The company has a goal to train 29 million people by 2025.

Amazon recently announced four initiatives for people to access free training with a focus on cloud computing based on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) system. At the end of 2020, the company started an initiative that hoped to train 29 million people by 2025. The program started by taking 300,000 employees from the mammoth company’s workforce and upgrading their skills, moving people from different departments and business groups into Amazon’s tech groups for jobs with higher growth potential and greater technical demands.

AWS learners can be part of the 29 million trainees. (Image courtesy of Amazon.)

AlphaBeta compiled a study commissioned by AWS titled Building Skills for the Changing Workforce and published it in November 2021. The study looked at the workforces in 12 countries and how they were affected by the pandemic and digitalization trends. The study found that 87 percent of employers adopted new technology faster during the pandemic. Using cloud-based tools is predicted to be the most in-demand skill in 2025. Along with this requirement for cloud-based skills, the study found that in just the next year 174 million people would need training in a digital skill to meet the future demands of their employers.

On the employee side, 85 percent of workers expressed a desire to obtain more digital skills to keep up with the technology changes at their jobs. Two out of three workers were reportedly “not confident that they are gaining digital skills fast enough to meet future career needs.” General pandemic malaise, these factors and other issues led to the high number of workers leaving their jobs over the last two years. The study reported that 56 percent of organizations polled saw a higher number of resignations occur during the pandemic. Training was one way that employers found to bump up employee retention rates. The report’s findings showed that 84 percent of employers that increased training during the pandemic had higher employee retention rates, and that 80 percent of employees who received training during the pandemic felt a higher level of job satisfaction.

Overall, AlphaBeta’s report showed a global shortfall in digital skills and the likelihood that this shortfall will persist as the world becomes increasingly digital. Based on the companies surveyed in the study, 97 percent expressed the need for workers with higher levels of digital skills, but only 30 percent were training their employees to have these skills. A 67 percent global shortfall in the number of employees with the skills needed by their employers seems significant enough to spur action. To further push the urgency of this need, when the employers surveyed indicated that the most in-demand skill of 2025 would be cloud-based skills, only 45 percent of the workforce from the 12 countries surveyed were able to use cloud-based tools. When discussing higher-level cloud-based skills, only 16 percent of current employees have the skills that companies are seeking. The main reasons behind this mismatch between what employers need now and what employees have should be familiar to most engineers—employees lacked the time to perform training and lacked knowledge about the training opportunities available.

Amazon took this knowledge—and its large resources—and started to work on a solution to the problem. If the basic issue that needed to be solved was a lack of skilled workers, why not create those workers? The company kicked off four initiatives to bring worker skills up to the level that employers will need. The company launched AWS Skills Builder, added AWS courses to the Amazon website, expanded the company’s re/Start global reskilling program, and opened the brick-and-mortar AWS Skills Center.

The AWS Skills Center is designed to introduce digital skills. People who are uncomfortable with technology can come in and get an understanding of what the cloud is able to do and how it might change their lives in the future. Even people without phones can take advantage of the training by using tablets available in the center. Potential students can have almost-immediate access to courses and resources. The Cloud Discovery Space has displays with QR codes, and scanning those codes will let users sign up to take a short course right away.

The DeepRacer exhibit shows how machine learning affects the real world. (Image courtesy of Amazon.)

Folks looking for more in-depth training can also take the short introductory courses available in the physical Skills Center and then sign up for more advanced classes. Some of these courses are available right through the Amazon website. Users can “shop” courses by topic, skill level, and course length to find the training desired. Shopping is the term that the company uses here, but currently the price of every training is zero dollars. A tab shows the courses that a user has enrolled in and has completed.

The only detractor I can see from learning presented in this way is the lack of a learning path, but clicking on the Beginner button took the full array of courses and pared it down to five or six offerings. Each course presents a good amount of information before the user takes the plunge and begins the training. The AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course, for example, follows the general pattern of the courses on the site. A course overview is given, which outlines the objectives and recommended audience—that is, who will benefit the most from the course. A details section shows that the course will take approximately six hours to complete, includes 66 quizzes, and resides in the AWS category of training. A note in the overview alerts learners that the course helps to prepare them for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam (which does cost money).

The AWS Skill Builder lets users decide on a specific learning plan and then offers online courses to follow that learning plan. Each learning plan has an introduction page describing who the training is designed for and then a tab showing the courses with their descriptions and durations. Several different plans are available in a wide array of languages. Amazon says that more than 500 courses are available for learners.

A robot display shows how the cloud can boost manufacturing and transportation capabilities. (Image courtesy of Amazon.)

AWS re/Start is the company’s program to train unemployed and underemployed workers. Individuals from specific back-to-work or retraining projects can apply for this training with the expectation that they will gain the skills to sit for AWS certification exams and move on to digital skills-based jobs. The people eligible for this training vary by region, and the “How to apply” section of the page shows which organizations will sponsor students to complete the retraining program.

The AWS Academy was not one of the four big pushes outlined in the training announcement but still has value as a training path for students. Higher education institutions can sign up to offer cloud courses to their students and gain a prebuilt curriculum to present the cloud skills that employers need. There’s a standardized learning management system that students are already familiar with, and students get a 50 percent discount on their certification exams.

At this point in the evolution of society, it’s hard not to have an opinion about Amazon. There are even several opinions published about the training announcements and why Amazon is pushing this initiative.

Overall, it’s good that the company sponsored an AlphaBeta study, found a need, and is working to fill that need—that’s simple problem and solution engineering. Beyond this, it’s great to see a commitment to pushing the world to become more familiar with technology in general. But the company seems to be gearing its digital and cloud technology to be positioned everywhere in the near future.

Looking at the potential benefits Amazon will reap from offering this training, it will be good to have 29 million users who are familiar with AWS over other cloud platforms. When these users go out into the world and work their way up to decision-making positions, it will still be the AWS platform they’re most comfortable using.

Google Cloud has its own slate of free training but on a much smaller scale. There are also several other free paths to learn about cloud computing, most with a focus on Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft Azure. People who want to learn these skills should have resources available, with at least the training portions free and some of the certifications free or discounted. One pitfall perhaps not considered, however, is the portion of students who don’t enjoy online learning.

Now in our third year of online or hybrid learning, the pandemic has really highlighted the divide between students who are comfortable with self-paced online learning and those who do not enjoy or struggle to succeed with the experience. My experience as a college professor and a parent of a high schooler both shows that students who do not enjoy self-paced online learning will not excel in that kind of learning experience.

Axios published a survey saying that 59 percent of teens felt that online learning is worse than traditional learning, and that 19 percent felt that it was “much worse.” Data from the Excellence in Virtual Education project showed that 79 percent of university students felt they had lower results in performance and meeting learning objectives online. Some alternate methods, either in-person learning or more individualized learning paths, need to be in place before the world moves in a fully digital learning direction.