Podcasts about aws educate

In this episode, join Morgan Willis, Principal Cloud Technologist from AWS, as she guides you through mastering your AWS Cloud skills.

In the grand finale of our six-part AWS Certification Exam Prep Series, join hosts Dave and Caroline as they chat with Anya Derbakova, a Senior Startup Solutions Architect at AWS, known for weaving social media magic, and Ted Trentler, a Senior AWS Technical Instructor with a knack for simplifying the complex. We journey beyond the technical realms to explore the treasure trove of resources provided by AWS to ensure your success in the Solutions Architect Associate Exam. This episode not only serves as your ultimate guide to the best study resources but also recaps the invaluable insights shared throughout our series. Embark on this final venture with us as we delve into the extensive array of free and paid resources designed to elevate your learning experience, from interactive labs and digital badges to comprehensive guides and community support. Whether you're starting your AWS journey or looking to validate and showcase your skills, AWS offers an ecosystem of learning paths tailored to your aspirations. In this episode, we highlight: • AWS Skill Builder's extensive library of lessons and labs, coupled with an affordable paid tier for enhanced learning. • Cloud Quest and AWS Educate, offering free labs and credits to kickstart your journey. • The definitive AWS Solutions Architect Ramp Up Guide for a structured learning approach. • Leveraging AWS Free Tier and workshops for hands-on experience and building real-world projects. • The significance of community engagement through AWS User Groups, Summits, and Twitch shows for interactive learning and networking. • Practical advice on exam registration, understanding the certification lifecycle, and strategies for recertification to maintain your credentials. Join us as we consolidate our learnings, reinforce our preparation strategies, and set our sights on not just passing the exam but becoming proficient AWS builders. Let's architect our success together! Anya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annadderbakova/ Ted on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ttrentler Ted on LinkedIn: https://linkedin/in/tedtrentler Caroline on Twitter: https://twitter.com/carolinegluck Caroline on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cgluck/ Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedavedev Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidisbitski AWS Educate - Gives $50 in signup credits: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/ AWS Cloud Quest: https://aws.amazon.com/training/digital/aws-cloud-quest/ AWS Solutions Architect Ramp Up Guide - Has both free and Paid for learning. https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/ramp-up_guides/Ramp-Up_Guide_Architect.pdf AWS Free Tier Accounts: https://aws.amazon.com/free/ - AWS Workshops: https://workshops.aws/ Get some digital Bling while you learn with Digital Badges from Credly: https://community.aws/content/2amRr40y98o4lrV7n2YJHKTszso/validate-your-aws-cloud-knowledge-with-aws-learning-knowledge-badges Don't just get certified be a builder! Builders Build! Build something that interests you - A Wordpress blog, A Minecraft server. ML object analysis of your drone video. Look at the cloud resume challenge for AWS by Forrest Brazeal https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/aws/ AWS on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/aws Use Party Rock (Gen A)I as a study Buddy: https://partyrock.aws/u/tedtrent/KQtYIhbJb/Solutions-Architect-Study-Buddy AWS Educate: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/ Serverlessland: https://serverlessland.com/ AWS Global Summits - https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits Subscribe: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:994363549/sounds.rss

Valerie Singer, GM of Global Education at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the vast array of cloud computing education programs AWS offers to people of all skill levels and backgrounds. Valerie explains how she manages such a large undertaking, and also sheds light on what AWS is doing to ensure their programs are truly valuable both to learners and to the broader market. Corey and Valerie discuss how generative AI is applicable to education, and Valerie explains how AWS's education programs fit into a K-12 curriculum as well as job seekers looking to up-skill. About ValerieAs General Manager for AWS's Global Education team, Valerie is responsible forleading strategy and initiatives for higher education, K-12, EdTechs, and outcome-based education worldwide. Her Skills to Jobs team enables governments, educationsystems, and collaborating organizations to deliver skills-based pathways to meetthe acute needs of employers around the globe, match skilled job seekers to goodpaying jobs, and advance the adoption of cloud-based technology.In her ten-year tenure at AWS, Valerie has held numerous leadership positions,including driving strategic customer engagement within AWS's Worldwide PublicSector and Industries. Valerie established and led the AWS's public sector globalpartner team, AWS's North American commercial partner team, was the leader forteams managing AWS's largest worldwide partnerships, and incubated AWS'sAerospace & Satellite Business Group. Valerie established AWS's national systemsintegrator program and promoted partner competency development and practiceexpansion to migrate enterprise-class, large-scale workloads to AWS.Valerie currently serves on the board of AFCEA DC where, as the Vice President ofEducation, she oversees a yearly grant of $250,000 in annual STEM scholarships tohigh school students with acute financial need.Prior to joining AWS, Valerie held senior positions at Quest Software, AdobeSystems, Oracle Corporation, BEA Systems, and Cisco Systems. She holds a B.S. inMicrobiology from the University of Maryland and a Master in Public Administrationfrom the George Washington University.Links Referenced: AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ GetIT: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-getit/ Spark: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-spark/ Future Engineers: https://www.amazonfutureengineer.com/ code.org: https://code.org Academy: https://aws.amazon.com/training/awsacademy/ Educate: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/ Skill Builder: https://skillbuilder.aws/ Labs: https://aws.amazon.com/training/digital/aws-builder-labs/ re/Start: https://aws.amazon.com/training/restart/ AWS training and certification programs: https://www.aws.training/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A recurring theme of this show in the, what is it, 500 some-odd episodes since we started doing this many years ago, has been around where does the next generation come from. And ‘next generation' doesn't always mean young folks graduating school or whatnot. It's people transitioning in, it's career changers, it's folks whose existing jobs evolve into embracing the cloud industry a lot more readily than they have in previous years. My guest today arguably knows that better than most. Valerie Singer is the GM of Global Education at AWS. Valerie, thank you for agreeing to suffer my slings and arrows. I appreciate it.Valerie: And thank you for having me, Corey. I'm looking forward to the conversation.Corey: So, let's begin. GM, General Manager is generally a term of art which means you are, to my understanding, the buck-stops-here person for a particular division within AWS. And Global Education sounds like one of those, quite frankly, impossibly large-scoped type of organizations. What do you folks do? Where do you start? Where do you stop?Valerie: So, my organization actually focuses on five key areas, and it really does take a look at the global strategy for Amazon Web Services in higher education, research, our K through 12 community, our community of ed-tech providers, which are software providers that are specifically focused on the education sector, and the last plinth of the Global Education Team is around skills to jobs. And we care about that a lot because as we're talking to education providers about how they can innovate in the cloud, we also want to make sure that they're thinking about the outcomes of their students, and as their students become more digitally skilled, that there is placement for them and opportunities for them with employers so that they can continue to grow in their careers.Corey: Early on, when I was starting out my career, I had an absolutely massive chip on my shoulder when it came to formal education. I was never a great student for many of the same reasons I was never a great employee. And I always found that learning for me took the form of doing something and kicking the tires on it, and I had to care. And doing rote assignments in a ritualized way never really worked out. So, I never fit in in academia. On paper, I still have an eighth-grade education. One of these days, I might get the GED.But I really had problems with degree requirements in jobs. And it's humorous because my first tech job that was a breakthrough was as a network administrator at Chapman University. And that honestly didn't necessarily help improve my opinion of academia for a while, when you're basically the final tier escalation for support desk for a bunch of PhDs who are troubled with some of the things that they're working on because they're very smart in one particular area, but have challenges with broad tech. So, all of which is to say that I've had problems with the way that education historically maps to me personally, and it took a little bit of growth for me to realize that I might not be the common, typical case that represents everyone. So, I've really come around on that. What is the current state of how AWS views educating folks? You talk about working with higher ed; you also talk about K through 12. Where does this, I guess, pipeline start for you folks?Valerie: So, Amazon Web Services offers a host of education programs at the K-12 level where we can start to capture learners and capture their imagination for digital skills and cloud-based learning early on, programs like GetIT and Spark make sure that our learners have a trajectory forward and continue to stay engaged.Amazon Future Engineers also provides experiential learning and data center-based experiences for K through 12 learners, too, so that we can start to gravitate these learners towards skills that they can use later in life and that they'll be able to leverage. That said—and going back to what you said—we want to capture learners where they learn and how they learn. And so, that often happens not in a K through 12 environment and not in a higher education environment. It can happen organically, it can happen through online learning, it can happen through mentoring, and through other types of sponsorship.And so, we want to make sure that our learners have the opportunities to micro-badge, to credential, and to experience learning in the cloud particularly, and also develop digital skills wherever and however they learn, not just in a prescriptive environment like a higher education environment.Corey: During the Great Recession, I found that as a systems administrator—which is what we called ourselves in the style of the time—I was relatively weak when it came to networking. So, I took a class at the local community college where they built the entire curriculum around getting some Cisco certifications by the time that the year ended. And half of that class was awesome. It was effectively networking fundamentals in an approachable, constructive way, and that was great. The other half of the class—at least at the time—felt like it was extraordinarily beholden to, effectively—there's no nice way to say this—Cisco marketing.It envisioned a world where all networking equipment was Cisco-driven, using proprietary Cisco protocols, and it left a bad smell for a number of students in the class. Now, I've talked to an awful lot of folks who have gone through the various AWS educational programs in a variety of different ways and I've yet to hear significant volume of complaint around, “Oh, it's all vendor captured and it just feels like we're being indoctrinated into the cult of AWS.” Which honestly is to your credit. How did you avoid that?Valerie: It's a great question, and how we avoid it is by starting with the skills that are needed for jobs. And so, we actually went back to employers and said, “What are your, you know, biggest and most urgent needs to fill in early-career talent?” And we categorized 12 different job categories, the four that were most predominant were cloud support engineer, software development engineer, cyber analyst, and data analyst. And we took that mapping and developed the skills behind those four different job categories that we know are saleable and that our learners can get employed in, and then made modifications as our employers took a look at what the skills maps needed to be. We then took the skills maps—in one case—into City University of New York and into their computer science department, and mapped those skills back to the curriculum that the computer science teams have been providing to students.And so, what you have is, your half-awesome becomes full-awesome because we're providing them the materials through AWS Academy to be able to proffer the right set of curriculum and right set of training that gets provided to the students, and provides them with the opportunity to then become AWS Certified. But we do it in a way that isn't all marketecture; it's really pragmatic. It's how do I automate a sequence? How do I do things that are really saleable and marketable and really point towards the skills that our employers need? And so, when you have this book-end of employers telling the educational teams what they need in terms of skills, and you have the education teams willing to pull in that curriculum that we provide—that is, by the way, current and it maintains its currency—we have a better throughway for early-career talent to find the jobs that they need, and the guarantee that the employers are getting the skills that they've asked for. And so, you're not getting that half of the beholden that you had in your experience; you're getting a full-on awesome experience for a learner who can then go and excite himself and herself or theirself into a new position and career opportunity.Corey: One thing that caught me a little bit by surprise, and I think this is an industry-wide phenomenon is, whenever folks who are working with educational programs—as you are—talk about, effectively, public education and the grade school system, you refer to it as ‘K through 12.' Well, last year, my eldest daughter started kindergarten and it turns out that when you start asking questions about cloud computing curricula to a kindergarten teacher, they look at you like you are deranged and possibly unsafe. And yeah, it turns out that for almost any reasonable measure, exposing—in my case—a now six-year-old to cloud computing concepts feels like it's close cousins to child abuse. So—Valerie: [laugh].Corey: So far, I'm mostly keeping the kids away from that for now. When does that start? You mentioned middle school a few minutes ago. I'm curious as to—is that the real entry point or are there other ways that you find people starting to engage at earlier and earlier ages?Valerie: We are seeing people engage it earlier and earlier ages with programs like Spark, as I mentioned, which is more of a gamified approach to K through 12 learning around digital skills in the cloud. code.org also has a tremendous body of work that they offer K through 12 learners. That's more modularized and building block-based so that you're not asking a six-year-old to master the art of cloud computing, but you're providing young learners with the foundations to understand how the building blocks of technology sit on top of each other to actually do something meaningful.And so, gears and pulleys and all kinds of different artifacts that learners can play with to understand how the inner workings of a computer program come together, for instance, are really experientially important and foundationally important so that they understand the concepts on which that's built later. So, we can introduce these concepts very early, Corey, and kids really enjoy playing with those models because they can make things happen, right? They can make things turn and they can make things—they can actually, you know, modify behaviors of different programming elements and really have a great experience working in those different programs and environments like code.org and Spark.Corey: There are, of course, always exceptions to this. I remember the, I think, it's the 2019 public sector summit that you folks put on, you had a speaker, Karthick Arun, who at the time was ten years old and have the youngest person to pass the certification test to become a cloud practitioner. I mean, power to him. Obviously, that is the sort of thing that happens when a kid has passion and is excited about a particular direction. I have not inflicted that on my kids.I'm not trying to basically raise whatever the cloud computing sad version is of an Olympian by getting them into whatever it is that I want them to focus on before they have any agency in the matter. But I definitely remember when I was a kid, I was always frustrated by the fact that it felt like there were guardrails keeping me from working with any of these things that I found interesting and wanted to get exposure to. It feels like in many ways the barriers are coming down.Valerie: They are. In that particular example, actually, Andy Jassy interceded because we did have age requirements at that time for taking the exam.Corey: You still do, by the way. It's even to attend summits and whatnot. So, you have to be 18, but at some point, I will be looking into what exceptions have to happen for that because I'm not there to basically sign them up for the bar crawl or have them get exposure to, like, all the marketing stuff, but if they're interested in this, it seems like the sort of thing that should be made more accessible.Valerie: We do bring learners on, you know, into re:Invent and into our summits. We definitely invite our learners in. I mean I think you mentioned, there are a lot of other places our learners are not going to go, like bar crawls, but our learners under the age of 18 can definitely take advantage of the programs that we have on offer. AWS Academy is available to 16 and up.And again, you know, GetIT and Spark and Educate is all available to learners as well. We also have programs like Skill Builder, with an enormous free tier of learning modules that teams can take advantage of as well. And then Labs for subscription and fee-based access. But there's over 500 courses in that free tier currently, and so there's plenty of places for our, you know, early learners to play and to experiment and to learn.Corey: This is a great microcosm of some career advice I recently had caused to revisit, which is, make friends in different parts of the organization you work within and get to know people in other companies who do different things because you can't reason with policy; you can have conversations productively with human beings. And I was basing my entire, “You must be 18 or you're not allowed in, full stop,” based solely on a sign that I saw when I was attending a summit at the entrance: “You must be 18 to enter.” Ah. Clearly, there's no wiggle room here, and no—it's across the board, absolute hard-and-fast rule. Very few things are. This is a perfect example of that. So today, I learned. Thank you.Valerie: Yeah. You're very welcome. We want to make sure that we get the information, we get materials, we get experiences out to as many people as possible. One thing I would also note, and I had the opportunity to spend time in our skill centers, and these are really great places, too, for early learners to get experience and exposure to different models. And so earlier, when we were talking, you held up a DeepRacer car, which is a very, very cool, smaller-scale car that learners can use AI tools to help to drive.And learners can go into the skill centers in Seattle and in the DC area, now in Cape Town and in other places where they're going to be opening, and really have that, like, direct-line experience with AWS technology and see the value of it tangibly, and what happens when you for instance, model to move a car faster or in the right direction or not hitting the side of a wall. So, there's lots of ways that early learners can get exposure in just a few ways and those centers are actually a really great way for learners to just walk in and just have an experience.Corey: Switching gears a little bit, one of my personal favorite hobby horses is to go on Twitter—you know, back when that was more of a thing—and mock companies for saying things that I perceived to be patently ridiculous. I was gentle about it because I think it's a noble cause, but one of the more ridiculous things that I've heard from Amazon was in 2020, you folks announced a plan to help 29 million people around the world grow their tech skills by 2025. And the reason that I thought that was ridiculous is because it sounded like it was such an over-the-top, grandiose vision, I didn't see a way that you could possibly get anywhere even close. But again, I was gentle about this because even if you're half-wrong, it means that you're going to be putting significant energy, resourcing, et cetera, into educating people about how this stuff works to help lowering bar to entry, about lowering gates that get kept. I have to ask, though, now that we are, at the time of this recording, coming up in the second half of 2023, how closely are you tracking to that?Valerie: We're tracking. So, as of October, which is the last time I saw the tracking on this data, we had already provided skills-based learning to 13-and-a-half million learners worldwide and are very much on track to exceed the 2025 goal of 29 million. But I got to tell you, like, there's a couple of things in there that I'm sure you're going to ask as a follow-up, so I'll go ahead and talk about it practically, and that is, what are people doing with the learning? And then how are they using that learning and applying it to get jobs? And so, you know, 29 million is a big number, but what does it mean in terms of what they're doing with that information and what they're doing to apply it?So, we do have on my team an employer engagement team that actually goes out and works with local employers around the world, builds virtual job fairs and on-prem job fairs, sponsors things like DeepRacer League and Cloud Quests and Jam days so that early-career learners can come in and get hands-on and employers can look at what the potential employees are doing so that they can make sure that they have the experience that they actually say they have. And so, since the beginning of this year, we have already now recruited 323 what we call talent shapers, which are the employer community who are actually consuming the talent that we are proffering to them and that we're bringing into these job fairs. We have 35,000 learners who have come through our job fairs since the beginning of the year. And then we also rely—as you know, like, we're very security conscious, so we rely on self-reported data, but we have over 3500 employed early-career talent self-reported job hires. And so, for us, the 29 million is important, but how it then portrays itself into AWS-focused employment—that's not just to AWS; these are by the way those 3500 learners who are employed went to other companies outside of AWS—but we want to make sure that the 29 million actually results in something. It's not just, you know, kind of an academic exercise. And so, that's what we're doing on our site to make sure that employers are actually engaged in this process as well.Corey: I want to bring up a topic that has been top-of-mind in relation to this, where there has been an awful lot of hue and cry about generative AI lately, and to the point where I'm a believer in this. I think it is awesome, I think it is fantastic. And even for me, the hype is getting to be a little over the top. When everyone's talking about it transforming every business and that entire industries seem to be pivoting hard to rebrand themselves with the generative AI brush, it is of some concern. But I'm still excited by the magic inherent to aspects of what this is.It is, on some level—at least the way I see it—a way of solving the cloud education problem that I see, which is that, today if I want to start a company and maybe I just got out of business school, maybe I dropped out of high school, doesn't really matter. If it involves software, as most businesses seem to these days, I would have to do a whole lot of groundwork first. I have to go and take a boot camp class somewhere for six months and learn just enough code to build something horrible enough to get funding so that then I can hire actual professional engineers who will make fun of what I've written behind my back and then tear it all out and replace it. On some level, it really feels like the way to teach people cloud skills is to lower the bar for those cloud skills themselves, to help reduce the you must be at least this smart to ride this amusement park ride style of metering stick.And generative AI seems like it has strong potential for doing some of these things. I've used it that way myself, if we can get past some of the hallucination problems where it's very confident and also wrong—just like, you know, many of the white engineers I've worked with who are of course, men, in the course of my career—it will be even better. But I feel like this is the interface to an awful lot of cloud, if it's done right. How are you folks thinking about generative AI in the context of education, given the that field seems to be changing every day?Valerie: It's an interesting question and I see a lot of forward movement and positive movement in education. I'll give you an example. One company in the Bay Area, Khan Academy is using Khanmigo, which is one of their ChatGPT and generative AI-based products to be able to tutor students in a way that's directive without giving them the answers. And so, you know, when you look at the Bloom's sigma problem, which is if you have an intervention with a student who's kind of on the fence, you can move them one standard deviation to the right by giving them, sort of, community support. You can move them two standard deviations to the right if you give them one-to-one mentoring.And so, the idea is that these interventions through generative AI are actually moving that Bloom's sigma model for students to the right, right? So, you're getting students who might fall through the cracks not falling through the cracks anymore. Groups like Houston Community College are using generative AI to make sure that they are tracking their students in a way that they're going into the classes that they need to go into and they're using the prerequisites so that they can then benefit themselves through the community college system and have the most efficient path towards graduation. There's other models that we're using generative AI for to be able to do better data analysis in educational institutions, not just for outcomes, but also for, you know, funding mechanisms and for ways in which educational institutions [even operationalized 00:21:21]. And so, I think there's a huge power in generative AI that is being used at all levels within education.Now, there's a couple of other things, too, that I think that you touched on, and one is how do we train on generative AI, right? It goes so fast. And how are we doing? So, I'll tell you one thing that I think is super interesting, and that's that generative AI does hold the promise of actually offering us greater diversity, equity, and inclusion of the people who are studying generative AI. And what we're seeing early on is that the distribution in the mix of men and women is far better for studying of generative AI and AI-based learning modules for that particular outcome than we have seen in computer science in the past.And so, that's super encouraging, that we're going to have more people from more diverse backgrounds participating with skills for generative AI. And what that will also mean, of course, is that models will likely be less biased, we'll be able to have better fidelity in generative AI models, and more applicability in different areas when we have more diverse learners with that experience. So, the second piece is, what is AWS doing to make sure that these modules are being integrated into curriculum? And that's something that our training and certification team is launching as we speak, both through our AWS Academy modules, but also through Skill Builder so those can be accessed by people today. So, I'm with you. I think there's more promise than hue and cry and this is going to be a super interesting way that our early-career learners are going to be able to interact with new learning models and new ways of just thinking about how to apply it.Corey: My excitement is almost entirely on the user side of this as opposed to the machine-learning side of it. It feels like an implementation detail from the things that I care about. I asked the magic robot in a box how to do a thing and it tells me, or ideally does it for me. One of the moments in which I felt the dumbest in recent memory has been when I first started down the DeepRacer, “Oh, you just got one. Now, here's how to do it. Step one, open up this console. Good. Nice job. Step two”—and it was, basically get a PhD in machine learning concepts from Berkeley and then come back. Which is a slight exaggeration, but not by much.It feels it is, on some level—it's a daunting field, where there's an awful lot of terms of art being bandied around, there's a lot that needs to be explained in particular ways, and it's very different—at least from my perspective—on virtually any other cloud service offering. And that might very well be a result of my own background. But using the magic thing, like, CodeWhisperer that suggests code that I want to complete is great. Build something like CodeWhisperer, I'm tapping out by the end of that sentence.Valerie: Yeah. I mean, the question in there is, you know, how do we make sure that our learners know how to leverage CodeWhisperer, how to leverage Bedrock, how to leverage SageMaker, and how to leverage Greengrass, right, to build models that I think are going to be really experientially sound but also super innovative? And so, us getting that learning into education early and making sure that learners who are being educated, whether they are currently in jobs and are being re-skilled or they're coming up through traditional or non-traditional educational institutions, have access to all of these services that can help them do innovative things is something that we're really committed to doing. And we've been doing it for a long time. I may think you know that, right?So, Greengrass and SageMaker and all of the AI and ML tools have been around for a long period of time. Bedrock, CodeWhisperer, other services that AWS will continue to launch to support generative AI models, of course, are going to be completely available not just to users, but also for learners who want to re-skill, up-skill, and to skill on generative AI models.Corey: One last area I want to get into is a criticism, or at least an observation I've been making for a while about Kubernetes, but it could easily be extended to cloud in general, which is that, at least today, as things stand—this is starting to change, finally—running Kubernetes in production is challenging and fraught and requires a variety of skills and a fair bit of experience having done this previously. Before the last year or so of weird market behavior, if you had Kubernetes in production experience, you could relatively easily command a couple $100,000 a year in terms of salary. Now, as companies are embracing modern technologies and the rest, I'm wondering how they're approaching the problem of up-leveling their existing staff from two sides. The first is that no matter how much training and how much you wind up giving a lot of those folks, some of them either will not be capable or will not have the desire to learn the new thing. And secondly, once you get those people there, how do you keep them from effectively going down the street with that brand new shiny skill set for, effectively, three times what they were making previously, now that they have those skills that are in wild demand across the board?Because that's simply not sustainable for a huge swath of companies out there for whom they're not technology companies, they just use technology to do the thing that their business does. It feels like everything is becoming very expensive in a personnel perspective if you're not careful. You obviously talk to governments who are famously not known for paying absolute top-of-market figures for basically any sort of talent—for obvious reasons—but also companies for whom the bottom line matters incredibly. How do you square that circle?Valerie: There's a lot in that circle, so I'll talk about a specific, and then I'll talk about what we're also doing to help learners get that experience. So, you talked specifically about Kubernetes, but that could be extracted, as you said, to a lot of other different areas, including cyber, right? So, when we talk about somebody with an expertise in cybersecurity, it's very unlikely that a new learner coming out of university is going to be as appealing to an employer than somebody who has two to three years of experience. And so, how do we close that gap of experience—in either of those two examples—to make sure that learners have an on-ramp to new positions and new career opportunities? So, the first answer I'll give you is with some of our largest systems integrators, one of which is Tata Consulting Services, who is actually using AWS education programs to upskill its employees internally and has upskilled 19,000 of its employees using education programs including AWS Educate, to make sure that their group of consultants has absolutely the latest set of skills.And so, we're seeing that across the board; most of our, if not all of our customers, are looking at training to make sure that they can train not only their internal tech teams and their early-career talent coming in, but they can also train back office to understand what the next generation of technology is going to mean. And so, for instance, one of our largest customers, a telco provider, has asked us to provide modules for their HR teams because without understanding what AI and ML is, what it does, and what how to look for it, they might not be able to then, you know, extract the right sets of talent that they need to bring into the organization. So, we're seeing this training requirement across the business and not just in technical requirements. But you know, bridging that gap with early-career learners, I think is really important too. And so, we are experimenting, especially at places like Miami Dade College and City University of New York with virtual internships so that we can provide early-career learners with experiential learning that then they can bring to employers as proof that they have actually done the thing that they've said that they can demonstrate that they can do.And so, companies like Parker Dewey and Riipen and Forage and virtual internships are offering those experiences online so that our learners have the opportunity to then prove what they say that they can do. So, there's lots of ways that we can go about making sure learners have that broad base of learning and that they can apply it. And I'll tell you one more thing, and that's retention. And we find that when learners approach their employer with an internship or an apprenticeship, that their stickiness with that employer because they understand the culture, they understand the project work, they've been mentored, they've been sponsored, that they're stickiness within those employers it's actually far greater than if they came and went. And so, it's important and incumbent on employers, I think, to build that strong connective tissue with their early-skilled learners—and their upskilled learners—to make sure that the skills don't leave the house, right? And that is all about making sure that the culture aligns with the skills aligns, with the project work, and that it continues to be interesting, whether you're a new learner or you're a re-skilled learner, to stay in-house.Corey: My last question for you—and I understand that this might be fairly loaded—but I can't even come up with a partial list that does it any justice to encapsulate the sheer number of educational programs that you have in flight for a variety of different folks. The details and nuances of these are not something that I store in RAM, so I find that it's very easy to talk about one of these things and wind up bleeding into another. How do you folks keep it all straight? And how should people think about it? Not to say that you are not people. How should people who do not work for AWS? There we go. We are all humans here. Please, go [laugh] ahead.Valerie: It's a good question. So, the way that I break it down—and by the way, you know, AWS is also part of Amazon, so you know, I understand the question. And we have a lot of offerings across Amazon and AWS. AWS education programs specifically, are five. And those five programs, I've mentioned a few today: AWS Academy, AWS Educate, AWS re/Start, GetIT, and Spark are free, no-fee programs that we offer both the community and our education providers to build curriculum to offer digitally, and cloud-based skills curriculum to learners.We have another product that I'm a huge fan of called Skill Builder. And Skill Builder is, as I mentioned before, an online educational platform that anybody can take advantage of the over 500 classes in the free tier. There's learning plans for a lot of different things, and some I think you'd be interested in, like cost optimization and, you know, financial modeling for cloud, and all kinds of other more technically-oriented free courses. And then if learners want to get more experience in a lab environment, or more detailed learning that would lead to, for instance a, you know, certification in solutions architecture, they can use the subscription model, which is very affordable and provides learners an opportunity to work within that platform. So, if I'm breaking it down, it really is, am I being educated and in a way that is more formalized or am I going to go and take these courses when I want them and when I need them, both in the free tier and the subscription tier.So, that's basically the differences between education programs and Skill Builder. But I would say that if people are working with AWS teams, they can also ask teams where is the best place to be able to avail themselves of education curriculum. And we're all passionate about this topic and all of us can point users in the right direction as well.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to go through all the things that you folks are up to these days. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Valerie: So, the first destination, if they want cloud-based learning, is really to take a look at AWS training and certification programs, and so, easily to find on aws.com. I would also point our teams—if they're interested in the tech alliances and how we're formulating the tech alliances—towards a recent announcement between City University of New York, the New York Jobs CEO Council, and the New York Mayor's Office for more details about how we can help teams in the US and outside the US—we also have tech alliances underway in Egypt and Spain and other countries coming on board as well—to really, you know, earmark how government and educational institutions and employers can work together.And then lastly, if employers are listening to this, the one output to all of this is that you pointed out, and that's that our learners need hands-on learning and they need the on-ramp to internships, to apprenticeships, and jobs that really are promotional for, like, career talent. And so, it's incumbent, I think, on all of us to start looking at the next generation of learners, whether they come out of traditional or non-traditional means, and recognize that talent can live in a lot of different places. And we're very happy to help and happy to do that matchup. But I encourage employers to dig deeper there too.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with me about all this. I really appreciate it.Valerie: Thank you, Corey. It's always fun to talk to you.Corey: [laugh]. Valerie Singer, GM of Global Education at AWS. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me exactly which AWS service I should make my six-year-old learn about as my next step in punishing her.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

En este episodio hablamos con Iñaki Bilbao Estrada de AWS que nos cuenta sobre los programas que ofrece AWS para las instituciones educativas, con Santos Pardos que nos cuenta como es enseñar la nube a chicos en el secundario y con José Emilio Vera que nos habla de las carreras de formación profesional modernizadas usando la nube. Este es el episodio 15 de la tercera temporada del podcast de Charlas Técnicas de AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing two new, free training initiatives that make it easy for individuals to get hands-on cloud computing skills training in a fun and engaging way. The first initiative is a new game-based role-playing experience, called AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner, ideal for early-career or new-to-cloud adult learners. AWS Cloud Quest teaches foundational cloud computing concepts while learners zap drones and collect gems in their quest to solve challenges in a virtual city. Amazon Web Services Support for Cloud Computing Skills AWS also launched a new, improved version of AWS Educate, with added interactive content and removal of the .edu email address requirement, making the program even more accessible. With AWS Educate, learners as young as 13 years old can access hundreds of hours of free, self-paced training, resources, and labs specifically designed for new-to-the-cloud learners. These two new initiatives support the development of foundational cloud computing skills, so anyone—from young learners to career professionals looking to build their cloud skills—can gain knowledge and practical experience that helps them prepare for jobs in the cloud. “When I had my first interview for cloud engineering, pretty much all the knowledge I discussed in that interview was based on what I learned from AWS Educate,” said Alfredo Colón DevOps engineer, Universal Studios Orlando. “AWS Cloud Quest and AWS Educate intentionally move away from passive content. We want to make abstract cloud computing concepts real through interactive and hands-on activities that immediately let learners turn theory into practice,” said Kevin Kelly, director of Cloud Career Training Programs at AWS. “These two offerings help individuals grow their skills and employability. We're continuing to innovate how learners can build their cloud knowledge and practical skills, meeting them where they are and bringing knowledge within anyone's reach by making these programs free.” ‘AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner' game-based learning AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner is an all-new 3D role-playing game, designed by AWS Training and Certification, to help adult learners gain practical AWS experience. To win, learners must complete quests that simultaneously build cloud skills and help citizens build a better city. Gameplay includes videos, quizzes, and hands-on exercises based on real-world business scenarios. Throughout their adventure, learners understand what the cloud is by exploring core AWS services and categories (e.g., compute, storage, database, and security services) and building basic cloud solutions. For learners looking to earn an industry-recognized credential, this program provides an engaging way to help prepare for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. AWS Cloud Quest is available globally in English for personal computers through AWS Skill Builder. AWS Educate: new content with greater reach AWS also released a reimagined AWS Educate program worldwide, including new courses and hands-on labs, making it easier than ever for individuals as young as 13 years old to register. AWS Educate is designed for self-motivated, pre-professional learners who are not yet working in the cloud, such as students and job-training participants. The program offers hundreds of hours of free, self-paced training and resources—including more than 50 courses and 10 hands-on labs in the AWS Management Console—so learners can practice their skills. New features include: Four new courses: Cloud Computing 101, AWS DeepRacer Primer, Machine Learning Foundation, and Builder Labs Ten new labs: help learners put theory into practice Redesigned website: guides learners to training content based on their knowledge, goals, interests, and age New online Explore section: features supplementary content, such as new courses, Twitch videos, blogs, and technical papers Since the program's inception in 2015, AWS Educate has reached over a million ...

About FrancescaFrancessca is the leader of the AWS Technology Worldwide Commercial Operations organization. She is recognized as a thought leader of business technology cloud transformations and digital innovation, advising thousands of startups, small-midsize businesses, and enterprises. She is also the cofounder of AWS workforce transformation initiatives that inspire inclusion, diversity, and equity to foster more careers in science and technology.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/FrancesscaV/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesscavasquez/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by “you”—gabyte. Distributed technologies like Kubernetes are great, citation very much needed, because they make it easier to have resilient, scalable, systems. SQL databases haven't kept pace though, certainly not like no SQL databases have like Route 53, the world's greatest database. We're still, other than that, using legacy monolithic databases that require ever growing instances of compute. Sometimes we'll try and bolt them together to make them more resilient and scalable, but let's be honest it never works out well. Consider Yugabyte DB, its a distributed SQL database that solves basically all of this. It is 100% open source, and there's not asterisk next to the “open” on that one. And its designed to be resilient and scalable out of the box so you don't have to charge yourself to death. It's compatible with PostgreSQL, or “postgresqueal” as I insist on pronouncing it, so you can use it right away without having to learn a new language and refactor everything. And you can distribute it wherever your applications take you, from across availability zones to other regions or even other cloud providers should one of those happen to exist. Go to yugabyte.com, thats Y-U-G-A-B-Y-T-E dot com and try their free beta of Yugabyte Cloud, where they host and manage it for you. Or see what the open source project looks like—its effortless distributed SQL for global apps. My thanks to Yu—gabyte for sponsoring this episode. Corey: And now for something completely different!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's pretty common for me to sit here and make fun of large cloud companies, and there's no cloud company that I make fun of more than AWS, given that that's where my business generally revolves around. I'm joined today by VP of Technology, Francessca Vasquez, who is apparently going to sit and take my slings and arrows in person. Francessca, thank you for joining me.Francessca: Hi, Corey, and thanks for having me. I'm so excited to spend this time with you, snarking away. I'm thrilled.Corey: So, we've met before, and at the time you were the Head of Solutions Architecture and Customer Solutions Management because apparently someone gets paid by every word they wind up shoving into a job title and that's great. And I vaguely sort of understood what you did. But back in March of this year, you were promoted to Vice President of Technology, which is both impressive, and largely non-descriptive when one works for a technology company. What is it you'd say it is you do now? And congratulations, by the way.Francessca: Thank you, I appreciate it. By the way, as a part of that, I also relocated to our second headquarters, so I'm broadcasting with you out of HQ2, or Arlington, Virginia. But my team, essentially, we're a customer-facing organization, Corey. We work with thousands of customers all over the globe, from startups to enterprises, and we ultimately try to ensure that they're making the right technology architecture decisions on AWS. We help them in driving people and culture transformation when they decide to migrate onto the cloud.And the last thing that we try to do is ensure that we're giving them tools so that they can build cultures of innovation within the places that they work. And we do this for customers every day, 365 days a year. And that's what I do. And I've been doing this for over 20 years, so I'm having a blast.Corey: It's interesting because when I talk to customers who are looking at what their cloud story is going to be—not just where it is, but where they're going—there's a shared delusion that they all participate in—and I'm as guilty as anyone. I have this same, I guess, misapprehension as well—that after this next sprint concludes, I'm going to suddenly start making smart decisions; I'm going to pay off all of my technical debt; I'm going to stop doing this silly thing and start doing the smart thing, and so on and so forth. And of course, it's a myth. That technical debt is load-bearing; it's there for a reason. But foundationally, when talking to customers at different points along their paths, I often find that the conversation that I'm having with them is less around what they should be doing differently from a tactical and execution perspective and a lot more about changing the culture.As a consultant, I've never found a way to successfully do that, that sticks. If I could I'd be in a vastly different, vastly more lucrative consulting business. But it seems like culture is one of those things that, in my experience, has to be driven from within. Do you find that there's a different story when you are speaking as AWS where, “Yeah, we're outsiders, but at the same time, you're going to be running production on us, which means you're our partner whether you want to be or not because you can't treat someone who owns production as a vendor anymore.” Does that position you better to shift culture?Francessca: I don't know if it positions us better. But I do think that many organizations, you know, all of them are looking at different business drivers, whether that be they want to move to more digital, especially since we're going through COVID-19 and coming out of it. Many of them are looking at things like cost reduction, some organizations are going through mergers and acquisitions. Right now I can tell you new customer experiences driven by digital is pretty big, and I think what a lot of companies do, some of them want to be the north star; some of them aspire to be like other companies that they may see in or outside the industry. And I think that sometimes we often get a brand as having this culture of innovation, and so organizations very much want to understand what does that look like: what are the ingredients on being able to build cultures of innovation?And sometimes organizations take parts of what we've been able to do here at AWS and sometimes they look at pieces from other companies that they view as north star, and I see this across multiple industries. And I think the one that is the toughest when you're trying to drive big change—even with moving to the cloud—oftentimes it's not the services or the tech. [smile]. It's the culture. It's people. It's the governance. And how do you get rallied around that? So yeah, we do spend some time just trying to offer our perspective. And it doesn't always mean it's the right one, but it certainly has—it's worked for us.Corey: On some level, I've seen cloud adoptions stall, in some scenarios, by vendors being a little too honest with the customer, if that doesn't—Francessca: Mmm. Mm-hm.Corey: —sound ridiculous, where it's—so they take the customer will [unintelligible 00:05:24], reasonable request. “Here's what we built. Here's how we want to migrate to the cloud. How will this work in your environment?” And the overly honest answer from a certain provider—I don't feel the need to name at the moment—is, “Well, great. What you've written is actually really terrible, and if you were to write it better, with smarter engineers, it would run great in the cloud. So, do that then call us.”Surprisingly, that didn't win the deal, though it was, unfortunately, honest. There was a time where AWS offerings were very much aligned with that, and depending on how you wind up viewing what customers should be doing is going to depend on what year it was. In the early days, there was no persistent storage on EC2—Francessca: Mm-hm.Corey: So, if you had a use case that required there had to be a local disk that could survive a reboot, well, that wasn't really the place for you to run. In time, it has changed, and we're still seeing that evolution to the point where there are a bunch of services that come out on a consistent, ongoing basis that the cloud-native set will look at and say, “Oh, that hasn't been written in the last 18 months on the latest MacBook and targeting the developer version of Chrome. Then why would I ever care about that?” Yeah, there's a bigger world than San Francisco. I'm sorry but it's true.And there are solutions that are aimed at customer segments that don't look anything like a San Francisco startup. And it's easy to look at those and say, “Oh, well, why in the world would I wind up needing something like that?” And people point at the mainframe and say, “Because of that thing.” Which, “Well, what does that ancient piece of crap do?” “Oh, billions a year in revenue, so maybe show some respect.” ‘Legacy,' the condescending engineering term for ‘it makes money.'Francessca: [smile]. Yeah, well, first off, I think that our approach today is you have to be able to meet customers where they are. And there are some customers, I think, that are in a position where they've been able to build their business in a far more advanced state cloud-natively, whether that be through tools like serverless, or Lambda, et cetera. And then there are other organizations that it will take a little longer, and the reason for that is everyone has a different starting point. Some of their starting points might be multiple years of on-premise technology.To your point, you talked about tech debt earlier that they've got to look at and in hundreds of applications that oftentimes when you're starting these journeys, you really have to have a good baseline of your application portfolio. One of my favorite stories—hopefully, I can share this customer name, but one of my favorite stories has been our organization working with Nationwide, who sort of started their journey back in 2017 and they had a goal, a pretty aggressive one, but their goal is about 80% of their applications that they wanted to get migrated to the cloud in, like, three to four years. And this was, like, 319 different migrations that we started with them, 80 or so production cut-overs. And to your point, as a result of us doing this application portfolio review, we identified 63 new things that needed to be built. And those new things we were able to develop jointly with them that were more cloud-native. Mainframe is another one that's still around, and there's a lot of customers still working on the mainframe. We work with a very—Corey: There is no AWS/400 yet.Francessca: [smile]. There is no AWS [smile] AS/400. But we do have mainframe migration competency partners to help customers that do want to move into more–I don't really prefer the term modernize, but more of a cloud-native approach. And mostly because they want to deliver new capability, depending on what the industry is. And that normally happens through applications.So yeah, I think we have to meet customers where they are. And that's why we think about our customers in their stage of cloud adoption. Some that are business-to-consumer, more digital native-based, you know, startups, of course; enterprises that tend to be global in nature, multinational; ISVs, independent software vendors. We just think about our customers differently.Corey: Nationwide is such a great customer story. There was a whole press release bonanza late last year about how they selected AWS as their preferred cloud provider. Great. And I like seeing stories like that because it's easy on some level—easy—to wind up having those modernized startups that are pure web properties and nothing more than that—not to besmirch what customers do, but if you're a social media site, or you're a streaming video company, et cetera, it feels differently than it does—oh, yeah, you're a significantly advanced financial services and insurance company where you're part of the Fortune 100. And yeah, when it turns out that the computers that calculate out your amortization tables don't do what you think they're going to do, those are the kinds of mistakes that show. It's a vote of confidence in being able to have a customer testimonial from a quote-unquote, “More serious company.” I wouldn't say it's about modernization; I'd say it's about evolution more than anything else.Francessca: Yeah, I think you're spot on, and I also think we're starting to see more of this. We've done work at places like GE—in Latin America, Itaú is the bank that I was just referring to on their mainframe digital transformation. Capital One, of course, who many of the audience probably knows we've worked with for a long time. And, you know, I think we're going to see more of this it for a variety of reasons, Corey. I think that definitely, the pandemic has played some role in this digital acceleration.I mean, it just has; there's nothing I can say about that. And then there are some other things that we're also starting to see, like sustainability, quite frankly, is becoming of interest for a lot of our customers as well, and as I mentioned earlier, customer experience. So, we often tend to think of these migration cloud journeys as just moving to infrastructure, but in the first part of the pandemic, one of the interesting trends that we also saw was this push around contact centers wanting to differentiate their customer experience, which we saw a huge increase in Amazon Connect adoption as well. So, it's just another way to think about it.Corey: What else have you seen shift during the pandemic now that we're—I guess, you could call it post-pandemic because here in the US, at least at this time of this recording, things are definitely trending in the right direction. And then you take a step back and realize that globally we are nowhere near the end of this thing on a global stage. How have you seen what customers are doing and how customers are thinking about things shift?Francessca: Yeah, it's such a great question. And definitely, so much has changed. And it's bigger than just migrations. The pandemic, as you rightfully stated, we're certainly far more advanced in the US in terms of the vaccine rollout, but if you start looking at some of our other emerging markets in Asia Pacific, Japan, or even AMEA, it's a slower rollout. I'll tell you what we've seen.We've seen that organizations are definitely focused on the shift in their company culture. We've also seen that digital will play a permanent fixture; just, that will be what it is. And we definitely saw a lot of growth in education tech, and collaboration companies like Zoom here in the US. They ended up having to scale from 10 million daily users up to, like, 300. In Singapore, there is an all-in company called Grab; they do a lot of different things, but in their top three delivery offerings—what they call Grabfood, Grabmart, and GrabExpress—they saw, like, an increase of 30% user adoption during that time, too.So, I think we're going to continue to see that. We're also going to continue to see non-technical themes come into play like inclusion, diversity, and equity in talent as people are thinking about how to change and evolve their workforce. I love that term you used; it's about an evolution: workforce and skills is going to be pretty important. And then globally, the need around stronger data privacy and governance, again, is something else that we've started to see in a post-COVID kind of era. So, all industries; there's no one industry doing anything any different than the others, but these are just some observations from the last, you know, 18 months.Corey: In the early days of the pandemic, there was a great meme that was going around of who was the most responsible for your digital transformation: CIO, CTO, or COVID-19?Francessca: [smile].Corey: And, yeah, on some level, it's one of those ‘necessity breeds innovation' type of moments. And we're seeing a bunch of acceleration in the world of digital adoption. And I don't think you get to put the genie back in that particular bottle in a bunch of different respects. One area that we're seeing industry-wide is talent discovering that suddenly you can do a whole bunch of things that don't require you being in the same eight square miles of an earthquake zone in California. And the line that I heard once that really resonated with me was that talent is evenly distributed; opportunity is not. And it seems that when you see a bunch of companies opening up to working in new ways and new places, suddenly it taps a bunch of talent that previously was considered inaccessible.Francessca: That's right. And I think it's one of those things where—[smile] I love the meme—you'll have to send me that meme by the way—that just by necessity, this has been brought to the forefront. And if you just think about the number of countries that, sort of, account for almost half the global population, there's only, like, we'll say eight of them that at least represent close to 60-plus percent. I don't think that there's a company out there today that can really build a comprehensive strategy to drive business agility or to look at cost, or any of those things digitally without having an equally determined workforce strategy. And that workforce strategy, how that shows up with us is through having the right skills to be able to operate in the cloud, looking at the diversity of where your customer base is, and making sure that you're driving a workforce plan that looks at those markets.And then I think the other great thing—and honestly, Corey, maybe why I even got into this business—is looking at, also, untapped talent. You know, technology's so pervasive right now. A lot of it's being designed where it's prescriptive, easier to use, accessible. And so I also think we're tapping into a global workforce that we can reskill, retrain, in all sorts of different facets, which just opens up the labor market even more. And I get really excited about that because we can take what is perceived as, sort of, traditional talent, you know, computer science and we can skill a lot of people who have, again, non-traditional tech backgrounds. I think that's the opportunity.Corey: Early on in my career, I was very interested in opening the door for people who looked a lot like me, in terms of where their experience level was, what they'd done because I'd come from a quote-unquote, non-traditional background; I don't even have a high school diploma at this point. And opening doors for folks and teaching them to come up the way that I did made sense for a while. The problem that I ran into pretty quickly is that the world has moved on. It turns out that if you want to start working in cloud in 2021, the path I walked is closed. You don't get to go be an email systems administrator who's really good at Unix and later Linux as your starting point because those jobs don't exist the way that they once did.Before that, the help desk roles aren't really there the way that they once were either, and they've become much more systematized. You don't have nearly as much opportunity to break the mold because now there is a mold. It used to be that we were all these artisanally crafted, bespoke technologists. And now there are training curriculums for this. So, it leads to a recurring theme on the show of, where does the next generation really wind up coming from?Because trying to tell people to come up the way that I did is increasingly reminiscent of advice of our parents' generation, “Oh, go out and pound the bricks, and have a firm handshake, and hand your resume to the person at the front desk, and you'll get a job today.” Yeah, sure you will. How do you see it?Francessca: You know, I see it where we have an opportunity to drive this talent, long-term, in a variety of different places. First off, I think the personas around IT have shifted quite a bit where, back in the day, you had a storage admin, a sysadmin, maybe you had a Solaris, .NET, Linux developer. But pretty straightforward. I think now we've evolved these roles where the starting point can be in data, the starting point can be in architecture.The personas have shifted from my perspective, and I think you have more starting points. I also think our funnel has also changed. So, for people that are going down the education route—and I'm a big proponent of that—I think we're trying to introduce more programs like AWS Educate, which allows you to go and start helping students in universities really get a handle on cloud, the curriculum, all the components that make up the technology. That's one. I think there are a lot of people that have had career pivots, Corey, where maybe they've taken time out of the workforce.We disproportionately, by the way, see this from our female and women who identify, coming back to the workforce, maybe after caring for parents or having children. So, we've got—there are different programs that we try to leverage for returners. My family and I, we've grown up all around the military veterans as well, and so we also look at when people come out of, perhaps in the US, military status, how do we spend time reskilling those veterans who share some of the same principles around mission, team, the things that are important to us for customers. And then to your point, it's reskill, just, non-traditional backgrounds. I mean, a lot of these technologies, again, they're prescriptive; we're trying to find ways to make them certainly more accessible, right, equitable sort of distribution of how you can get access to them.But, anyone can start programming in things like Python now. So, reskill non-traditional backgrounds; I don't think it's just one funnel, I think you have to tap into all these funnels. And that's why, in addition to being here in AWS, I also try to spend time on supporting and volunteering at nonprofit companies that really drive a focus on underserved-based communities or non-traditional communities as different pathways to tech. So, I think it's all of the above. [smile].Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by CircleCI. CircleCI is the leading platform for software innovation at scale. With intelligent automation and delivery tools, more than 25,000 engineering organizations worldwide—including most of the ones that you've heard of—are using CircleCI to radically reduce the time from idea to execution to—if you were Google—deprecating the entire product. Check out CircleCI and stop trying to build these things yourself from scratch, when people are solving this problem better than you are internally. I promise. To learn more, visit circleci.com.Corey: Yeah, I have no patience left, what little I had at the beginning, for gatekeeping. And so much of technical interviewing seems to be built around that in ways that are the obvious ones that need not even be called out, but then the ones that are a little bit more subtle. For example, the software developer roles that have the algorithm questions on a whiteboard. Well, great. You take a look at the average work of software development style work, you don't see those things coming up in day-to-day. Usually.But, “Implement quicksort.” There's a library for that. Move on. So, it turns out that biases for folks who've recently had either a computer science formal education or computer science formal-like education, and that winds up in many ways, weeding people out have been in the workforce for a while. I take a look at some of the technical interviews I used to pass for grumpy Unix sysadmin jobs; I don't remember half of the terminology.I was looking through some my old question lists of what I used to ask candidates, and I don't remember how 90% of this stuff works. I'd have to sit there and freshen up on it if I were to go and take a job interview. But it doesn't work in the same way. It's more pernicious than that, though, because I look at what I do and how I approach it; the skills you use in a job interview are orthogonal, in many cases, to the skills you'll need in the workforce. How someone performs with their career on the line at a whiteboard in front of a few very judgy, judgy people is not representative of how they're going to perform in a collaborative technical environment, trying to solve an interesting problem, at least in my experience.Francessca: Yeah, it's interesting because in some of our programs, we have this conversation with a lot of the universities, as well, in their curriculums, and I think ultimately, whether you're a software developer, or you're an architect, or just in the field of tech and you're dealing with customers, I think you have to be very good at things like problem-solving, and being able to work in teams. I have a mental model that many of the tech details, you can teach. Those things are teachable.Corey: “Oh, you don't know what port some protocol listens on. Oh, it's a shame you never going to be able to learn that. You didn't know that in the interview off the top of your head and there's no possible way you could learn that. It's an intrinsic piece of knowledge you're born with.” No, it's not.Francessca: [smile]. Yeah, yeah, those are still things every now and then I have to go search for, or I've written myself some nice little Textract. Uh… [smile] [unintelligible 00:22:28] to go and search my handwritten notes for things. But yeah, so problem-solving, being able to effectively communicate. In our case, writing has been a muscle that I've really had to work at hard since joining here.I haven't done that in a while, so that is a skill that's come back. And I think the one that I see around software development is, really, teams. It's interesting because when you're going through some of the curriculums, a lot of the projects that are assigned to you are individual, and what happens when you get into the workplaces, the projects become very team-oriented, and they're more than one people. We're all looking at how we publish code together to create a process, and I think that's one of the biggest surprises making a transition [smile] into the workforce is, you will work in teams. [smile].Corey: Oh, dear Lord. The group project; the things that they do in schools is one of those, great, there's one person who's going to be diligent—which was let's be clear, never me—they're going to do 90% of the work on it and everyone shares credit equally. The real world very rarely works that way with that sense of one person carries the team, at least ideally. But on the other side of it, too, you don't wind up necessarily having to do these things alone, you don't have to wind up with dealing with those weird personal dynamics in small teams, for the most part, and setting people up with the expectation, as students, that this is how the real world works is radically different. One of the things that always surprised me growing up was hearing teachers in middle school and occasionally beyond, say things like, “When you're in the real world”—always ‘the real world' as if education is somehow not the real world—that, “Oh, your boss is never going to be okay with this, or that, or the other thing.”And in hindsight, looking back at that almost 30 years later, it's, “Yeah, how would you know? You've been in academia your entire life.” I'm sorry, but the workplace environment of a public middle school and the workplace environment of a corporate entity are very culturally different. And I feel confident in saying that because my first Unix admin job was at a university. It is a different universe entirely.Francessca: Yeah. It's an area where you have to be able to balance the academia component with practitioner. And by the way, we talk about this in our solutions architecture and our customer solutions team—that's a mouthful—in our organization, that how we like to differentiate our capabilities with customers is that we are users, we are practitioners of the services, we have gone out and obtained certifications. We don't always just speak about it, we'd like to say that we've been in the empty chair with the customer, and we've also done. So yeah, I think it's a huge balance, by the way, and I just hope that over the next several years, Corey, that again, we start really shifting the landscape by tapping into what I think is an incredible global workforce, and of users that we've just not inspired enough to go into these disciplines for STEM, so I hope we do more of that.And I think our customers will benefit better from it because you'll get more diversity in thought, you'll get different types of innovation for your solution set, and you'll maybe mirror the customer segments that you're responsible for serving. So, I'm pretty bullish on this topic. [smile].Corey: I think it's hard not to be because, sure, things are a lot more complex now, technically. It's a broader world, and what's a tech company? Well, every company, unless they are asleep at the wheel, is a tech company. And that that can be awfully discouraging on some level, but the other side of it has really been, as I look at it, is the sheer, I guess, brilliance of the talent that's coming up. I'm not talking the legend of industry that's been in the field for 30 years; I'm talking some of the folks I know who are barely out of high school. I'm talking very early career folks who just have such a drive, and such an appetite for being able to look at how these things can solve problems, the ability to start thinking in innovative ways that I've never considered when I was that age, I look at this. And I think that, yeah, we have massive challenges in front of us as people, as a society, et cetera, but the kids are all right, for lack of a better term.Francessca: [smile].Corey: And I want to be clear as well; when we talk about new to tech, I'm not just talking new grads; I'm talking about people who are career-changing, where they wound up working in healthcare or some other field for the first 10 years of their career—20 years—and they want to move into tech. Great. How do we throw those doors open, not say, “Well, have you considered going back and getting a degree, and then taking a very entry-level job?” No. A lateral move, find the niches between the skill you have and the skill you want to pick up and move into the field in half steps. It takes a little longer, sure, but it also means you're not starting over from square one; you're making a lateral transition which, because it's tech, generally comes with a sizable pay bump, too.Francessca: One of the biggest surprises that I've had since joining the organization, and—you know, we have a very diverse, large global field organization, and if you look at our architecture teams, our customer solution teams, even our product engineering teams, one of the things that might surprise many people is many of them have come from customers; they've not come from what I would consider a traditional, perhaps, sales and marketing background. And that's by design. They give us different perspective, they help us ensure that, again, what we're designing and building is applicable from an end-user perspective, or even an industry, to your point. We have lots of different services now, over a hundred and seventy-five plus. I mean, we've—close to two hundred, now.And there are some customers who want the freedom to be able to build in the various domains, and then we have some customers who need more help and want us to put it together as solutions. And so having that diversity in some of the folks that we've been able to hire from a customer or developer standpoint—or quite frankly, co-founder standpoint—has really been amazing for us. So.Corey: It's always interesting whenever I get the opportunity to talk to folks who don't look like me—and I mean that across every axis you can imagine: people who didn't come up, first off, drowning in the privilege that I did; people who wound up coming at this from different industries; coming at this from different points of education; different career trajectories. And when people say, “Oh, yeah. Well, look at our team page. Everyone looks different from one another.” Great. That is not the entirety what diversity is.Francessca: Right.Corey: “Yeah, but you all went to Stanford together and so let's be very realistic here.” This idea that excellence isn't somehow situational, the story we see about, “Oh, I get this from recruiters constantly,” or people wanting to talk about their companies where, yes, ‘founded by Google graduates' is one of my personal favorites. Google has 140,000 people and they founded a company that currently has five folks, so you're telling me that the things that work at Google somehow magically work at that very small scale? I don't buy that for a second because excellence is always situational. When you have tens of thousands of people building infrastructure for you to work on, back in the early days was always the story that, that empowered folks who worked at places like Google to do amazing things.What AWS built, fundamentally, was the power to have that infrastructure at the click of a button where the only bound—let's be realistic here—is your budget. Suddenly, that same global infrastructure and easy provisioning—‘easy,' quote-unquote—becomes something everyone can appreciate and get access to. But in the early days, that wasn't the thing at all. Watching our technology has evolved the state of the art and opened doors for folks to be just as awesome where they don't need to be in a place like Google to access that, that's the magic of cloud to me.Francessca: Yeah. Well, I'm a huge, just, technology evangelist. I think I just was born with tech. I like breaking things and putting stuff together. I'll tell you just maybe two other things because you talked about excellence and equity.There's two nonprofits that I participate in. One I got introduced through AWS, our current CEO, Andy Jassy, and our Head of Sales and Marketing, Matt Garman. But it's called Rainier Scholars, and it's a 12-year program. They offer a pathway to college graduation for low-income students of color. And really, ultimately, their mission is to answer the question of how do we build a much more equitable society?And for this particular nonprofit, education is that gateway, and so spent some time volunteering there. But then to your point on the opportunity side, there's another organization I just recently became a part of called Year Up. I don't know if you've heard of them or worked with them before—Corey: I was an instructor at Year Up, for their [unintelligible 00:31:19] course.Francessca: Ahh. [smile].Corey: Oh, big fan of those folks.Francessca: So, I just got introduced, and I'm going to be hopefully joining part of their board soon to offer up, again, some guidance and even figuring out how we can help. But so you know, right? They're then focused on serving a student population and decreasing, shrinking the opportunity divide. Again, focused on equitable access. And that is what tech should be about; democratizing technology such that everyone has access. And by the way, it doesn't mean that I don't have favorite services and things like that, but it does mean—[smile] providing [crosstalk 00:31:58]—Corey: They're like my children; I can't stand any of them.Francessca: [smile]. That's right. I do have favorite services, by the way.Corey: Oh, as do we all. It's just rude to name them because everyone else feels left out.Francessca: [smile] that's right. I'll tell you offline. Providing that equitable access, I just think is so key. And we'll be able to tap in, again, to more of this talent. For many of these companies who are trying to transform their business model, and some—like last year, we saw companies just surviving, we saw some companies that were thriving, right, with what was going on.So again, I think you can't really talk about a comprehensive tech strategy that will empower your business strategy without thinking about your workforce plan in the process. I think it would be very naive for many companies to do that.Corey: So, one question that I want to get to here has been that if I take a look at the AWS service landscape, it feels like Perl did back when that was the language that I basically knew the best, which is not saying much.Francessca: You know you're dating yourself now, Corey.Corey: Oh, who else would date me these days?Francessca: [smile].Corey: My God. But, “There's more than one way to do it,” was the language's motto. And I look at AWS environments, and I had a throwaway quip a few weeks back from the time of this recording of, “There are 17 ways to deploy containers on AWS.” And apparently, it turned into an internal meme at AWS, which is just—I love the fact that I can influence company cultures without working there, but I'll take what I can get. But it is a hard problem of, “Great, I want to wind up doing some of these things. What's the right path?” And the answer is always, “It depends.” What are you folks doing to simplify the onboarding journey for customers because, frankly, it is overwhelming and confusing to me, so I can only imagine what someone who is new to the space feels. And from customers, that's no small thing.Francessca: I am so glad that you asked this question. And I think we hear this question from many of our customers. Again, I've mentioned earlier in the show that we have to meet customers where they are, and some customers will be at a stage where they need, maybe, less prescriptive guidance: they just want us to point them to the building blocks, and other customers who need more prescriptive guidance. We have actually taken a combination of our programs and what we call our solutions and we've wrapped that into much stronger prescriptive guidance under our migration and again, our modernization initiative; we have a program around this. What we try to help them do first is assess just where they are on the adoption phase.That tends to drive then how we guide them. And that guidance sometimes could be as simple as a solution deployment where we just kind of give them the scripts, the APIs, a CloudFormation template, and off they go. Sometimes it comes in the form of people and advice, Corey. It really depends on what they want. But we've tried to wrap all of this under our migration acceleration program where we can help them do a fast, sort of, assessment on where they are inclusive of driving, you know, a quick business case; most companies aren't doing anything without that.We then put together a fairly fast mobilization plan. So, how do they get started? Does it mean—can they launch a control foundation, control tower solutions to set up things like accounts, identity and access management, governance. Like, how do you get them doing? And then we have some prescriptive guidance in our program that allows them to look at, again, different solution sets to solve, whether that be data, security. [smile].You mentioned containers. What's the right path? Do I go containers? Do I go serverless? Depending on where they are. Do I go EKS, ECS Anywhere, or Fargate? Yeah. So, we try to provide them, again, with some prescriptive guidance, again, based on where they are. We do that through our migration acceleration initiative. To simplify. So.Corey: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And I give an awful lot of guidance in public about how X is terrible; B is the better path; never do C. And whenever I talk—for example, I'm famous for saying multi-cloud is the wrong direction. Don't do it.And then I talk to customers who are doing it and they expect me to harangue them, and my response is, “Yeah, you're probably right.” And they're taken aback by this. “Does this mean you're saying things you don't believe?” No, not at all. I'm speaking to the general case, where if, in the absence of external guidance, this is how I would approach things.You are not the general case by definition of having a one-on-one conversation with me. You have almost certainly weighed the trade-offs, looked at the context behind what you're doing and why, and have come to the right decision. I don't pretend to know your business, or your constraints, or your capabilities, so me sitting here with no outside expertise, looking at what you've done, and saying, “Oh, that's not the right way to do it,” is ignorant. Why would anyone do that? People are surprised by that because context matters an awful lot.Francessca: Context does matter, and the reason why we try not to just be overly prescribed, again, is all customers are different. We try to group pattern; so we do see themes with patterns. And then the other thing that we try to do is much of our scale happens through our partner ecosystem, Corey, so we try to make sure that we provide the same frameworks and guidance to our partners with enough flexibility where our partners and their IP can also support that for our customers. We have a pretty robust partner ecosystem and about 150-plus partners that are actually with our migration, you know, modernization competency. So yeah, it's ongoing, and we're going to continue to iterate on it based on customer feedback. And also, again, our portfolio of where customers are: a startup is going to look very different than 100-year-old enterprise, or an independent software vendor, who's moving to SaaS. [smile].Corey: Exactly. And my ridiculous build-out for my newsletter pipeline system leverages something like a dozen different AWS services. Is this the way that I would recommend it for most folks? No, but for what I do, it works for me; it provides a great technology testbed. And I think that people lose sight pretty quickly of the fact that there is in fact, an awful lot of variance out there between use cases' constraints. If I break my newsletter, I have to write it by hand one morning. Oh, heavens, not that. As opposed to, you know, if Capital One goes down and suddenly ATMs starts spitting out the wrong balance, well, there's a slightly different failure domain there.Francessca: [smile].Corey: I'm not saying which is worse, mind you, particularly from my perspective, however, I'm just saying it's different.Francessca: I was going to tell you, your newsletter is important to us, so we want to make sure there's reliability and resiliency baked into that.Corey: But there isn't any because of my code. It's terrible. This—if—like, forget a region outage. It's far more likely I'm going to make a bad push or discover some weird edge case and have to spend an hour or two late at night fixing something, as might have happened the night before this recording. Ahem.Francessca: [smile]. Well, by the way, I'm obligated, as your Chief Solution Architect, to have you look at some form of a prototype or proof of concept for Textract if you're having to handwrite out all the newsletters. You let me know when you'd like me to come in and walk you through how we might be able to streamline that. [smile].Corey: Oh, I want to talk about what I've done. I want to start a new sub-series on your site. You have the This is my Architecture. I want to have something, This is my Nonsense Architecture. In other words, one of these learning by counterexample stories.Francessca: [smile]. Yeah, Matt Yanchyshyn will love that. [smile].Corey: I'm sure he will. Francessca, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more about who you are, what you believe, and what you're up to, where can they find you?Francessca: Well, they can certainly find me out on Twitter at @FrancesscaV. I'm also on LinkedIn. And I also want to thank you, Corey. It's been great just spending this time with you. Keep up the snark, keep giving us feedback, and keep doing the great things you're doing with customers, which is most important.Corey: Excellent. I look forward to hearing more about what you folks have in store. And we'll, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:40:01]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.Francessca: Thank you. Have a good one.Corey: Francessca Vasquez, VP of Technology at AWS. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me why there is in fact an AWS/400 mainframe; I just haven't seen it yet.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

No segundo episódio da trilha de setor público, trazemos Renata Trindade para falar dos programas AWS que beneficiam diretamente os clientes. Entenda mais sobre os programas AWS Edstart, AWS Educate, AWS Academy, Digigov e mais. Dúvidas? Mande um email para pslatam-rsvp@amazon.comCréditos: Trilha sonora – Copyright:Acid Trumpet by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3340-acid-trumpet - License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseFunkorama by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3788-funkorama - License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license (edited)

No segundo episódio da trilha de setor público, trazemos Renata Trindade para falar dos programas AWS que beneficiam diretamente os clientes. Entenda mais sobre os programas AWS Edstart, AWS Educate, AWS Academy, Digigov e mais. Dúvidas? Mande um email para pslatam-rsvp@amazon.com Trilha sonora – Copyright: Acid Trumpet by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3340-acid-trumpetLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Funkorama by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3788-funkoramaLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

In this amazing episode of The EdUp Experience, we have the honor of speaking with Ken Eisner, Director of Worldwide Education Programs with Amazon Web Services. The AWS Educate & AWS Academy programs aim to fill the need for skilled workers in cloud computing technologies - which is at an all-time high. Ken discusses Ed-Tech's role in educational equity, and why technology can contribute to closing the wealth gap through economic attainment. Also, Ken points out why co-created learning between business and education is changing the learning landscape, and why it's essential that the 21st century institutions better be FAST and AGILE. With the most important outcome of education being the job, the future of education is hands-on, career aligned, and SPEED needs to be the new normal for Higher Ed! BOOM! Ken is an education technology leader with 20+ years-experience spearheading initiatives that improve educational outcomes and disrupt traditional delivery models. Ken founded AWS Educate, Amazon's global initiative to dramatically accelerate cloud learning and prepare students for a cloud-enabled workforce. Program demand has far outstripped projections, with a membership composed of hundreds of thousands of students and over 2,400 institutions including all of the top ten leading global computer science higher education institutions. Thanks so much for tuning in. Join us again next time for another episode! Contact Us! Connect with the hosts - Elvin Freytes, Elizabeth Leiba, and Dr. Joe Sallustio ● If you want to get involved, leave us a comment or rate us! ● Join the EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! ● Follow us on Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube Thanks for listening! We make education your business!

From high school students to US Veterans, AWS Educate is a global initiative by Amazon to provide students and educators resources to learn about the cloud. In honor of Veterans Day, the Fix This team sat down with two Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees to learn how AWS Educate can help transitioning Veterans learn cloud-based skills. First, the team talked to Hannah Buffington, AWS Educate marketing manager, to learn about the basics of the program. Next, the team heard from Caleb Jarrett, a Veteran and current AWS lead development representative for the Department of Defense (DoD). Caleb shared how he used the program to jumpstart his career at AWS, and how it shaped his current role.

Some awesome things happening at Hocking College Data Analytics program has been approved New updates with AWS Educate

Join us for four ten-minute powerful lightning talks from leading higher-education educators on topics related to AWS Educate, education, innovation, voice AI, ML, and deep learning.

Escucha la noticia del lanzamiento de AWS EDUCATE desde Guadalajara para Latinoamérica.

Talent skilled in app development, cloud computing, and data has never been in higher demand, yet companies are struggling to quickly fill their open jobs. Ken Eisner from AWS Educate shares what teachers and students need to do today in order for students to have the skills to take advantage of these booming careers tomorrow. For more InspirED, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! AWS Educate Resources – www.awseducate.com or in myPLTW   Follow links: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Subscribe links: iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, email newsletter Feedback or suggestions: Email us at podcast@pltw.org.   GUEST: Ken Eisner – Twitter HOSTED BY: Jennifer Erbacher - LinkedIn, Twitter

Guest Tia Williams, AWS Training Architect About Tia is an AWS Training Architect at Linux Academy. AWS Certified x 5. Winner of the Linux Academy 2018 Student First Award. Cloud, Datacenter, and converged infrastructure as her area of focus for many years. Her experience includes NetApp, Cisco UCS, Cisco switching with VMware virtualization and cloud environments. From North Carolina Education Self Taught Years of Experience 14+ Where to Find Tia Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/tia-williams-3a90922/ Website/Blog http://tiatalkstech.com Mentions Linux Academy https://linuxacademy.com/ Linux Academy Free Community Edition https://linuxacademy.com/join/community Linux Academy AWS Beginners Course https://linuxacademy.com/amazon-web-services/training/course/name/aws-essentials-new AWS Educate https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/ AWS Educate provides tools for students around the world dreaming of a technology career. Students choose a standard AWS Account or the new AWS Educate Starter Account, which requires no credit card to join. Netapp Storage NetApp storage refers to the hardware and software solutions provided by NetApp for different organizations in various industries. Open Tech Positions at Linux Academy As Of 4.24.19 Angular Developer (Remote) https://jobs.lever.co/linuxacademy/0faf4491-b395-491d-8f9a-bd137d1ac22f Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer (Remote) https://jobs.lever.co/linuxacademy/b1b75b6a-a54c-4854-809f-f36ed4f08f28 AWS Training Architect (Remote) https://jobs.lever.co/linuxacademy/c26f0400-4cd5-4b84-b401-9ea084758396 Google Cloud Training Architect (Remote) https://jobs.lever.co/linuxacademy/fae198a4-c9a9-419a-9c27-99a95da8176f Microsoft Azure Training Architect (Remote) https://jobs.lever.co/linuxacademy/f66dc060-f72d-4e85-b787-e5af9d867558 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/frauvis/support

On LinkedIn, the #1 skill for three years in a row is cloud and distributed computing. The pressure on our educational system to produce tech-ready employees, and on companies to source talent, is enormous, with ripe opportunities for disintermediation. In this session, hear from the disruptors who are collaborating with AWS Educate in order to rapidly change the trajectory and impact that global skills gap. Meet both the supply and demand side for cloud jobs.

Singapore's National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) Learning Hub works with AWS Educate to reach a different audience — adult learners. Spearheading a global movement, the NTUC intends to train and re-skill 20,000 Singaporeans to build cloud computing skills before the end of 2019. https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate

The California Cloud Workforce Project (“CA Cloud”), a consortium of 19 LA County community colleges and their sister high schools, designed a Cloud Computing Certificate in collaboration with faculty at Santa Monica College and AWS Educate. Intended to scale, CA Cloud sets a precedent for thinking big about global cloud curriculum. https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate

Cloud computing has been highlighted by LinkedIn as the #1 in-demand global skill for the past three years in a row, with Northern Virginia housing one of the largest concentrations of IT jobs in the nation. Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) and AWS Educate collaborate to create an innovative degree offering, an associates degree with cloud computing specialization. https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate

This is a Special Series about Workforce Development Using AWS Educate. AWS Educate launches the AWS Siklab Pilipinas in Manila, Philippines. The Siklab — a Tagalog word that translates to a flame and spark — provided cloud essentials training and a job fair for 400 students and 80 educators across 90 institutions. https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/

Deep diving into the skills revolution which will power the future economy: cloud literacy. Vincent Quah, Regional Head, Education, Research, Healthcare and Not-For-Profit, Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services also talks us through AWS Educate.

Simon speaks with Ken Eisner, Senior Manager of Worldwide AWS Education Programs about AWS Educate. Are you an educator looking for up-to-date content for your curriculum? Are you a student wanting to get modern, relevant qualifications? Do you want to “re-skill” yourself with some of the most valued technical skills in the market? Take a listen to how the AWS Educate program can help - PLUS a special code for $150 of AWS Credit is shared in the episode (NOTE: code valid to 31st December 2017). https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/