AWS Educate adds cloud career courses, job board
Amazon wants to put those with AWS Educate qualifications into jobs.
Amazon Web Services is adding cloud-related learning courses to its Amazon Educate e-learning platform to encourage the development of skills for cloud related roles -- and the company is inviting employers to recruit for roles on a newly created AWS Educate Job Board.
The move is described as a global initiative to provide students and educators with the resources required to "accelerate cloud-related learning" and represents AWS getting further involved with education. Meanwhile the job board sees the company taking a step into online job hunting and recruitment, putting it in direct competition with the likes of LinkedIn.
At its heart, AWS Educate -- which was launched in May last year -- provides education institutions and students with cloud-related learning. Professors, teaching assistants, and students all receive access to AWS technology and open source content for courses, as well as access to a community of users to interact and learn with.
The education platform has added over 25 new modules dubbed "Cloud Career Pathways" which offer students instructional videos, lab exercises, online courses, whitepapers, and podcasts they can learn from at their own pace.
Courses are spread across four job areas -- cloud architect, software developer, operations-support engineer, and analytics and big data specialist -- and are designed to match up with relevant internships and jobs posted on the AWS Educate Job Board. Employers which have already signed up to post roles include Amazon itself, along with Cloudnexa, Instructure, Salesforce, Splunk, Udacity, and others in the cloud software industry.
According to AWS, the job board represents a natural addition to their e-learning platform, as it allows students to find work relevant to their skills.
"We built AWS Educate with a vision of helping to cultivate a cloud-enabled workforce," said Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS.
"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," she added.
Educate isn't Amazon's only e-learning tool; earlier this year the company rolled out Inspire, a free online education service for teachers which acts a portal where teachers and other educators can share resources for digital learning.