As artificial intelligence permeates much of the software available today, there will be opportunities for tech professionals to transition into lucrative careers and expand their AI skillsets.
Over the past few months, AWS has been encouraging the development of AI skills through a wide range of courses and certifications.
Last year, Amazon partnered with Code.org to launch the “AI Ready” initiative, a set of generative AI courses that teach generative artificial intelligence skills. Through this initiative, Amazon hopes to equip 2 million people around the world with the skills they need for lucrative generative AI-centric careers by 2025.
AWS announced in June that it would launch two new certifications starting in August, and Amazon is also offering training in cloud computing skills and other free online courses.
AWS to launch two new AI certifications in August
The certification, AWS Certified AI Practitioner, covers artificial intelligence and machine learning fundamentals, design considerations, model tuning, and more. Because this is an AWS course, you should have some experience with AWS before you begin, but you don't need to have experience building AI/ML solutions on AWS. The certification costs $75 and is completed with a 120-minute exam. Registration opens on August 21.
The second certification, AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate, is designed for people with around a year of experience designing AI/ML on AWS. This certification teaches technical skills around ML workloads. It covers feature engineering, model training, model integration and deployment, security, and more. AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate will be released in beta, which means that the lessons of the first participants can be used to create a standard version of the exam later. You can register for the beta starting August 13th. It costs $75 and includes a 170-minute exam.
You can add the certification to your resume to show that your AI knowledge has been validated by AWS.
Free Generative AI Training Courses for Experts and Beginners
AWS offers a variety of free or low-cost training courses to help you get started with the platform. For developers and technologists, the following generative AI training courses are offered for free by Amazon via AWS Skill Builder:
- Prompt Engineering Fundamentals.
- Low-code machine learning on AWS.
- Build language models on AWS.
- Getting started with Amazon Transcribe.
- Build generative AI applications with Amazon Bedrock.
The following generative AI training courses are offered for free by Amazon for beginners and students:
- Generative AI learning plans for decision makers with AWS Skill Builder.
Employers are looking for AI skills
According to Indeed, generative AI skills are among the highest-paying tech skills sought by employers as of February 2024. Deep learning, a type of machine learning, is also included in the list. Salesforce India noted in March 2024 that AI will create new types of tech jobs, including:
- Rapid engineering.
- AI training.
- Sentiment analysis.
- more.
SEE ALSO: People with generative AI skills could command some of the highest salaries in tech today, according to Indeed (TechRepublic)
AI Ready courses will be added to our existing AI and Cloud resource library
These courses are in addition to Amazon's existing free cloud computing classes, as the company aims to equip 29 million people with the skills for cloud computing careers by 2025.
Amazon offers over 100 free or low-cost training courses and other resources on AI, ML, and generative AI through AWS Skill Builder and AWS Educate. Taking some of these courses alongside your generative AI training can help you better understand how different AWS and Amazon capabilities work together and how they fit into the larger world of AI and ML technologies.
This article has been updated since original publication.
