AWS (Amazon Web Services) is expanding its tools for the online education market with a new set of capabilities for users of its AWS Educate platform to make it easier for students to focus on the most in-demand developer skills. The new features aim to provide both students and educators with training content to help budding cloud developers advance their skills.
“AWS Educate now offers students a more direct way to put their cloud knowledge to use with over 25 self-paced content modules known as ‘Cloud Career Pathways,’ which are made up of instructional videos, lab exercises, online courses, whitepapers, and podcasts,” Amazon said today in a statement.
Four Job Families
The Cloud Career Pathways are designed to align to four overarching job families that are also represented in the new AWS Educate Job Board: cloud architect, software developer, operations-support engineer, and analytics and big data specialist, Amazon said.
“We built AWS Educate with a vision of helping to cultivate a cloud-enabled workforce,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS. “Based on that vision, we are taking the program one step further and adding a connection to employers who are in need of the cloud skills students can learn on AWS Educate. We’ve designed Cloud Career Pathways that will help students get targeted experience and skills, and placed those side-by-side with relevant jobs from some of the most in-demand technology employers today.”
The goal is to allow students to create self-guided curriculums of online training that nevertheless directly addresses the cloud skills sought after by employers. To that end, AWS Educate is providing more than 25 of the Cloud Career Pathways, each consisting of at least 30 hours of content focused on a core skill set across the four job families.
Leveraging Credentials into Job Offers
After completing a pathway, students receive digital credentials on their AWS Educate profiles, which they can then use when applying for cloud-based jobs or internships through the platform’s job board.
The new career pathways were designed with the help of Udacity, an online educational platform, which developed and provided AWS with more than 30 courses for the four separate job families. “These courses are applicable to some of the most in-demand fields today,” said Zhalisa Clarke, VP of Business Development at Udacity.
AWS Educate has been available since May 2015, and now counts more than 500 institutions as customers. But the new capabilities won’t be available everywhere at launch, with the career pathways only launching in the United States, India, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and China at first.
For universities, the new pathways offer a way for computer science departments to easily add coursework that is already designed to address in-demand job skills. At the same time, they should also help employers discover and connect with developers with the cloud technology skills they are seeking.
