AWS offers new AI certifications

With a shortage of IT workers with AI skills looming, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering two new certifications to help enterprises building AI applications on its platform to find the necessary talent.

One of the certifications, AWS Certified AI Practitioner, is a foundational-level certification to help workers from a variety of backgrounds to demonstrate that they understand AI and generative AI concepts, can recognize opportunities that benefit from AI, and know how to use AI tools responsibly.

The company is offering eight free courses, leading up to this certification, including Fundamentals of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Exploring Artificial Intelligence Use Cases and Application, and Essentials of Prompt Engineering.

The other certification, AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate, is designed for those with a year or more of experience building, deploying, and maintaining AI or machine-learning workloads on AWS who want to demonstrate their ability to make AI models available for real-time usage.

Candidates for this certification can sign up for an AWS Skill Builder subscription to check three new courses exploring various concepts. AWS expects to release more courses over the next few months.

Registration for the beta exams for the two certifications opens August 13.  

AWS has been adding new certifications to its offering. Earlier this year, the company had added the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate certification.

In October 2023 the company released a new virtual program, Cloud Institute, in an effort to reduce the scarcity of cloud developers trained on its platform.

AWS Cloud Institute, which is a one-year program with 12 different courses spread across four quarters, was designed by AWS experts with inputs from customer enterprises and partners, such as Accenture.

AWS certifications span different levels from foundational through associate and professional to speciality across a variety of roles and departments, including solutions architect, developer, cloud practitioner, devops engineer, AI and machine learning, and operations.