CHENNAI: In a bid to help entrepreneurs start and scale up businesses besides imparting digital skills to job seekers, social networking giant Facebook said it would train some five lakh people in India on digital skills by 2020.
It unveiled two programmes on Wednesday — Facebook digital training and Facebook startup training hubs. “India is poised to have a digital economy worth $1 trillion by 2022. We believe the best way to prepare India for this digital economy is by providing tools, knowledge, and skills people need to succeed,” said Ritesh Mehta, Facebook’s head of programmes, India and South Asia.
According to him, these tools will help people learn digital skills and enable entrepreneurs and small and medium businesses in digitising their business. Apart from these two, Facebook also runs offline training programmes as well as Blueprint (free online training for advertising on Facebook).
“Through all these initiatives, we hope to train more than half-a-million people in India by 2020,” he said adding that more than 51,700 SMBs have been trained by Facebook in India, including 12,000 women entrepreneurs, through Boost and SheMeansBusiness. Facebook is working with organisations like Digital Vidya, EDII, DharmaLife and StartupIndia to develop the curriculum that is designed to work in low network strength regions as well.
The digital training hub of the US-based company will provide free social and content marketing training for anyone – from students to business owners – who is looking to develop digital skills.
The curriculum includes social media basics, how to build and create an audience, how to create content, how to measure online activity and how to stay ahead of the curve.It will also help people learn skills such as personal branding, digital storytelling, consumer behaviour and reputation management.
On the other hand, the start-up training hub will help developers and tech start-ups build better products and businesses. It will cover a range of subjects including how entrepreneurs can protect their ideas, how to hire, how to go about getting funding, regulations and legal hurdles an entrepreneur needs to consider, among others.