Name: Jenni Troutman, AWS
Uploaded: 2024-10-16T17:59:00.000Z
Duration: 17 min 12 s

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Jenni Troutman

Director of Training and Certification Products & Services

AWS

play_circle_outline AWS Training and Certification offerings, including free courses and certifications

play_circle_outline Skills gap in the job market, focusing on cloud skills and AI

play_circle_outline Emphasis on diversity and inclusivity in tech training and education

play_circle_outline Focus on continuous learning and evolving training to keep up with AI capabilities

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Jenni Troutman, AWS

Jenni Troutman

Director of Training and Certification Products & Services AWS

Dave Vellate and Rob Strechay welcomed Jenni Troutman, Director of Training and Certification at Amazon Web Services. AWS Training offers over 600 free online courses and certifications to help bridge the skills gap in cloud technologies. They aim to train 2 million people in AI skills and have already trained over 31 million. Developing skills in AI can lead to increased salary and job opportunities. AWS provides adaptable training solutions for various roles and emphasizes the importance of continuous skills development to stay competitive. Investing in wor... Read more

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What options are available for people interested in learning about cloud computing and obtaining certification? add

What specific skills gaps are being targeted in order to address the shortage of skilled professionals in the workforce, particularly in the area of cloud technologies and emerging AI skills? add

What role does training generally and AWS training specifically play in fostering a more inclusive culture? add

What is one of the challenges in training with AI capabilities and how do you ensure that training remains up to date? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Jenni Troutman, AWS

Dave Vellante

>> Hi, welcome back to our special CUBE presentation. We're here in Seattle on the ground. I'm Dave Vellate with my co-host, Rob Strechay. Good to see you, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> Good to see you too.

Dave Vellante

>> And we're super excited to have Jenni Troutman here. She's the Director of Training and Certification, Products and Services at Amazon Web Services. Good to see you Jenni. Thanks for coming on.

Jenni Troutman

>> Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Dave Vellante

>> So training products, interesting, products and services. Tell us more about those products and what services you offer. And we really want to get into what skills are in demand right now?

Jenni Troutman

>> Well, at AWS Training and Certification, our focus is really around skilling up the globe on cloud skills. So we help organizations, large enterprises, all the way down to small businesses, make sure they have the skills they need within their company. We also help individuals looking for a job or looking to up-skill and move into new roles, new positions to be able to build those skills. And we do it with traditional classroom training like you might be used to when you were in school, but we also have a lot of self-paced, learn as you go game-based learning, all kinds of immersive experiences people can dive into to really build skills. And then we also have AWS certifications, which are industry-recognized credentials that help companies understand that you do have the skills and help people be able to show that they've learned.

Dave Vellante

>> And are these a combination of for-pay and some freebies, or is it...?

Jenni Troutman

>> Yes, there is a mix of stuff. So we have over 600 free courses online. People can go and they can get foundational, understand what cloud is, what it's all about, learn about different services, learn about the basics of AI, and they can go all the way through to all of the learning they would need for our first foundational certification in cloud. But then there are low-cost options that we have to be able to get hands-on and really get experience building and then get the certification.

Rob Strechay

>> It would seem like there's, and we hear it all the time, that there's a skills gap. And I know personally as we were talking beforehand, my wife went through the training and got her certification, yay. And companies are looking to understand that. What skills gaps are you seeing that you're trying to really hone in on and fill those gaps and bring people's knowledge forward?

Jenni Troutman

>> Yes. Well, when we think about cloud skills, every year 5 million jobs go unfilled. And that's really just from having a lack of skilled professionals in the workforce. So when we talk about skills, we're talking about all cloud skills, but lately with the pace of change that we've seen with AI, with generative AI becoming kind of mainstream and people being able to use it in their day to day, now those kind of emerging skills are becoming more and more top of mind. And so when we think about skilling people up, we go all the way from what are the basics of cloud core technologies all the way through to kind of the deepest, most technical and being able to day to day build the models that are powering those applications?

Dave Vellante

>> My former boss, Rob Pat McGovern, one of the tenants of the organization was they would carve out 10% of the profits for training, invest in your people through training. If you wanted to get training, it was a no-brainer to get it approved as long as it was relevant. And of course at AWS it's compulsory you learn how to spin up S3 buckets and the like. But I don't know what your guys' experience is with other companies, but are companies investing enough in training in your view, or is there a gap?

Jenni Troutman

>> So I would say there's a gap. So we work with companies and they are companies who have gone all-in and they build out kind of comprehensive plans and they continue to build the skills of their workforces. And what they find is those companies are building a competitive advantage. They're able to maintain their workforce, they're able to keep people engaged, they're able to grow, and they're seeing the results in their pace of innovation. But we do also see the companies that are not seeing investing in skills as being core to investing in their business are struggling to keep up. And those are the companies that are struggling with their cloud migrations, they're falling behind in their product innovation. And that's where we're really trying to help companies understand that that investment in skills really is their investment in the business.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, it would seem like, especially as you said, with the changing dynamics of organizations with gen AI and AI and yet another set of services that have come out, and now I think we're over 300 here.

Jenni Troutman

>> It's hard to keep up.

Rob Strechay

>> It's hard to keep up. And I think do you see that really changing the narrative for these organizations as they're leaning in, because it's not only the technical folks, it's the non-technical folks also that need to understand gen AI and what does the architecture look like? Because, and we will talk about this in another segment around responsible AI and bias and all these other things that are not necessarily technical or stuff that you're programming in there.

Jenni Troutman

>> Yeah, so we think about it really across three things. One is everybody needs to have what we call cloud resiliency. Cloud is its own language and finance needs to understand what's the difference in the financial models, marketing needs to understand the difference in how it helps them innovate. So across the business, everyone needs to understand the language. And then you of course have the deep technologists who need to go deeper into the areas, wherever they're specialized, security, software developers, whatever it is. And then the last thing now that has become big lately is what we're seeing is with generative AI, there's all these new tools coming out, people can't even imagine how their job could change in the future. And the people who, one, are very curious and choose to keep track of what's going on and try and stay ahead of it and try these new things as they come out and, two, understand and learn how to use these tools, they're able to really excel in their roles because they're able to get ahead of it and keep learning and stay ahead. And that's really what we see of the power of this AI where people can now have it at their fingertips. We've always had it, it's been around for like 20 years, but it wasn't at your fingertips. And now that it's at people's fingertips to be able to use it on their day-to-day, it's being able to figure out how. And that's a big part of the learning now is understand what's possible with it and what tools are available for people to continue to innovate themselves.

Dave Vellante

>> Let's talk a little bit about diversity. It's a hot topic, obviously. I think women in tech, the number sort of stuck at maybe 15 or 17% of the tech industry are women, but every large tech company anyway is focused on this issue. I don't know what the stats are for people of color and other diversity statistics, but the question is what role does training generally and AWS training specifically play in fostering a more inclusive culture?

Jenni Troutman

>> So one of our big taglines is we believe the future of tech is diverse. We say that in training and certification all the time, and because of that, in order to be able to drive that diversity, we made a commitment to provide free skills training across the globe to anyone that wants it because a lot of the challenges with getting the diverse workforce is access and access can mean a lot of different things, it can be the timing, "I can't do it because I am working all day and I have kids in the evening, and when am I going to? I have to be able to do it in the time that I have that narrow window right after the kids go to bed." Or it could be that you're in a location where there's been a lot of local access to learning, and so we provide free skills to people across the globe. We made a commitment in 2020 to train 29 million people for free by 2025, and I'm very proud to say that earlier this year we had already achieved over 31 million, and we will continue to invest, that has been a big focus for us. And now our latest commitment was on AI skills and we said we were going to train at least 2 million people by next year across the globe on free AI skills and we want to continue to grow that. We hoped that that would be a very conservative number and we would reach a lot more people because frankly, the whole point of all of these tools and all of this access to education is that anybody can have it and the globe is diverse.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean, I think to me that actually that forward-looking aspect of it and what skill sets are going to be required for the next five to 10 years, what are you seeing from that and how the job market is transforming and how you're bringing new criteria out to help them and educate them for that?

Jenni Troutman

>> The question I often get is people are afraid jobs are going to go away with AI. And what we've seen is there probably will be changes in jobs, but really we actually expect there's going to be a lot of new jobs. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to help people imagine what's possible and start to create those new jobs. And so I would say that we are very focused on helping people understand the opportunity. We did a study with a partner who found that in existing jobs, people with AI skills can earn up to 47% more in salary, though it's a massive wage premium and that's technologists. But even when you look at jobs like sales, marketing, HR, legal, there's wage premiums anywhere from 35 to 42% in those as well. So I would say knowing what's possible, knowing what's out there and then developing those skills, it's pretty compelling right now. It's going to become, by the way, table stakes so I would say do it now where there's a premium.

Dave Vellante

>> Machines have always replaced humans over the course of history and there's always been more jobs. The first time it's been really cognitive, but there's no reason to believe that it won't happen again. But I'd like to dig into gen AI specifically. What kinds of training are you seeing people take with gen AI? What are you recommending? Is it like prompt engineering or is it how to apply gen AI?

Jenni Troutman

>> Yeah, so we definitely look at it by the role. So one is we have a whole series on gen AI for executives, and that's really about what's possible, how to think about what's possible for your business, and then how to think about getting your organization ready for AI, how to get started with a project, what does that look like? So that's one track. Then another is if you think about software development, developers in other areas, prompt engineering is definitely a skill that is critical. It sounds simple, but you do the wrong prompt and you do not get what you want, and all of that productivity goes out the window. So learning prompt engineering is key. But another is even thinking about, for example, marketing. A marketer, if you think about is trying to figure out where to invest, say geographically, they would go and they would ask for some reports, right? They'd get these reports, it might take a couple weeks. They come back and the reports are showing them, I don't know, maybe the German market, and they look at it and they're like, "Huh, that seems really compelling, but what about Israel? How does it compare? Oh no, I got to go get some more reports," and you keep doing this, you keep digging deeper and deeper and it's taking weeks and you still haven't made this decision on where you're going to invest. Now there are BI tools that they can do that in five minutes, you can sit there and you can say, "Now show me this, now show me this." And you can make in that hour meeting that you're having your investment decision, that would've taken months. So it really can accelerate that pace of growth.

Dave Vellante

>> It isn't static either. I mean, I remember when you first started doing search on the internet, you had to put plus signs in and you had to spell things correctly. So it's an ongoing capability that the AI is going to deliver, and we're going to, I'm sure, figure out ways to use it in new ways. So the training presumably has to evolve with the capabilities of the AI?

Jenni Troutman

>> I will say that is the hardest part, yes, it is constantly. Evolving and that is why we have such a broad portfolio because we're constantly finding new areas to introduce the tools. If we think about the AWS technologies, Amazon Q just keeps changing. So we're in lockstep with those service teams to keep changing what the content is and letting people know, "Hey, you got to keep learning," because if you learn it now and the technology changes and you didn't keep up, you're kind of falling behind again. And so we do very much encourage continuous learning, that's why we encourage so much online self-paced immersive experience because you keep coming back and you're going to get the latest information and you're going to get the experience hands-on to be able to use it in your real world.

Dave Vellante

>> Go ahead, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. Have you seen that, because lot of the large language models have obviously been everything that's public on the internet, which includes all of the APIs for EPS and things of that nature, have you seen that people are looking to understand how they actually use gen AI and have training to use gen AI in their day-to-day jobs? Like, "Hey, I'm using this, I'm doing EC2 stuff and I want to do some Kubernetes now with EKS," or something like that. Is that kind of some of the requests you're getting, is it cross more solution oriented versus actual just services oriented?

Jenni Troutman

>> Yeah, we are definitely getting that. And in fact, what we're building now, the training solutions we're building are to be adaptable for exactly that reason. So we actually just came out with something called Simularn, AWS Simularn, and what it is it gives you a simulation. So say you're a solution architect, it gives you a customer situation. You now are interacting with it, you have to ask questions like you would in an actual customer meeting, you get scored on how good your questions are, how you communicate. You have to build the solution and you have to keep adapting the solution based on the feedback that you're getting, the AI powered solution feedback you're getting all the way through. And we need to do that not only because that's a great way to learn, but also because the content is constantly changing and we need it to be bite-sized. So as we make bite-sized content, we can adjust what's happening in the simulation to keep up with the pace of change.

Dave Vellante

>> There's so much, the media always goes to the negative, we think about AI is going to affect jobs, it is going to take over the world with AGI, but I find that I don't want to be dumber. I mean, AI makes me smarter, so I don't want to go backwards. But Eric Schmidt this week, there was a story, I don't know if you saw this, it's quite interesting, he basically said, "Look, we've got to let AI go and the whole negative around carbon emissions," because AI does take a lot of energy, his point was AI is going to help us maybe find new ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere. And I hadn't thought of it, that was a really interesting way to sort of flip the narrative. And so my question is, do you think training and education can help flip that narrative?

Jenni Troutman

>> I don't know if I understand.

Dave Vellante

>> I mean, the negative narrative around AI.

Jenni Troutman

>> Oh yes, I do, because I actually think, in fact, this is what we're trying to do with our training itself, is to make it so adaptive and so ability to customize to what you need that you can learn exactly what you need, exactly when you need to. And we've never had that ability before, we have to have AI to power that. And I agree, I think it shows people the power of being able to make things easier for you, make your life better. We think about the efficiency of learning, I know that sounds weird, but how do you get people to learn exactly what they need as fast as possible? And we're able to finally do more with that now that we have AI powered solutions. When you sit in a classroom, everybody's got to learn at the same pace, there's no ability to do that. When you can be on your own and you can have the ability to adapt the training, that's when you can get it just what you need.

Dave Vellante

>> Do you have a specific recommendation or a call to action to executives in this topic? Where should they start? What should they focus on? What should they do next?

Jenni Troutman

>> Yeah, I would say start by recognizing that you have to invest in your workforce. These wage premiums are there because we don't have people with the skills and so you need to recognize that you have the people you need and you have to invest in developing them and continuing to develop them. And I think that's the starting point. And then it can't just stop with, "Okay, I have a budget for this year," it has to be thinking about how you use that as your competitive advantage to build your organization and grow it over time and stay ahead of the industry.

Dave Vellante

>> Where can people get more info?

Jenni Troutman

>> So AWS Skill Builder is where you can find all of the online learning and you can also find information about all of our training.

Dave Vellante

>> Check it out, sharpen those skills. Jenni, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, appreciate it.

Jenni Troutman

>> Thank you, it was great.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay, Dave Vellate and Rob Strechay. Keep it right there for these CUBE conversations, we're going wall-to-wall. We're here on the ground in Seattle. Right back.