As tech companies the world over face an acute crunch of skilled workforce in the field of cloud computing, retail giant Amazon's cloud arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has decided to go beyond providing training and certification to now help students grab relevant openings in Cloud.

According to Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, the time is ripe to connect skilled students with employers via "AWS Educate" - a global initiative to provide students and educators with the resources needed to accelerate cloud-related learning.

"There are hundreds of thousands of job openings in cloud computing today. 'AWS Educate' will now help students communicate with over 30 potential employers - including Amazon.

"With this, AWS Educate goes beyond just training and certification to connect skilled students with the employers and fill the skill gap in cloud-based technologies," Carlson told a select gathering at the flagship "AWS ReInvent 2018" event here.

Another tool called "Interview Accelerator" in "AWS Educate" will help candidates advance through the job application process faster, she informed.

Globally, over 1,500 institutions and more than 10,000 educators have joined "AWS Educate" to accelerate their journey towards helping the young generation acquire cloud skills.

The beauty of "AWS Educate" is that 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.

"AWS Educate" has nearly 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.

The move to connect skilled students with the right employers is going to help thousands of "AWS Educate" participants in India, at a time when the country is also facing a huge skill gap in emerging technologies.

IT industry's apex body Nasscom in July 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 Andhra government this month 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.

As part of a pilot programme in 2017, the Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC) rolled out the "AWS Educate" programme to engineering colleges in the state, and enrolled more than 10,000 students into various "Cloud Career Pathways".

The "Cloud Career Pathway" framework enables students to put their cloud knowledge to use across 12 self-paced pathways aligned to labour market trends and workforce needs.

By September, more than 13,000 students were enrolled in the AWS Educate programme from nearly 130 non-engineering colleges.

Not just empowering students, AWS is also helping researchers make sense of the humongous data-sets at their disposal.

According to Carlson, AWS recently launched 19 new data sets for researchers spanning across the fields - from healthcare to space science - in its Open Data Registry.

When data is shared on AWS Open Registry, anyone can analyse it and build services on top of it using a broad range of compute and data analytics products, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Athena, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR).

Sharing data in the cloud lets data users spend more time on data analysis rather than data acquisition.

Carlson also informed that AWS will organise its flagship Public Sector Summit in New Delhi next year.