Software vendors have long offered free product training to accelerate adoption, increase use and build a positive reputation. Amazon is following this trend with new courses for Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant aimed at developers and business users.
Since 2020, Amazon has offered free training to 29 million people worldwide on cloud and AWS skills, achieving 21 million trained by last fall. It has now extended this initiative to include its AI Ready initiative, unveiled in November, with the goal of training at least two million people on AI skills by 2025.
“We hope it’s a lot more,” said Jenni Troutman, director of products and services at AWS training and certification.
Amazon offers more than 600 courses in total, including more than 100 free AI courses covering foundational topics as well as deeper technical content, Troutman said. Fee-based offerings include hands-on learning experiences such as labs. Recently, it added training for Amazon Q with two courses — Amazon Q Developer Getting Started and Generative BI with Amazon Q in Quicksight.
But Amazon is also part of a crowded field of free training initiatives, especially around AI. In April, Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and others established a job training consortium with a goal to upskill and reskill 100 million workers whose jobs are likely to be affected by AI.
Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, noted that while skills development options continue to grow, it can be difficult to determine what options fit best for employers and employees.
HR challenges in defining value
In a new survey by CompTIA of some 1,200 HR and learning and development professionals, including 500 based in the U.S., 44% reported challenges in quantifying the effects of training on productivity, quality of work and business outcomes.
“It can be tempting for companies to simply provide an all-access license to a learning platform and leave it to individuals to create their own skills development plan,” Herbert said. “Like anything, the quality will vary and, by extension, the learning outcomes and applicability in the workplace.”
As generative AI is not specific to Amazon, I think there is definite value to be derived from the free training regardless of whether the learner is an AWS user. Evelyn McMullenAnalyst, Nucleus Research
Other research by CompTIA found that among job seekers, only about one in three rated themselves as very confident in navigating the range of training available.
Amazon plans to continue adding more free courses to its lineup, focusing on both existing and new products such as generative AI services, Troutman said.
Troutman added that early generative AI adopters can be more productive when using generative AI-powered tools. “They’re able to work faster, smarter, and have more time to be creative and innovate in their roles,” she said.
The free training from Amazon is similar to certification programs from other major tech vendors such as Microsoft, Google and Salesforce. It serves as a marketing push to familiarize people with Amazon Q, according to Evelyn McMullen, an analyst at Nucleus Research.
“However, as generative AI is not specific to Amazon, I think there is definite value to be derived from the free training regardless of whether the learner is an AWS user,” McMullen said.
Patrick Thibodeau is an editor at large for TechTarget Editorial who covers HCM and ERP technologies. He’s worked for more than two decades as an enterprise IT reporter.
