Amazon is working with three New York colleges — LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York and State University of New York — to launch a cloud-computing certificate program.
Four notes:
1. Students who attend LaGuardia Community College, CUNY and SUNY will be able to enroll in the new certificate program in 2019. LaGuardia Community College will also partner with at least one high school in New York City to offer enrollment in the 15-credit certificate program.
2. As part of the collaboration, Amazon's cloud arm — Amazon Web Services — will provide faculty at the colleges with professional development, such as curriculum-development workshops. Students will be able to receive free membership to AWS Educate, which provides hands-on experience with cloud tools and a job board that posts listings from AWS and members of the Amazon Partner Network.
3. Amazon said the program will provide students with the opportunity to learn skills for entry-level technology jobs. The company cited a LinkedIn study that found cloud and distributed computing were the most in-demand skills, as well as statistics on local demand for cloud computing talent in New York City, as reasons for focusing the certificate program on cloud computing.
4. The collaboration is part of Amazon's broader workforce development efforts in New York, following the company's decision to split its second headquarters between New York City and Arlington, Va.
"There is such rich talent in New York, and we want to ensure we're reaching New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds, as we hire for 25,000 jobs across the region," Ardine Williams, vice president of workforce development at Amazon, said in a news release.