Helping the unskilled and unemployed for years, Turkey's employment agency İŞKUR is now keeping up with changing times.
In a unique program, the agency offers training on how to be a YouTuber and in general, an online entrepreneur.
Once dismissed as a fad, pursuing a professional career by broadcasting YouTube videos has become a main source of income, a very high income, nowadays.
İŞKUR, who has trained tens of thousands of people since its inception decades ago, hopes to decrease unemployment in this age of tech-savvy young generation.
The agency cooperates with Google, the parent company of the video-sharing website, in order to train the masses who aspire to join the hordes of popular YouTubers in Turkey who managed to reach up to two million followers and earn up to TL 30,000 ($8,250) monthly.
İŞKUR's efforts are part of a broader project entitled "Digital Transformation for Turkey," which seeks to attract the public to digital technologies.
In the first stage of the agency's program, would-be entrepreneurs undergo training in the cities of Bursa in the northwestern Turkey, Kayseri in central Turkey, Van and Gaziantep in southeastern and eastern Turkey, Samsun in the north and Antalya in the south.
At Google-sponsored training events at universities in those cities, trainees attend classes on digital entrepreneurship and being a YouTuber.
In another project, İŞKUR, in cooperation with the Labor Ministry and a federation of chambers of commerce, provides training in the digital sector with Digital Workshops where the youth receive free training to improve their online skills on how to establish successful business models on the internet, etc.
With the training, İŞKUR aims to tap into the potential of the youth who compose a large portion of the population to boost economic growth.
Viewing figures on YouTube via mobile devices double every year, providing a lucrative market for amateurs with a penchant for making entertainment videos, lifelong learning videos and etc.
The youth is both the target audience and make up majority of YouTubers.
In Turkey, music videos remain most popular; NetD channel tops the list of popular channels with more than 3.7 million subscribers.
Channels of gaming videos, funny videos and a channel showing videos of a popular stand-up comic are also among the channels very popular with subscribers.
