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AWS Expands Education Program with Classes, Job Board
Amazon gave its 1-year-old AWS Educate program a significant boost this week in a bid to better prepare students for cloud-centric careers.
The company on Wednesday announced the addition of over two dozen training modules called "Cloud Career Pathways," as well as a new job board that connects students with tech companies looking to fill entry-level cloud positions. Availability is currently limited to students in the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, India and Singapore.
The new features build on AWS Educate's original offerings, which include online labs, training resources, classroom content for teachers and AWS credits.
"We built AWS Educate with a vision of helping to cultivate a cloud-enabled workforce," said Teresa Carlson, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, in a prepared statement. "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."
Each Cloud Career Pathway contains at least 30 hours of instructional content geared toward one of four job titles: software developer, analytics and Big Data specialist, cloud architect, and operations-support engineer. The instructional content includes podcasts, videos, labs and online classes.
For each Cloud Career Pathway that students complete, they receive "digital micro-credentials in the form of badges and certificates that appear on their AWS Educate profile," according to AWS.
With their competencies displayed on their profiles, students can then apply directly to positions listed in the AWS Educate Job Board. Companies that have already posted internships or jobs to the board include Salesforce.com, Cloudnexa, Splunk and Amazon itself.
Participation in AWS Educate is free for students and teachers. AWS says that more than 500 educational institutions have become members since its launch.