AWS re/Start – A new opportunity to grow the talent pool in Vietnam

At a press briefing on May 18, Emmanuel Pillai, head of AWS Education and Training in ASEAN, said that AI Education and Cloud Kinetics are AWS’ partners in the programme, which was first launched in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi in mid-May.

“The free 12-week training programme will help the unemployed and underemployed to develop their cloud computing skills and launch their careers in the technology industry,” he added.

The programme is meant for the local workforce where digital transformation is being accelerated. Cloud skills development is a critical foundation for organisations looking to embark on their digital transformation journey and this will help reduce the shortage that businesses globally are facing.

Pillai said, “With the skills gap observed in the employment market in Vietnam, we have taken this opportunity to grow the talent pool from a non-traditional group of individuals who are underemployed by launching the programme re/Start.”

According to a recent study that was published by Alpha Beta, over 90 per cent of organisations and employees said that they do not have the necessary digital skills required to transform their organisations.

In Vietnam in particular, the pandemic has accelerated the need among organisations to digitally transform and adopt new business models by upskilling and rescaling themselves.

A study by PwC on Vietnam's technology, jobs, and skills found that 84 per cent of respondents said that they need to be more digitally savvy and that they would learn new skills or completely retrain to improve their future employability.

Looking at the top 10 required skills, many of the most significant were cloud based. The first is the ability to use cloud-based tools and services like SAAS, with cybersecurity and the ability to migrate from on-premise infrastructure to cloud services also being key.

At an organisational level, Pillai elaborated that in the financial services industry, organisations like Techcombank, HDBank, and VPBank are all adopting cloud migration strategies so that they can digitally transform and build better services and products for the end customers.

To provide local customers with access to a talent pool that is diverse and comes with the necessary skills, AWS has developed this programme. Since 2012, AWS training and certification has been designing cloud curriculum content and deploying it to rapidly build cloud skills and close the gap for its partners.

In 2020, AWS publicly announced that it would train 29 million individuals across the globe with cloud computing skills by 2025, providing them with access to free cloud computing through training and education programmes.

At present, re/Start is available in over 100 cities across 40 different countries. It has many courses and modules available in different languages including Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian – Bahasa, Korean, and Chinese.

The AWS re/Start focuses on three pillars. The first is focused on basic IT skills, the second builds AWS cloud skills, and the third improves employability.

The AWS representative said that as of late 2021, 6 million individuals have been trained globally and over 90 per cent of graduates have found employment.

“We are very confident that we will reach the 29 million and we are well on track to possibly go beyond that,” he noted.

In Vietnam, this programme is now available for individuals based in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The training is across different business types from large organisations to small- and medium-sized enterprises, startups, and digital-native businesses.

AWS re/Start is one of many educational programmes that are part of the company’s commitment to building a diverse pool of talent, enabling graduates to enter the cloud workforce in the digital age.