At the center of sharing information and creating new technologies is a partnership that Kim Majerus at Amazon Web Services views as essential for success: educational institutions and local government.
Majerus took on her role this month as vice president of the U.S. public sector education, state and local government at AWS, after her fourth year with Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud computing arm.
In that time, Majerus, who oversees all of AWS' educational clients and partners, said she has seen immense change to ed-tech and the needs of higher education institutions, especially after 19 months of the coronavirus pandemic.
We sat down with her during a recent AWS conference in D.C. to talk about how the company strategizes those partnerships and its support for secondary and higher education locally, including Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University and Howard University. Here are three ways she said Greater Washington should fill its tech talent gap.
- Pair more government funding with higher education for initial tech training
Essentially, she said, higher education institutions can't do it alone.
Ever since Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) chose Northern Virginia for its second headquarters, local universities and community colleges have invested more in cloud computing, computer engineering and other data analytics-related fields to help feed a growing “innovation corridor.” For instance, GMU and NOVA are starting to recruit in local high schools for their cloud computing degree programs.
But the influx still isn't enough to keep up with the current 17,215 tech job openings in the D.C. area, as of the end of August, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association.
“Once you get the leadership in the state to partner with the community colleges and with the universities, it’ll change the direction,” Majerus said. “It’s about meeting people where they’re at. It’s not about a two-year, it’s not about a four-year degree, it is about skills.”
To that end, since 2018, AWS has launched an associate cloud computing degree at NOVA, a cloud computing program and bachelor’s of applied science degree at GMU and a master’s program at Howard’s future applied data sciences hub through its AWS Educate platform. Amazon alone is seeking workers to fill HQ2's 25,000 total planned jobs by 2030, in exchange for $550 million in cash incentives from Virginia, and up to 37,850 people by 2035 for another $220 million in state funds, even as AWS builds up its East Coast hub in Herndon with thousands of new tech workers. But Majerus said it's not just about the tech and cloud computing giant.
“Even the customers we have here, the partners we have here, they, too, are looking for that talent. It should be a pipeline not only just for AWS,” she said, adding that the partnerships are “feeding the local community of employers.”
Thus far, Amazon employs more than 3,000 people at HQ2, while offering another at least 2,800 open postings. Beyond HQ2, many of the local positions are software development engineers and solutions architects at AWS — hence the links to the local universities to help build that pipeline.
“We could get that talent. We could get that from the students that are coming out,” she said. “Even if you had all the students come through, it still is not going to close the gap, especially with how many are going to have to be reskilled.”
2. More stackable certifications for retraining workforce
At least half of the current tech workforce will need to be retrained in 2025 as the tech shifts and needs change, Majerus said.
“We’re working with the universities to make sure that they’re getting those cloud-based skills but, more importantly, some of the community colleges to help the workforce, all of us, to be able to retrain ourselves,” she said.
Earlier this month, Amazon pledged $1.2 billion to cover college tuition, skills training and other certifications, such as the GED, ESL programs and community college courses, for front-line employees to prepare them for data center jobs.
“The stackable certifications are getting so much attention,” she said. “What we see is that people are actually changing the way they’re recruiting. Because they would put the requirements and they would say, ‘I’m not getting anything, but this person is what I need.’ So they’re actually adjusting their job prepositions to say, ‘Hey, we need to be more open, we need people with experience, and we can upskill and reskill through the technology that’s out there.’”
3. Find more innovation by ed-tech companies
Some of the best fixes, she said, will come from outside of academia and the public sector.
“The pandemic has really been a key catalyst for change. I think we all saw local schools, as well as local governments, struggle to respond,” Majerus said. “Shifting teachers from in-classroom to onlline overnight was a significant lift."
To that end, AWS said it worked with Reston-based Blackboard, Inc., which recently combined with Boca Raton, Florida-based Anthology. In March 2020, AWS worked to scale Blackboard's capacity by 50 times within 24 hours to help customers that use the latter's virtual teaching and learning platform — a base that surged 3,600% in global daily use at the time. Though, Blackboard still faced some hiccups in ramping up to full remote learning in some school systems at the start of the pandemic, including in Fairfax County.
Majerus said Loudoun County had also struggled with early pandemic outages and meeting the technical needs of its 82,000 students, plus their parents and teachers, with only two on-site data centers, both of which were at least 14 years old and expensive to maintain. The school system, she said, tapped smaller ed-tech apps to move its entire student information system into the cloud, marking a “fundamental shift" in its security and technical expenses.
One platform, for instance, was desktop-as-a-service, which the school system used with math and computer science students to virtually access a lab. Another helped its network load data faster — 40 gigabytes went from 30 minutes to 30 seconds, an AWS spokeswoman said.
“Great innovations by ed-techs across our portfolio," Majerus said, "were able to help those students.”
