By Ifeoma Ozoma, Policy Programs

Today, we’re in Greenville, South Carolina, on the fourth stop of this year’s 30-city Facebook Community Boost tour. From May 29 to June 1, we’ll be joined by Greenville organizations, partners and small businesses to share trainings to help small businesses grow and give people useful digital skills to compete in today’s economy.

Coding Bootcamps and Workforce Development

This week, we’re delighted to announce a partnership with the Carolina Code School to fund 25 scholarships for members of the Greenville community to attend the school’s coding bootcamps. Carolina Code School’s full-time, 12-week program will give participants hands-on exposure to the concepts and projects to build a career in web development. Bootcamp graduates will also be eligible to receive credit hours from Greenville Technical College, which can later be applied to the College’s Technology programs.

Digital Skills and Marketing Training for Greenville

We know from talking to small businesses around the state of South Carolina that nearly 8 in 10 small business managers on Facebook believe an individual’s digital and social media skills are an important factor when hiring, a higher rate than those that value where a candidate went to school.

To better tailor Community Boost to the people in Greenville, we surveyed hundreds of job seekers and members in the Greenville community specifically to understand their unique challenges and training needs. As we listened, we learned that there is a wide gap between the digital skills people feel they have, and those they most feel they need to succeed:

94% of job seekers in Greenville say that digital skills are important when looking for a job; however only 16% of job seekers rate their digital skills today as excellent. 2 in 3 job seekers in Greenville say that social media skills in particular are important when looking for a job, but less than 1 in 3 rate their social media skills as excellent

In order to help address these gaps, we’re offering train-the-trainer sessions for community organizations at Facebook Community Boost. This will not only equip their teams to run their own workshops, but help scale the delivery of digital marketing and social media curriculum across their audiences and ensure they receive training long after this week’s events end.

We’re committed to helping small businesses and their communities across the US and beyond. Please share your thoughts and stay up to date with the latest city announcements, news and program schedules at facebook.com/communityboost.