AWS adds new capabilities to AWS Educate, connecting students with cloud careers

Amazon Web Services, (AWS), an Amazon.com company has announced new capabilities for AWS Educate, an initiative to provide students and educators with the resources they need to accelerate cloud-related learning. 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. The Cloud Career Pathways align to four overarching job families, which are also represented in the new AWS Educate Job Board: Cloud Architect, Software Developer, Operations-Support Engineer, and Analytics and Big Data Specialist. AWS Educate maps students’ academic training on AWS Educate, and their achievements in the Cloud Career Pathways to relevant internships and jobs posted on the AWS Educate Job Board, which features top employers, including Amazon, Cloudnexa, Instructure, Salesforce, Splunk, Udacity, and more.

“We built AWS Educate with a vision of helping to cultivate a cloud-enabled workforce. It’s been inspiring to see students from every corner of the globe – from Brooklyn to Bombay to Singapore to Seoul – embrace AWS Educate, eager to digest learnings from top computer science courses, and get their hands on their first Amazon S3 bucket,” 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.”

In addition to AWS Educate’s core benefits – AWS Promotional Credits, online training, self-paced labs, a library of AWS resources, and educator-shared content – AWS Educate now features Cloud Career Pathways and the AWS Educate Job Board. The more than 25 Cloud Career Pathways are made up of content modules designed to teach the technical skills required in hundreds of cloud-related jobs. Each Cloud Career Pathway includes a minimum of 30 hours of content designed to build core skill sets across the four job families. After students successfully complete Cloud Career Pathways, they receive digital micro-credentials in the form of badges and certificates that appear on their AWS Educate profile, which students can leverage on their own job applications. Students can apply directly to relevant jobs posted on the AWS Educate Job Board, which features cloud internships and jobs from some of the top technology companies.

At Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Majd Sakr’s cloud computing course uses AWS Educate, and has grown from a few dozen students in 2013, to several hundred students in 2016. Dr. Sakr said, “AWS Educate hasn’t just been beneficial, it has been transformative. We have the ability to give students the opportunity to learn computer science skills through large hands-on projects on the AWS Cloud. With AWS Educate, we can offer projects at scale and be innovative, without needing to buy any on campus resources. Students have been eager to bring these timely cloud skills to their first jobs, and I’m thankful that AWS Educate can help.”

Udacity is an online education company with a mission to bring accessible, affordable, and highly effective learning to the world. Udacity helped design AWS Educate’s Cloud Career Pathways by providing over 30 courses that align to the job families. “We’re thrilled to make Udacity courses available to students via AWS Educate Cloud Career Pathways,” said Zhalisa Clarke, VP of Business Development at Udacity. “These courses are applicable to some of the most in-demand fields today. The mission of AWS Educate perfectly aligns with our belief that education and lifelong learning is a basic human right, and we look forward to working with AWS to make STEM content available to more students around the world.”

Instructure, a learning management system (LMS) company, is using the AWS Educate Job Board to recruit employees. Jeff Weber, Instructure’s senior vice president of people and places, said, “Today, technology is helping to drive business growth. At Instructure, we believe our success can be attributed to our team of innovators, who not only believe in our mission to make software that makes people smarter, but have the aptitude and capability needed to execute on our vision. We are a lean but growing team and we depend on each member to help us deliver proactive solutions to our customers. To that end, we are excited about the opportunity to align our open positions to AWS Educate’s new Cloud Career Pathways. The skills learned through the pathways represent core competencies we are looking for in our future employees and leaders.”