Google’s Lisa Gevelber is Helping Americans Upskill
Photos by Cardinal Creative
As a junior at the University of Michigan, Lisa Gevelber, ’90, was searching for a great summer internship. While she was studying psychology at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, she learned that a representative from Procter & Gamble was interviewing students across campus.
“I literally went into the business school and begged the person who was interviewing the students to squeeze me in during his lunchtime,” she says.
The spots were supposed to be for business school students only, but the representative gave up his lunch to interview Gevelber. He ended up hiring her for the role.
“That guy gave me a real chance. I’m 100% sure my career would not have been what it was had it not been for this Procter & Gamble guy who gave up his lunch hour to interview me,” she says. “I think the power of giving someone else a chance is a theme of my life.”
Today, as Google’s chief marketing officer for the Americas, Gevelber is the one giving others a chance. She founded Grow with Google in 2017, an initiative that provides tools and resources to help people grow their skills, careers, and businesses.
Paving Her Way
Gevelber grew up in Ann Arbor and graduated from Pioneer High School in the shadow of the Big House. Her family is no stranger to U-M: her parents met on campus, and her brothers are both graduates from the University.
“My parents really wanted us to go to college, but didn’t have the money to send us,” she says. “And so my brothers and I knew from a very young age that our job was to work and save enough money that we could pay our way through college, which we did. And luckily, at that time, the University of Michigan, if you were an in-state student, it was actually highly affordable.”
So Gevelber worked every chance she had, including during summer vacations and on weekends.
“I think it means more to you to be at the University when you’ve had to work for it,” Gevelber says. “When you’ve paid your own way, you feel a different connection to being able to be there.”
She continued to work while studying at U-M, with jobs at the front desk at West Quad, as a resident assistant at Couzens Hall, and as a campus tour guide.
During her time as an undergraduate, Gevelber also had two formative experiences. The first was being president of the campus chapter of AIESEC, a global organization focused on youth leadership development.
“I never thought of myself as a leader or someone who would run an organization back then,” she says. “But interestingly, the woman who was president before me really believed in me and thought I could do it. And it’s amazing that when someone believes in you, you can believe in yourself.”
The other formative experience was running a summer jobs program for inner-city high school students in Chicago. Her job was to hire and place 125 students in summer jobs.
“I found it so inspiring,” Gevelber says. “I got to see firsthand the power of giving a kid a chance.”
She says that experience propelled her to find a way to help people at scale.
Expanding Opportunity
Nearly 30 years later, Gevelber found that scale with the Grow with Google program. The idea behind the program is that people without college degrees in the U.S. often are locked out of good-paying jobs. But the reality is that some technology-based jobs only need specific training. Driven by a belief that opportunities created by technology should be available to everyone, Grow with Google helps people learn the specific, high-impact skills that employers are seeking.
“Unfortunately, the college degree became a proxy, a terrible proxy, for many career fields. And we believe that while having a college degree is life-changing, it should absolutely not be the only way you can change your life,” she says. “So we created a training and certification program, initially with a focus on people without college degrees, to help them get into some of the most in-demand and high-paying careers in the country.”
The jobs include data analytics, IT support, cybersecurity, project management, and digital marketing, to name a few.
To date, Grow with Google has trained more than 13 million Americans in digital skills. This includes more over 1.4 million graduates of the Google Career Certificates program.
Google has partnered with 150 companies as part of a consortium to hire graduates and train their own employees through the certificate programs. The company is now partnering with several academic institutions, including the University of Michigan, to give access to Grow with Google to current students, staff, and alumni.
Playing Team
Gevelber recently joined an advisory board at U-M’s Law School to discuss artificial intelligence and how it might be leveraged at the school.
“It’s fun to feel like I’m contributing back at the University of Michigan,” she says. “It’s an incredible group of Wolverines.”
In the end, Gevelber says her time at U-M was a great training ground for the future because students were free to explore.
“The thing I really liked at Michigan is you could make your own way,” she says. “There’s not one path. … If you’re curious and you’re willing to make your own way, there are just so many paths at Michigan.”
Gevelber says the advice she gives to recent graduates or people thinking about how to grow in their careers comes from the themes of the movie “Miracle” about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. She says you must dream big, work hard, and play team.
“If you’re always dreaming big, you’re always willing to put in the work, and most importantly, I think if you are always playing team, you’ll get to amazing places you could have never imagined,” she says. “That has certainly been my story.”
