This is a contributed article by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. A version of the essay was originally published on NBCNews.com.

Tune in to MSNBC Friday, January 19, at 7 pm PT/10 pm ET to see Pichai and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki onstage in San Francisco with Recode executive editor and co-founder Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Ari Melber in a special town hall, “Revolution: Google and YouTube Changing the World.”


It’s clear that people need more options to thrive in the digital world. The next generation of workers will depend on how we evolve education and tech in the coming years.

When you think of how to help our workforce thrive and find opportunities in the digital world, the first word that often comes to mind is “code.” Nearly every digital-skills program over the past decade has focused on computer science, with a lot of emphasis on young students. Coding, of course, is vital and a core skill for America to invest in. Google has focused resources and employee time helping people from all backgrounds to code — from helping introduce students to the basics, to offering 10,000 free Udacity courses in coding for apps, to training other businesses in how to become experts in programming artificial intelligence. All of this will help meet the growing need for workers who can write the software that will power everyone’s businesses. And it will help countless people more move into in-demand, high paying careers.

But the focus on code has left a potentially bigger opportunity largely unexplored. In the past, people were educated and learned job skills, and that was enough for a lifetime. Now, with technology changing rapidly and new job areas emerging and transforming constantly, that’s no longer the case. We need to focus on making lightweight, continuous education widely available. This is just as crucial to making sure that everyone can find opportunities in the future workplace.

There are two areas that are relevant here. The first is around basic digital skills training. An office admin, for example, now needs to use online programs to run budgets, scheduling, accounting and more. While digital technology should be empowering people, it can often alienate them from their own jobs.



 
Some of these skills didn’t exist five years ago, yet workers are today expected to have them. A recent report by the Brookings Institute says that jobs in the US requiring “medium-digital” skills in America have grown from 40 percent of jobs in 2002 to 48 percent of jobs in 2016.

The digital skills necessary to do these jobs are far easier to learn than code, and should be easier to deliver at scale. For example, we rolled out a “Grow with Google” program, and partnered with Goodwill last year to incorporate digital skills training into its already amazing training infrastructure for job seekers. One trainee spoke of the value of her own experiences. “Before I learned digital skills, I felt unsure of myself,” she says. “Now I feel confident. You have to feel confident in what you do in order to be successful and move on in life.”

Through these trainings, people learn about using technology to research, to plan events, analyze data and more. They don’t require a formal degree or certificate. We think there’s great scope to expand this model, and teach hard and soft skills that can empower a workforce that has access to constant, accredited learning opportunities as job requirements change.

Second, we have a huge opportunity to rethink training for jobs that are core to the digital economy, but that don’t require coding. IT support is a clear opportunity, here. Just as anyone has a clear path to becoming an auto mechanic, we need a similar path to the 150,000 open positions for IT support, in which people maintain the machines and software that underpin technology services. Yet no training today efficiently connects people to that opportunity.

We learned this ourselves through an IT-support apprenticeship program we offered, with the Bay Area’s Year Up job-training program. Over 90 percent of the young adults met or exceed Google’s expectations as apprentices, but we noticed they didn’t return to apply for full-time jobs. It turned out that the standard, two-year computer science degree cost too much time and money, teaching skills that those former apprentices simply didn’t need to start their careers.




So we developed, and just announced, a new IT certificate program alongside Coursera that’s far more focused and flexible. We believe in just 8 to 12 months, it teaches everything you need to be an IT support technician. IT support jobs are predicted to grow by 10 percent from 2016 to 2026, faster than most other occupations the government tracks. We’re giving 10,000 people free access to the course and will connect graduates to job opportunities at places like Bank of America, Walmart, Sprint, GE Digital, Infosys, TEKSystems, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center — as well as Google. If the program works, the payoff will be substantial. The median annual wage for IT support is close to the median salary in America.

You can imagine this lightweight, focused model being applied to other tech-related jobs of the future: Robust certification programs for project management, delivery fleet operation, and other jobs no one can imagine today, but that will be obvious — and ubiquitous — in five years’ time.

Moving beyond code and intensive degrees to these constant, lightweight and ubiquitous forms of education will take resources and experimentation. But that effort should help close today’s skills gaps, while making sure future skills gaps don’t open. That’s part of the reason Google has invested $1 billion over five years to help find new approaches to connect people to opportunities at work and help small and medium businesses everywhere grow in the digital economy.

We should make sure that the next generation of jobs are good jobs, in every sense. Rather than thinking of education as the opening act, we need to make sure it’s a constant, natural and simple act across life — with lightweight, flexible courses, skills and programs available to everyone.
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WhatsApp Business enables you to have a business presence on WhatsApp, communicate more efficiently with your customers, and help you grow your business.

If you have separate business and personal phone numbers, you can have both WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Messenger installed on the same phone, and register them with different numbers.

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• RUN BOTH WHATSAPP MESSENGER AND WHATSAPP BUSINESS: You can use both WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Messenger on the same phone, but each app must have its own unique phone number.

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What does 2018 hold for developers? What trends will change the way they work? TNW spoke to developers across a number of segments, and asked what they thought next year would bring. Here’s what they said.

All about the containers

Containerization is a great idea. When you put a bit of code into a container, you’re essentially packaging it in a certain way. It contains pretty much everything you need to run the software — like libraries, tools, settings — and binds it into an executable that you can deploy pretty much everywhere.
Containerized software is consistent. It runs the same no matter what machine you put it on. And because it’s isolated from its environment, and from other containers on the same system, they’re a lot more secure.
Like I said, it’s a great idea. And thanks to projects like Docker and Kubernetes, containerizing software is really easy. In 2018, you can expect this to become even more popular.
Kit Merker, VP of Business Development at JFrog, agrees. “The world needs more reliable software – secure, up to date, performant, resilient to failure – in order to keep all of our daily critical systems running,” he said.
“The introduction of a near-ubiquitous container computing platform that can run democratically on a myriad of open and closed platforms becomes a fundamental building block of Planet Earth’s information, commerce, government, social, education, health, transportation, energy, and industrial systems. The more we can interoperate a world-scale computing infrastructure the better.”

AR and Machine Learning will become even more commoditized (and easy)

Building AI-driven software used to be hard. Building mixed-reality applications used to be hard. That’s not the case anymore.
Let’s start with augmented reality. Over the past year, Facebook and Apple have thrust their own AR development technologies into the mix. ARKit in particular is a revolution, and people are using it to do some really cool things. And thanks to the WebXR project, it’s now possible to build sophisticated AR apps using web technologies.
Gabriel Kwok, Lead Frontend Engineer at mobile ad platform, Kiip thinks 2018 will be an “exploratory year”.
“With the release of ARKit and ARCore for iOS and Android respectively, AR capabilities will become more and more mainstream and developers will be challenged to push their imagination and incorporate AR as a differentiating factor in the sea of mobile apps. Despite advances in AR software, we’ll continue to grapple with hardware bottlenecks.”
On the AI front, you can expect much of the same. AI is making its way into almost everything, and it’s largely due to the same trends we’ve seen in the augmented reality world: simpler, free developer tools that lower the bar for entry significantly.

Data-Driven Developers

Next year, developers will increasingly take an data-driven approach to problem solving. Monitoring and analytical tools that allow them to identify, break-down, and resolve complex issues in their code.
Tague Griffith, Head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs, concurrs. Speaking to TNW via email, he explained that failure engineering and failure analysis will continue to grow and become more codified in 2018.
“Consider databases: there’s this idea of building tools and systems that validate whether databases do what they claim,” he explained.
“Netflix started the trend of the Chaos Monkey, and techniques like ‘failure introduction’ are becoming more mainstream as we start to understand the complexity of systems. Software is key part of our everyday lives and so much of our personal and health data is on our phones, available in cloud. In light of this, automated testing of failure and security analysis will keep building.”
JFrog’s Kit Merker made the case that data-driven analysis can result in significant performance improvements:
“When you first start to improve your development infrastructure you see amazing initial results. It’s like when you start lifting weights you get linear improvement for some time. But eventually you have to dig deeper and do more nuanced improvements to eke out a bit more performance,” he said.
“Measurement of every facet of development from idea to code to deployment to customer feedback will be expected and will help mature development teams focus on incremental gains. This means that those who are only just now investing in improved developer infrastructure might feel like they are making huge strides, but in reality they are scratching the surface of what’s possible. And what got you here won’t get you there.”

Go will be a hot language in 2018

Go is a fun language to work with. Like the majority of compiled language, it’s blazing fast. Unlike other languages, it’s built with concurrency in mind, and makes writing code that performs parallel tasks a doddle.
Syntax wise, it’s really easy to wrap your head around, and reads like a happy compromise between C and Python. It also has a thriving developer community that have created libraries and frameworks which extend the language further.
Recently, I’ve been playing around with Pixel — a dead simple games development platform for the Go programming language. Go can also be used to create web applications, although it primarily thrives as a systems language.
Redis Labs’s Tague Griffith reckons 2018 will be a bumper year for Go, explaining “Go the language is gaining a lot of popularity. It’ll become the new system language that developers turn to for performance-sensitive software, where control is key.”
That said, it won’t be the language of 2018. As was the case with last year, that crown belongs to JavaScript.

Developers will enter the industry through vocational study

Finally, here’s a prediction of my own.
Developers typically enter the industry through one of two ways: they’d go to university and study a computer science related topic, or they’d teach themselves how to code. But in recent years, a third option has emerged: vocational study.
More precisely, I’m talking about coding bootcamps.
Coding bootcamps are (typically private) educational institutions that teach software development in an intensive manner. While a traditional computer science degree takes place over four years, a course at a coding bootcamp lasts just a few months.
Crucially, bootcamps emphasize practical skills over theory. That’s because they typically aim to bring people to junior developer standard in just a few short weeks. That doesn’t leave much time for Djikstra’s algorithm.
Coding bootcamps are booming. Some, like Coding Dojo, have become a legitimate brand, with branches across the United States. One, Flatiron School, was acquired by WeWork earlier this year.
Developers are flooding the industry from these bootcamps. A huge part of that is due to cost. While the upfront cost of a bootcamp can be as high as $15,000, that’s nothing compared to a four-year degree. You can expect that trend to continue, especially while employment outcomes from traditional computer science courses remain dismal.

Bring on 2018

If you want to read the previous year’s predictions and see how right (or wrong) I was, you can check them out here. And if you want to tell me your own predictions, shoot me an email.

Today W3C releases HTML 5.2. This is the second revision of HTML5, following last year’s HTML 5.1 Recommendation. In 2014 we expressed a goal to produce a revision roughly every year; HTML 5.2 is a continuation of that commitment.

This Recommendation like its predecessor provides an updated stable guide to what is HTML. In the past year there has been a significant cleanup of the specification. We have introduced some new features, and removed things that are no longer part of the modern Web Platform, or that never achieved broad interoperability. As always we have also fixed bugs in the specification, making sure it adapts to the changing reality of the Web.

Many of the features added integrate other work done in W3C. The Payment Request API promises to make commerce on the Web far easier, reducing the risks of making a mistake or being caught by an unscrupulous operator. New security features such as Content Security Policy protect users more effectively, while new work incorporated from ARIA helps developers offer people with disabilities a good user experience of their applications.

HTML 5.2 makes the venerable plugin system obsolete. The Web was once extended by plugins – downloaded code with great power over the user’s computer. New technologies or capabilities such as virtual reality or speech interaction are now developed as part of the Web Platform. This allows for better control over potential security flaws, often reduces the cost of development, and enables more focus on the services people want to build than the platform they stand on.

Clarifications and bug fixes bring the HTML Recommendation closer to what has been deployed recently. The definition for the main element has been updated to support modern responsive design patterns, the style element can be used inside the body element. Numerous constraints on code have been loosened, while where necessary for interoperability or security a few have been carefully reinforced. Browsers are encouraged to provide better support for internationalised email addresses that let people around the world write the letters they grew up with, supporting their own language and community.




These are just some examples of W3C’s work to ensure the HTML specification reflects the reality of the Web. There are many other changes large and small in this update, which developers can use with confidence as a reference.

With this update we bid farewell to some of our editing team Steve Faulkner and Travis Leithead, who began as editors of HTML 5.0, Arron Eicholz, who worked on the new code structure for HTML 5.1, and Alex Danilo, who joined when HTML 5.1 was still in development. Their contributions have been important, and they join the many people who have dedicated untold efforts to develop HTML over the years.

Today also sees the First Public Working Draft of HTML 5.3. This was part of our existing plans to produce a new HTML Recommendation in 2018. This week WHATWG announced a new structure, and we are again exploring ways to collaborate with them on HTML. While this means the current plans may change, we remain committed to ensuring that HTML development takes into account the needs of the global community, and that HTML continues to improve in areas like accessibility, internationalisation, and enabling privacy alongside providing greater interoperability, performance, and security.

Sangwhan Moon continues as an editor, joined by Bruce Lawson, Patricia Aas, Shwetank Dixit, Terence Eden, and Xiaoqian Wu to continue the work of updating HTML. Thanks again to Steve Faulkner, who stayed on until now to help with the transition before returning his focus to editing the ARIA in HTML and HTML AAM specifications at W3C. We are pleased to have such a broad-based team, and we believe their strong combination of global experience will help as they work with the chairs, W3C staff, the Working Group and other contributors to meet the world’s needs. While there is always fairly mundane work to do maintaining and enhancing the quality of the HTML specification, 2018 promises an exciting year for HTML, with new features reaching the level of maturity necessary for a W3C Recommendation.



The Web was developed as a platform for everyone, and broad participation in its development, representing the diversity of stakeholders in its success, is vital to keeping it that way. For that reason among others, many thanks are due to all of the 250 or so individuals who contributed to this particular version over the last year. We are also grateful to the people who have already helped move HTML forward with early contributions to 5.3. We look forward to collaborating with many more of you as we continue a key part of W3C’s mission.