Americans now have access to a free, one-week AI literacy course offered by the federal government, as part of a strategy to bolster growing employer efforts to train the workforce on AI skills.

The “Make America AI-Ready” initiative was recently unveiled by the U.S. Department of Labor, with support by edtech firm Arist. The program offers bite-sized learning—which can be completed in one week, at 10 minutes a day—all via text messaging.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer said the initiative is “designed to ensure every American worker has the chance to learn foundational skills so they can benefit from the opportunities that the AI economy presents.”

Growing appetite for learning

The initiative comes as demand for AI skills soars among employers.

Many have architected their own internal upskilling programs. For instance, late last year, FedEx announced a partnership with Accenture to provide customized AI education programs for its 500,000 workers.

Others have looked beyond the walls of their own organizations to prepare future pipelines of AI-ready talent. For instance, in 2023, global IT services leader Cognizant announced the Synapse initiative, aiming to equip one million people worldwide with skills for the digital age by the end of 2026. The organization hit that mark more than a year early and has since expanded its target to two million individuals by 2030.

Similarly, Amazon’s AI Ready program—designed to provide AI upskilling to two million globally by 2025—also accomplished that goal a year early, highlighting the significant appetite for publicly available AI skills-building efforts.

Wrriting about the initiative’s success for HR Executive, Maureen Lonergan, vice president of training and certification for Amazon Web Services, emphasizes that all workers—not just tech professionals—should have access to AI skills-building, including prompt engineering. The firm’s work in this area, she writes, highlighted that learning is never “one-size-fits-all” and platforms like social media can help ease access to AI upskilling, meeting the public where they are.

Making AI skills ‘as accessible as possible’

That’s among the aims of the Make America AI-Ready program, according to a statement from the DOL.

“The text message-based design is intended to be as accessible as possible to all Americans, including those without a laptop or with limited access to the internet,” the department said.

The training is based off of the five pillars of AI literacy outlined in the DOL’s recently announced framework, meant to guide workforce and education systems’ AI upskilling efforts. These include: understanding AI principles, exploring AI uses, directing AI effectively, evaluating AI outcomes and using AI responsibly.

According to the DOL, participants will receive tailored suggestions following course completion for ongoing skills-building and career-related opportunities.

Participants can enroll by texting READY to 20202; the DOL noted in its press statement that enrolled phone numbers will “never be shared with or sold to third parties.”

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