Looking to Grow Your Tech Skills? Explore Our Udacity Scholarships!

The demand for tech skills is growing tremendously in every industry as our world of work is becoming increasingly digital. As an HR executive, I have seen digital competence become career-defining and the dearth of tech skills is a constant challenge every company is faced with. These developments have spurred us to explore how we can equip our employees with the most up-to-date skills they need to do their best work in today’s fast-paced digital world.

As a subsidiary of Mediengruppe RTL, smartclip is part of the Bertelsmann conglomerate. Bertelsmann is committed to empowering as many people as possible to be successful in the digital world, and the company continuously takes up actions to overcome the shortage of high-skilled workers in the digital domain.

In light of this commitment, Bertelsmann has expanded its investments in the digital education sector by becoming one of the largest shareholders of Udacity, an e-learning provider. The online learning platform provides access to unique tech-focused learning solutions that smartclip employees can take advantage of.

Nanodegree Sponsorships

Udacity offers a wide range of Nanodegree programmes that enable students to keep pace with the emerging technologies and ever-evolving digital requirements. The online curriculum (duration: 3-6 months) is career-oriented and focuses on skills related to Software Development, Data Science, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and more. Every programme is taught by leading experts, and graduates earn an industry-recognised credential. smartclip is currently sponsoring 10 motivated employees per year who are dedicated to growing their skillsets.

“…the programme offers a great insight into working with databases. Especially the last part about data visualisation with tableau is an area I really need every day. You learn how to work with large datasets and quickly learn the most important visualisation methods.”

Christoph Burger, Junior Manager Supply – Business Analytics at smartclip Europe

Tech Scholarships 

smartclip employees are also able to apply for the Udacity Tech Scholarship Program, a global initiative by Bertelsmann specifically created to drive data literacy. Bertelsmann funds 15,000 scholarships each year for 3-months Challenge Courses with a focus on Data, AI, or Cloud. Furthermore – as part of this initiative – the top ten per cent of the Challenge Course graduates (merits based on attendance, participation, performance, and diversity) will receive a scholarship for a full Nanodegree programme in their selected subject area. We congratulate our colleagues who have recently completed the 2020 programme, and we wish those accepted in the 2021 edition much success.

“What I liked most about the Bertelsmann Challenge Course is the all-roundedness. It offers a structured introduction to topics like statistics, mathematical logic, coding practices, and programming languages like Python and SQL. This knowledge is something you can use and build upon in any data related career.”

Inge Klaassen, Data Analyst at smartclip Benelux

Thomas Servatius, our Co-CEO and Managing Director of Platform and Technology, has made our motivations and commitment to training and development programmes clear, “Digitalisation and data-driven solutions lie at the core of our business, and data literacy is unarguably one of the decisive employee skills for the future. We believe it is our responsibility to create opportunities for our colleagues to continuously expand their knowledge and drive innovation forward.” 

I am thrilled that we are able to offer such important training programmes to smartclip employees and empower them with the tools they need to never stop learning!