Amazon Web Services (AWS) Educate added 25 modules called Cloud Career Pathways to help students interested in cloud-related learning test their skills.
AWS Educate is an online platform for students and teachers to learn about cloud and IT careers. The new Cloud Career Pathways modules include instructional videos, lab exercises, online courses, and podcasts. Each pathway contains more than 30 hours of training materials. AWS Educate tracks students’ performance on their online courses and links them to positions on the AWS Educate Job Board. The job board features positions as cloud architects, software developers, operations and support engineers, and big data specialists for companies such as Amazon, Cloudnexa, and Splunk.
“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 of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, in an Oct. 19 press release on Amazon’s website. “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.”
After completing pathways courses, students receive credentials that appear on their online profiles and can attract potential employers. Professors, in addition to students, can use the modules on AWS Educate. For example, Majd Sakr, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, uses AWS Educate’s cloud computing course for his own classes. Sakr stated that his class size has increased from a few dozen students in 2013 to several hundred students in 2016.
“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,” Sakr said. “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.”
