AWS Helps Students Find Cloud Jobs with New AWS Educate Capabilities

Amazon Web Services is doing its part in closing the cloud skills gap by adding new capabilities to AWS Educate, its global initiative to provide students and educators with the resources for cloud-related learning.

The new capabilities, announced on Tuesday, include Cloud Career Pathways – 25 self-paced content modules – and an AWS Educate Job Board to help students find entry-level jobs that use the skills they learned in training.

AWS Educate was launched last year to bring AWS to institutions, educators, and students. AWS skills have real value as shown in a recent report by Global Knowledge which says that an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is the top-paying certification.

Cloud Career Pathways include instructional videos, lab exercises, online courses, whitepapers, and podcasts. The Pathways connect to four overarching job families: Cloud Architect, Software Developer, Operations-Support Engineer, and Analytics and Big Data Specialist.

Students can map their academic training and achievements to relevant internships and jobs posted on the AWS Educate Job Board, which features companies including Amazon, Cloudnexa, Salesforce, and others.

“We built AWS Educate with a vision of helping to cultivate a cloud-enabled workforce. It’s been inspiring to see students from every corner of the globe – from Brooklyn to Bombay to Singapore to Seoul – embrace AWS Educate, eager to digest learnings from top computer science courses, and get their hands on their first Amazon S3 bucket,” Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS said in a statement. “Based on that vision, we are taking the program one step further and adding a connection to employers who are in need of the cloud skills students can learn on AWS Educate. We’ve designed Cloud Career Pathways that will help students get targeted experience and skills, and placed those side-by-side with relevant jobs from some of the most in-demand technology employers today.”    

Each Cloud Career Pathways includes a minimum of 30 hours of content. After students successfully complete the modules they receive badges and certificates that appear on their AWS Educate profile.

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

The new capabilities of AWS Educate are available now to students in the U.S., India, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and China.