AWS re:Invent 2020: Building the cloud workforce of tomorrow with AWS
hello and welcome to building the work the cloud workforce of tomorrow with aws i'm nick lee roman yellow consortium manager and program manager with aws educate and i'm delighted to be joined today by antonio delgado he's the dean of engineering technology and design with miami-dade college before we get started here's a quick look at the agenda i'm going to be describing the demand for cloud skills and the opportunity in education to provide teaching and learning resources for students to prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow in cloud at the end of the presentation we'll hear from miami-dade college and antonio will be telling us about the amazing success that they've had in bringing cloud skills to their students and learners finally we'll talk a bit about how to hire those learners and where to find this new pipeline of cloud skill talent that we're working on at aws professionals with cloud skills are in very high demand as most of you know who are listening to this it's very difficult to find the cloud skilled talent that you need to fill the roles in your businesses ninety percent of organizations report severe shortages in cloud skills and i teach the decision makers are having a very difficult time with 80 percent telling us that the cloud computing skills they need are not available in the candidates that they're looking for this brings us to a huge opportunity in education in fact it is our goal at aws to expand and diversify the pool of cloud skilled talent we do that through many different programs but the two we'll focus on today are aws academy and aws educate we work with education institutions around the world to help students build the skills they need to pursue cloud careers at aws academy they provide higher education institutions with ready-to-teach courses and learning resources designed by aws experts aws academy provides curriculum developed and maintained by aws gets faculty ready to teach those courses make sure the courses are aligned to aws certifications and then prepares students for jobs at the end of these courses aws academy students can take courses that give them the opportunity to develop a range of skills from foundational cloud concepts all the way to higher level cloud computing concepts like architecting developing machine learning operations and data analytics as you can see aws academy and aws educate which we'll get to next have member institutions with students going through programs as described around the world aws educate is amazon's global initiative to provide students and educators with resources for building skills in cloud talent we create pathways for in-demand jobs and technology on aws educate students can find self-paced online learning content they also are able to get into the aws console via aws promotional credits there's a job board where we can connect students who are learning cloud skills to employers who are looking to hire those students and just like aws academy the faculty members have an opportunity to upskill themselves in cloud computing so that they can teach the students the skills they need to be successful in jobs once they finish the programs that they're working on aws educate does this work via a cloud competency framework it's a taxonomy of knowledge skills and abilities working backwards from employers needs and it enables a common language between learners educators and employers so that students know what they need to learn in order to be successful in jobs employers know what students have learned communicate with us to help us know what are the cloud competencies that students need to be successful at the end of the jobs and then we work hand in glove to build programs that meet those needs in order to do this well we have learned that academic institutions have to bring leadership at five different levels in order to build programs that we can say are verified the students coming out of that program will learn and understand have the knowledge skills and abilities that they need to be successful in different job families in cloud computing that includes our ability to support leadership align curriculum to the cloud competency framework and to jobs that that are high demand jobs for students faculty development so that teachers and faculty can upskill themselves and teach the cloud concepts necessary for students to be successful and then we employ we engage directly with employers that's aws aws partners and aws customers to connect students completing their work to the jobs that you're looking to fill we also support students in career support so that they're putting their best foot forward as they look to apply for new jobs the most important impact we have and the reason that we do this work is to impact individuals to bring the opportunity of cloud computing to students first who normally get these opportunities last you can see some students on screen where we have shown the kind of success that they have finishing this getting themselves jobs and most importantly earning their families a family sustaining income with that i'm going to throw the presentation over to antonio delgado who's going to tell us about the amazing work that they've done at miami-dade college he's one of the most inspiring educators that i know and he's going to show us the many and varied ways that he's bringing aws cloud talent to the community of miami dane thank you very much nick it's a real pleasure to be here today presenting with you about this amazing opportunity to develop cloud talent and how to connect that talent so before we jump into our case study i want to really share about miami-dade college who we are miami-dade college is one of the largest institutions in this nation we serve more than 100 000 students every year and the beauty of our student body is that 91 of them are minorities so we are very proud to be serving the minorities and to give them the chance to get a job high-paying job that really helped and connect their career further and we are extremely proud of developing this cloud computing degree to connect our students with that opportunity that next step to really get them with a ticket to the middle class that's how we call it so i wanted to share on this presentation today how miami-dade college developed the cloud computing journey in partnership 100 with amazon web services so we are extremely proud of being doing this unique partnership since we started more than two years ago when we first discovered about all the opportunities that aws had to offer it was around 2018 and and they really helped us define that timeline that i'm sharing with you so in today's presentation you're gonna see how we started by doing faculty training how we develop the courses how we open our own cloud computing center how we connected with high school students and summer camps and then from there how how we launch our cloud degrees and also cloud courses for existing professionals that we're not looking for degrees then from there we're going to see how we connected those students how we train them how we got them certified and how we are finishing now on the first group connecting them with jobs so let's start with faculty training for every academic institution it's really hard to find the the instructors of these classes the ones that are certified and ready to teach they're already getting really high paying jobs so it's really hard for us to compete with those salaries instead of looking for that outside of the institution in partnership with aws academy in this case we created the the the training opportunities for our own internal body of faculty to get them certified and ready to teach these courses so through aws academy in summer of 2018 we did the first training for faculty and two years later i'm extremely proud to say that we have got eight aws certified solutions architect associate faculty that are getting certified to teach in the classroom to give this content to the students not only for their own benefit outside of that uh solutions architect of course all of them got into the cloud practitioner as an entry level but they decided some of them decided to even continue their education with aws so they went further and they got the two of them got the developer associate certification one of them went through data analytics and one got the security specialty so that tells you how engaged these faculty are with aw aws once they were given the opportunity to get this training and skills so the second step once once you have this faculty certified and ready it's like you need the courses that you need to teach but we don't want to reinvent the wheel we don't want to really get out of the this is what we believe that we should be delivering a classroom so it's the opposite we work with aws to really get what are the skills that we need to have on each of these courses and aws educate an academy both of them were essential on helping us create the right courses for our students for our curriculum and not only the cloud courses that the three that you see on the screen that we've developed in connection with cloud practitioners solutions architect but also other courses that are part of the foundation that students need to have in cloud computing and we collect clarification of courses for example in databases linux python security and that's a curriculum that we're now delivering to our students so talking about curriculum when you have this group of courses ready to be taught in cloud so you put them together and then you have degrees and that's what exactly what we did a year ago on september of 2019 we launched two degrees in cloud computing the first one is a college credit certificate it's a reduced version only six courses for those professionals that are really not looking for a degree they're looking for the skills to get into the cloud and this is their option that they can complete in eight to eleven months but we also have the option of the two-year associate degree like any other college does and an associate degree you get the skills to get a job and that's the pathway that we're providing now for the first time in florida in cloud computing and this degree it also started together in fall of 2019 when we started offering these first few courses on top of that we're now working on the next steps as you saw some faculty getting specialties we're also developing those advanced courses in cloud for bachelor level and that's where we want our students to get once we get them to complete an associate degree they can continue getting with those specialties from aws for example so we are developing courses we have faculty training but we were missing something amanda college and that's something that we want to share with everyone because it's essential how to connect with industry aws is a great partner but we wanted to bring all the local ecosystem to one physical place and that's what we did by developing a cloud computing center at miami college not only to have classrooms that's what we already have in a college is to create that space of collaboration a space for aws clients to come and learn about you know the latest aws release let's have meetups let's have uh training for existing professionals that want to get one particular certification so that's the space that we created and we are extremely happy to share that we have already offered after a year of creating this space multiple awesome days with aws even the deep razor competition happening at this particular space and having the beauty of this space at the end a year later we can say despite of covet of course we are not using it in person at this at this time was to get those existing companies and professionals in the cloud coming to the college and then having our students networking meeting with these companies giving them the chance to get an opportunity to potentially get an internship or a job so now let me tell you about the journey that we launched the programs what happened what happened is that in since september of 2019 when we launched these courses we launched the programs we have had 64 students enrolling at any given time during the year those 64 students it's amazing for me to say that 54 of them had already aws cloud practitioner certified and that's an amazing passing rate considering that you know this is the first year that we implement fully the program but even better for me is to see that these students without any work experience in cloud 30 of them that already got to the advanced solutions architect class 30 of them are already certified so in the first year we are we have already proven that this partnership with fatal us is producing exactly what we wanted to produce students that are well trained but also certified to get that cloud job that they are looking for now out of those 64 students i can tell you that we have 14 students that have already completed most of those students are already finding employment in the cloud and that's something i'm going to touch in a few slides coming now but first let me tell you about how we connected with high school students when you when we all know about cloud we know what it is we know what what it does but when you ask a high school student what is cloud they say cloud is what we have on the sky they really don't know what cloud computing is so we decided that even before launching this cloud degree associate degree we had to connect with high school students but by explaining them we connected with high schools that were already having technology courses and we invited these high schools to send us the students we we created a summer camp two-week summer camp totally for free for for 30 high school students and in only two weeks we give them this cloud 101. what is amazing that in only two weeks we were able to get 21 of these students at aws cloud practitioner certified that was an outcome that we really didn't expect and even better for for us was that 22 of those students decided to continue in dual enrollment courses at miami college to continue learning about the cloud so a year later we got back to you know they continued dual enrollment courses we go to april of 2020 what i can tell you is that 10 high school students dual enrollment students are already aws solutions architect certified and we're talking about high school students so this formula works even for high school students and we're extremely proud of that now when we talk about degrees cloud computing courses and the opportunity that we have created we at some point realize that we have the knowledge already and then covet happened we saw the impact on the local community many people losing jobs so we decided why don't we offer this knowledge that we have gotten from aws why don't we offer these courses for free on this particular two certifications so we can get most of these people back with jobs and some of them brand new to cloud others already were in 19 and working so it was easier for them so we developed two courses through continuing education and no cost one was four weeks only for for the aws cloud practitioner we had 54 students going through these courses during the summer 45 of them certified great they have a chance to get into the cloud or at least to get the fundamentals on how the cloud works on aws and then we have a more advanced course eight weeks that you of course needed to have certain foundation we had 17 students in that course eight of eight of them already aws solutions architect certified so this is great information like great we have a program that works but we can also benefit our local community we can also give a chance to those students or those professionals that lost their jobs and want to jump into the cloud or really learn from scratch we have a formula that works and why because of this partnership with failus so we got to the last point of the whole uh timeline that i showed you before you have the students you are getting them ready you're getting them certified what is the next step we need to connect them with jobs and that's the opportunity that when when we started the program yes there is a lot of job opportunities great but then we got to a hiccup when we started getting the students to graduate and it was that most of the companies like as you know when you look for talent you're looking for someone that is not only certified but someone that has some years of work experience usually three to five years what is the challenge here we're talking about students we're talking about college students and most of them don't have those three to five years of experience so what we decided to do was a roundtable with all the local companies hiring talent in cloud computing and really give them an overview of the program that we developed in partnership with aws but also about the talent that we're producing versus the gap on the skills that they were looking for so what we were able to get from that roundtable is a connection to connect those companies with capstone projects so the students can work in in real projects what they are learning in the classroom so they can add that those years of experience becomes more of real projects are working as part of the classroom and also internships for the students to show that they're ready and from there to get a full-time job and then based on that four or five months later we were able to see the first few companies believing in the students believing in the product that we were offering believing in the talent that was coming out of the classroom and we had companies that at some point decided really the partners that trust us and said i'm we're not gonna require a bachelor degree we're not gonna require three to five years of experience we're gonna get one of your students and see how that works what happened is that that company went from one to three students automatically because when they were interviewing the candidate they said this is exactly what we were looking for let's change the rules from from our hr department let's bring those students let's give them a chance and that's what is happening already with three five companies here locally and that's what we're planning to expand so what i wanted to conclude is that this partnership with aws and miami-dade college as a local institution serving the community really works to change lives and we're doing that all the way from training faculty to getting student certified to placing the students and aws has been an amazing partner doing that now our next steps is how can we engage more companies to really get the talent that we're producing how can we close the gap that exists in cloud computing how can we create new training based on the needs that those companies have based on the needs that you have and how can we continue increasing the pipeline of high school students of college students and existing professionals getting the skills that are needed in the cloud so thank you very much for the opportunity nick i'm passing back to you thank you everyone thank you antonio we're so grateful for your work we find it inspiring every day it's amazing what you've done for high school students what you've done for students and community in your community college connecting those students to jobs is truly going to make a difference in the miami-dade region if you're interested in looking for entry-level cloud talent for your open roles we have job boards you can see on the screen where you can go to to sign yourself up get yourself registered and find the talent coming out of the programs that we're serving all over the world and if you're more if you're interested in aws academy or aws educate you can also find those resources by going to the links you see on the screen with that thank you very much and i'd like to close by saying we just want to say thank you and extend our gratitude the work we do is just supporting academic institutions and faculty members teachers in bringing cloud competencies to their students in teaching and modernizing the curriculum that they've already taught and in connecting students to jobs once they have learned the cloud content that we are supporting them in bringing the educators that we work with have had a very difficult time all through this pandemic and we're really inspired by their work so thank you very much and thank you for coming to this presentation on aws educate aw aws academy and the amazing work at miami-dade college
2021-02-11 09:17
