On Tuesday this week, Amazon announced AWS Skill Builder Individual and Team subscriptions.
Last fall, AWS introduced Skill Builder, a digital learning platform with free on-demand training modules. The new subscription service incorporates builder labs that cover common cloud scenarios and AWS Jam, which challenges users to solve open-ended problems. This adds to AWS Skill Builder subscriptions, giving registered individuals and organizations access to exclusive learning materials built by builders for builders, in addition to the 500+ free courses.
The instructional package also incorporates AWS Cloud Quest. In this “role-based game, your mission is to help citizens of a virtual city by learning and building cloud solutions for their challenges,” according to the post.
Why do we care?
If you missed my live stream Wednesday night from CompTIA’s ChannelCon, upskilling workers was a key theme of the event, and I’d encourage you to catch that segment in the video on YouTube. CompTIA has a vision of certification growth… and Amazon does too. What intrigues me here is the idea of a subscription-based service for training. It’s not necessarily new… but how often are these subscriptions offered as employee benefits? Can they be used to grow teams systematically and even build the new employees you need? If Masterclass can do it on the consumer side, there’s reason to believe it would be successful in staffing too.