Author: AWS Public Sector Blog Team

re:Invent 2019 is next week! Are you still filling out your schedule? Remember that reserved seating is now available for some sessions. Consider these can’t-miss sessions for the public sector.

Parsons Corporation, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, announced 10 semi-finalists in the first Parsons Smart Cities Challenge. The competition, titled Transforming Intersections, will award the winning city with a year of support and services to help increase mobility around cities and reduce the amount of time citizens spend at red lights.

The sixth annual City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge opened new categories to highlight innovative customers that are driving actionable change for the benefit of constituents. The competition includes categories for constituent services, solving persistent problems, sustainability and equity, powered by AWS, dream big, and public datasets. The competition received more than 100 nominee use cases that highlighted how AWS customers are using the cloud to innovate and improve the lives of constituents.

To keep up with rapid technological advancement and the new world of work, current and future generations of leaders should be equipped with the right skills and mindset. Innovating in classrooms and beyond and creating citizen-centric services means taking advantage of the latest technology. It also means empowering the people who build and use it. AWS created resources that demonstrate paths to achieving a more diverse and prepared workforce – and how tech can help.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and FIRST®, a global robotics community, launched an initiative to provide students with cloud-related learning content and resources on subjects from storage to machine learning. The AWS Educate program, featuring computer science and cloud content, is now available to all volunteer mentors and students ages 14 and up participating in FIRST Robotics Competition and FIRST Tech Challenge.

Ellucian announced the launch of a new initiative in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to both streamline and accelerate digital transformation and cloud adoption for higher education. The initiative – the Cloud Acceleration program – is available for a limited time to all Ellucian Banner and Ellucian Colleague on-premises customers considering moving to the cloud during 2020.

This month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and California IT in Education (CITE, formerly CETPA) announced the new California AB 1584 Compliance Addendum, a contract addendum available to AWS customers in California that are required to affirm compliance with California Assembly Bill 1584 (AB 1584) in California Education Code Section 49073.1.

Chegg, an educational software company, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Educate launched a new initiative to help accelerate a student’s time from learning to earning. Through this collaboration, Chegg students can take skill assessments that identify potential skill gaps and connect them to appropriate AWS Educate cloud curricula – helping better prepare them for high-demand jobs in cloud computing. This partnership brings AWS Educate resources to Chegg’s 14 million (and growing) student membership.

The Hour of Code is coming! Amazon Future Engineer, Amazon Web Services, and AWS Educate are supporting Amazonians across the globe as they inspire kids to try computer science through Code.org’s Hour of Code – both powered by AWS. The Hour of Code takes place during Computer Science Education Week, December 9 to 15.

In 2016, Amazon made a public commitment to hire and train military Veterans and spouses. As part of that commitment, we committed to hiring 25,000 military Veterans and spouses (a number of whom will join us in AWS) by 2021. As of this month, Amazon now employs more than 21,000 Veterans and military spouses in full- and part-time roles across the United States. Learn more about available programs, training, and resources for Veterans and spouses.