ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - Facebook plans to partner with Central New Mexico Community College to establish a certificate program in digital marketing, the social media giant announced Monday.
Marne Levine - chief operating officer for Instagram, a social media platform owned by Facebook - told people gathered for a small-business training event in Albuquerque that the certificate program will help participants add marketable skills to their resume.
Facebook also plans to fund scholarships for more people to attend a coding boot camp at CNM.
“We need to build a community to really help people build these digital skills,” Levine said.
About 94 percent of people the company surveyed recently said strong digital skills were important while searching for a new job, but only 10 percent rated their own digital skills as excellent, she said.
New Mexico’s overall unemployment rate remains about two points above the national average of 4 percent, and nearly one in five New Mexicans live below the federal poverty line.
Levine and other Facebook staff are in New Mexico this week as part of a program to boost small businesses and build the digital skills of people on and off the social networking site.
The event that began Monday at the National Hispanic Cultural Center comes amid a privacy scandal that has shaken the social platform.
Facebook is building a 2.8 million-square-foot (260,000-square-meters) data center south of Albuquerque that will include six buildings. The data center in Los Lunas is expected to go online at the end of the year.
Thirty cities will be visited as part of Facebook’s small-business training tour, with Albuquerque among the initial stops.
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