Skills in cloud computing have become almost essential in the modern workforce and Humber College is taking steps it hopes will help fill the talent gap in Canada.
Leading the way in that initiative is Humber’s launch of its Cloud Computing Ontario Graduate Certificate – the first of its kind in Canada – which is set to launch in the Fall of 2020 and was developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services.
Rani Dhaliwal, Humber’s senior vice president of transformation and strategic partnerships, says this course was an evolution of past conversations the college had done with AWS, which led them to evaluate how they could collaborate together.
“We started to have conversations as to ‘What do you do in training? And what are the other tools that you have? And how can that help us to fill our mandate?’. Which is really to ensure that there is appropriate knowledge and the skills in our learners that feed the industry requirements,” said Dhaliwal. “And from that conversation, we looked at our strengths and their opportunities.”
Through this partnership, Amazon will be providing Humber with its cloud infrastructure as well as many of the cloud computing tools being used in the course. Such tools include AWS Deep Racer, a 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, and ‘go smart with Alexa’, an AI training program that creates custom Alexa skills using Amazon Echo.
AWS’s head of programs for Latin America, Canada, and the Caribbean, Abby Daniell, says that the content of this course is based on much of the educational courses that AWS provides itself and was designed with the modern economy in mind, although with enough versatility to fill the varying jobs of our modern landscape.
“We’re all about helping educate students and then they get a job,” said Daniell. “Those pathways vary from everything from data analytics to cybersecurity to DevOps and cloud computing.”
Humber College is also due to become an AWS Academy Institution, and an AWS Certification Testing Center, which allows them to teach AWS’s curriculum and conduct the testing needed for AWS certification.
