Creating a skilled pool of Indian coders top priority: Amazon Cloud arm AWS

India that produced amazing software engineers in the first wave of technology is now set to create builders for the future, said AWS.

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As disruptive technologies begin to touch every part of our daily lives, the world today needs builders who can write Cloud-driven smart algorithms to help companies deliver customer experiences -- be it retail, banking, food, transportation or health sector.

According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of retail giant Amazon, India that produced amazing software engineers in the first wave of technology is now set to create builders for the future.

"The whole idea is to write smart codes. With our 'AWS Educate' programme, we're sort of setting new records in India where several institutions have signed up a number of students for the programme. The response to join the next phase of skilling has been tremendous for us in the country," Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director for APAC and Japan, Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon, told IANS.

"AWS Educate" has over 30 career pathways to choose from which essentially belong to four big job families -- Big data and analytics, cloud architecture, system/engineering support and software/web development.

"Rather than focusing on specific certification of technologies -- which has been the traditional approach by the IT companies -- we focus on learning pathways where you basically focus on what is the outcome that you want like if you want to become a data scientist," Moore explained.

Globally, over 10,000 educators and more than 2,400 institutions are today using "AWS Educate". It is available to students aged 14 and older around the world, helping young students learn fundamental cloud principles.

Students, while receiving hands-on training and access to content prepared by some of the top computer science institutions from across the world, also get free Cloud credits into their accounts.

The Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur is the latest institution to adopt "AWS Educate".

"We are happy to introduce AWS Educate programme to provide AWS Cloud Computing experience and AI-enablement for all our students, irrespective of their branch of study. We look forward to some really innovative solution ideas coming out of this," Professor P.P. Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur said in March this year.

According to Rahul Sharma, President, Public Sector, Amazon Internet Services Private Limited in India, "AWS Educate is designed to upskill students with the latest advancements in cloud computing technology and provide them with an environment to experiment on AWS Cloud, without worrying about cost or access challenges".

Tens of thousands of students in India are already part of the "AWS Educate" programme.

"India has a brimming community of developers, start-ups and young entrepreneurs. Once the country has smart builders, the growth across the spectrum would see no boundaries," said Moore.

The Andhra government last year launched a Cloud-based initiative with AWS, where it will skill 60,000 students across the state's over 300 engineering and non-engineering colleges by 2020.

The move to prepare builders is critical at a time when the country is facing a huge skill gap in emerging technologies.

IT industry's apex body NASSCOM last year highlighted that around 1.4 lakh jobs remain vacant in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data Analytics segment across various sectors in India, out of the total demand of 5.1 lakh employees in the country.

"The time is to go beyond providing training and certification to now help students grab relevant openings in Cloud," stressed Moore.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)