Author: Aaron Osmond

In this challenging job market, many Texans who lost their jobs to COVID-19 lack the skills to quickly reenter the workforce to secure employment with employers with open roles. With support from the Texas State Legislature, the Texas Association of Community Colleges (TACC) and AWS announced a statewide collaboration committed to equipping Texas community colleges with professional development, technical training, and certification exams for those educators, instructors, and faculty who will begin implementing the AWS Academy program starting next fall.

This week, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) announced a statewide plan to train and certify at least 5,000 Arizona students in cloud computing by June 2022. The state’s Career and Technical Education Districts (CTED), community colleges, and universities will train students using the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs. Arizona is the most recent state to collaborate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform their future workforce with cloud readiness and technical education programs.

States are transforming their workforce and addressing immediate unemployment and re-skilling challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. One state—Utah—announced a plan to train and certify 5,000 students for cloud careers by June 2022. Yesterday, Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert announced the statewide initiative, enable training at Utah technical schools, community colleges, universities, and select K-12 career and technical education schools with access to AWS education and training programs.