Building a platform to upskill millions

Challenge

Grow with Google helps people learn and adopt the digital skills they need to find a job, grow in their career, or boost their business. To date, the programme has helped millions of people across Europe, Middle East and Africa achieve their personal and professional goals.

Beyond has worked with the Grow with Google EMEA team since 2017, supporting two platforms: the overarching Grow with Google marketing site, and the Digital Workshop e-learning platform. Our remit spans the whole product lifecycle — from strategic workshops, agile roadmap planning and feature exploration, to implementation and measurement. Since our work started, we've navigated a number of challenges, such as:

• When we first inherited the platform, it was a legacy site using old technologies. And with a mixture of hosted and off-platform courses, the platform is deployed in 40+ countries and 80+ locales.
• We had to develop a methodology to allow for a modernization of the stack, given that technologies used were reaching EOL, while actively doing concurrent feature development, data architecture migration and bug fixing.
• We work to an evolving roadmap, redesigning the offering as the platforms expand with changing user needs, and through partnerships with other Google teams, external course providers and country-specific initiatives.

Solutions

Grow with Google is our longest-standing program at Beyond. We work on the design, the engineering, and the product evolution.

• We took a really complex and outdated system and were able to modernize it, migrating from Python 2 to Python 3 and upgrading from AngularJS to Angular 10.
• Concurrently, we made technical improvements to the platforms and development workflow using managed and cloud-native services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• We also completed the migration from legacy Google Cloud technologies.
• During the development of this project, we worked with Google as a team. We accessed their internal platform and worked with their internal APIs in a collaborative way.
• Design-wise, we created a very accessible and user-friendly experience. In line with Google’s recognisable brand style, it’s easily navigable with primary colors against a white background.
• In particular, the Digital Workshop platform is user-led, and hyper-functional, with more registered users and traffic than any other product Beyond work with.
• It’s designed for the speed of its evolution, whether that’s a new demand for specific skills from users, or a new learning medium such as webinars.
• A set of multinational platforms sit within the Grow with Google programme. Each has local versions to benefit the specific training and business needs of people in different countries and regions.

As the product evolves, so does our product roadmap, which keeps us highly responsive to business and user needs.

Technologies

In addition to ElasticSearch and SendGrid, we used Google Cloud, including:

• AppEngine
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud Logging
• Cloud Build
• Cloud Memorystore for Redis
• Cloud Tasks
• Firestore
• Cloud Monitoring\
• Container Registry

Impact

Since 2017, Beyond has collaborated with Google to design and build three digital platforms and tools that underpin this programme across the entire EMEA region. This includes:

• The flagship e-learning platform Digital Workshop
• The AI for Business tool
• The Grow with Google marketing site – which proved especially useful during the pandemic, when people’s working lives dramatically altered, and the demand for Google’s online training tripled.

People are at the heart of Grow with Google, our work on the program has helped millions find a job, learn new skills, grow their career and accelerate their businesses. In 2021, Matt Brittin, President of Google EMEA Business & Operations, said the online tools had became a ‘lifeline’ to newly remote workers and would help countries recover ‘more quickly and more sustainably' from global events of the day.