part of our free two-day event we’ll be offering more than 14 workshops focused on the type of skills that will be critical to today’s evolving workforce: digital skills, coding, online safety, data analytics, helping businesses improve their online presence and more. We will also offer 1:1 coaching sessions with Google employees who will cover topics such as digital marketing, analytics, and SEO. Finally, there will be a number of handson demos featuring various Grow with Google programs, tools, and resources such as Google for Jobs, Google Expeditions, Applied Digital Skills, Google My Business and more. Our event is targeted toward people who want to learn digital skills such as small businesses, educators, job seekers, and people who want to increase their digital literacy.
Please sign up at g.co/GrowLansing or just come on down on Friday, March 9 to the Gannon Building at Lansing Community College (422 N Washington Square).
What are your favorite workshops? Peter's personal favorite is Intro to Online Marketing. It really offers a terrific landscape of the various ways you can take advantage of the reach of the Internet to help your small business or non-profit. But it’s hard to choose just one because they all offer so much! What do you hope people take away? Over the course of our two-day event, we’re aiming to engage 1,000 educators, job seekers, students, and local businesses on digital skills. Our hope is that Michiganders come away feeling more confident in their ability to use technology to grow their skills, career, or business.
What happens after GwG? Google has established relationships with over a dozen organizations, including Capital Area District Libraries, Capital Area Michigan Works!, City of Lansing, Information Technology Empowerment Center, Lansing Economic Area Partnership, and Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce, who we will continue working with to provide digital skills trainings to Lansing residents. Their insights and input were invaluable as we developed the content for this weekend’s workshops, and we worked hand-in-hand to get the word out. Going forward, we will work with them to continue making digital skills trainings and resources available to the small businesses, jobseekers, educators, and students they serve.
If people miss GwG, can they still access the resources and training? How? They can go online to google.com/grow where all of these same programs and materials are available.
What else do you think it's important to know or understand? Our top priority is to to make sure technology brings opportunity to everyone, so please come down to our free event at the Gannon Building this Friday. You can register here: http://g.co/GrowLansing.
To hear the full interview click on the embedded SoundCloud Podcast below!
