As artificial intelligence seeps into much of the software available today, tech professionals have the chance to move into lucrative careers and expand their skill sets in AI.
Over the past few months, AWS has encouraged people to boost their AI skills with a wide selection of courses and certifications.
Last year, Amazon partnered with Code.org for the “AI Ready” commitment, which is a set of generative AI courses to teach generative artificial intelligence skills. Over the course of this commitment, Amazon wants to provide two million people across the globe with the skills needed for lucrative generative AI-focused careers by 2025.
In June, AWS announced it will open the doors of two new certifications starting in August. In addition, Amazon is offering cloud-computing skills training and other free online courses.
AWS to releases two new AI certifications in August
One certification, AWS Certified AI Practitioner, covers the fundamentals of artificial intelligence and machine learning, design considerations, model tuning and more. Since this is an AWS course, you should have some experience with AWS before you start; however, you don’t need to have built AI/ML solutions on AWS before. This certification costs $75 and concludes with a 120-minute exam. Enrollment opens on August 21.
The second certification, AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate, is designed for people who already have about a year of experience designing AI/ML on AWS. This certification teaches technical skills regarding ML workloads. It covers feature engineering, model training, model integration and deployment, security and more. AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate will release in beta, which means lessons from the first round of participants may be used to create a standard version of the exam later. The beta version is open for enrollment on August 13. It will cost $75 and include a 170-minute exam.
The certifications can then be added to a resume to show your AI knowledge has been verified by AWS.
Free generative AI training courses for professionals and beginners
AWS offers a variety of free or low-cost training courses to make using its platform easier. The following generative AI training courses are available for free from Amazon via AWS Skill Builder for developer and technical audiences:
- Foundations of Prompt Engineering.
- Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS.
- Building Language Models on AWS.
- Amazon Transcribe Getting Started.
- Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock.
The following generative AI training course is available for free from Amazon for beginners and students:
- Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers via AWS Skill Builder.
Employers seek AI skills
According to Indeed, generative AI skills are one of the highest-paying tech skills employers are looking for as of February 2024. Deep learning, a type of machine learning, made the list as well. Salesforce India pointed out in March 2024 that AI creates new types of tech jobs, including:
- Prompt engineering.
- AI training.
- Sentiment analysis.
- And more.
SEE: Generative AI skills can bring in the highest salaries in the tech industry today, according to Indeed. (TechRepublic)
AI Ready courses add to existing library of AI and cloud resources
These courses come in addition to Amazon’s existing free cloud computing classes. Amazon has a goal of giving 29 million people the right skills for cloud computing careers by 2025.
Amazon offers over 100 free and low-cost training courses and other resources on AI, ML, and generative AIÂ through AWS Skill Builder and AWS Educate. Taking some of these courses alongside generative AI training could broaden one’s understanding of how different AWS and Amazon capabilities work together, as well as contextualizing their places in the larger world of AI and ML technologies.
This article has been updated since initial publication.
