Working at Royal Dutch Shell's Deepwater division in New Orleans offers Barbara Waelde a front-row seat to how the proper knowledge can unlock essential data for the oil large. So when her supervisor requested her final yr if she was interested by a program that might sharpen her digital and knowledge science capabilities, Waelde, 55, jumped on the probability.

Since she started her on-line coursework, the seven-year Shell veteran has discovered Python programming, supervised studying algorithms and knowledge modeling, amongst different expertise.

Shell started making these on-line programs accessible to U.S. staff lengthy earlier than COVID-19 upended each day life. And based on the oil large, there are not any plans to halt or cancel any of them, even if on March 23 it introduced plans to slash working prices by $9 billion.

Actually, the distant nature of the courses, supplied by Udacity, the digital studying and workforce skilling platform, might turn out to be...