Amazon has announced it will provide free cloud training to some 29 million people around the world by 2025.
Amazon’s AWS is the leading cloud platform, with 31% of the market. In spite of its lead, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM have been making headway in an effort to close the gap. At the same time, the cloud computing market as a whole is experiencing unprecedented growth as a result of the pandemic and companies’ reliance on remote work.
To help with the latter, Amazon is investing hundreds of millions to provide free training to 29 million people around the world over the next several years. Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services, made the announcement at re:Invent 2020.
As part of our efforts to continue supporting the future workforce, we are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to people from all walks of life and all levels of knowledge, in more than 200 countries and territories. We will provide training opportunities through existing AWS-designed programs, as well as develop new courses to meet a wide variety of schedules and learning goals. The training ranges from self-paced online courses—designed to help individuals update their technical skills—to intensive upskilling programs that can lead to new jobs in the technology industry.
Given the free training will be through “existing AWS-designed programs,” it’s a safe bet the training will also help Amazon maintain its lead in the cloud market. While the company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s hard to put a price on millions of people having their first serious exposure to cloud computing via Amazon’s platform.
