This fall we partnered with the Center on Rural Innovation to offer digital upskill training leveraging the online education platform Udacity. Through our partnership we were able to provide free scholarships to our region in an effort to support rural community members in gaining digital skills to help better set them up for a bright digital future.

This was our first year offering the Future is Digital Challenge program and we saw a lot of interest from our surrounding communities as they signed up for courses in Digital Marketing, Business Analytics, and Web Development. In our region we had 67 people enroll in the program with majority of the interest being in Digital Marketing. We saw 82% of those people were women with 51% looking to develop their skills for their current role, while 27% were looking to do a job switch and 4% were wanting to start a new business. There was also diversity in the age groups enrolled with a split between the 25-34 and 55-65 year olds.

As our rural communities continue to adapt to the changing times and moving more into the digital space, we hope to continue to support the need for upskilling the workforce. Adding these skills into our community helps elevate opportunities by uplifting workers in their current role or by supporting someone in search of remote work opportunities. We hope our partnership with CORI will allow us to bring this great opportunity back so we can continue building momentum and awarding digital skills scholarships to rural residents in Southwest Colorado.