Amazon gave its 1-year old AWS Educate program a substantial boost this week to better prepare students in cloud-centric careers.
Wednesday’s announcement by the company included over two dozen new training modules called “Cloud Career Pathways” and a new job board that links students with companies seeking entry-level positions in the cloud. Students in the United States, South Korea and Japan, China, India, Singapore are currently restricted to this offer.
These new features are built on AWS Educate’s original offerings, which included online labs, training resources and classroom content for teachers, as well as AWS credits.
Teresa Carlson, vice-president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS stated in a prepared statement that AWS Educate was built with the vision of helping to create a cloud-enabled workforce. We are expanding the program to include a link to employers that are interested in the cloud skills students can learn through AWS Educate. Cloud Career Pathways have been created to help students gain targeted experience and skills and place them side-by side with relevant jobs at some of the most sought-after technology employers today.
Each Cloud Career Pathway has at least 30 hours worth of instructional content that focuses on one of the following four job titles: software developer; analytics and Big Data specialist; cloud architect; and operations-support engineer. Podcasts, videos and online classes are all part of the instructional content.
According to AWS, students receive digital micro-credentials in form of badges or certificates for each Cloud Career Pathway they complete. These certificates can be found on their AWS Education profile.
Students can apply directly for positions on the AWS Educate Job Board by displaying their competencies. Salesforce.com, Splunk, Cloudnexa and Amazon have all posted internships to the board.
AWS Educate is available to both students and teachers at no cost. AWS claims that more than 500 educational institutions joined AWS Educate since its inception.
