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AWS holds Jogja Cloud Innovation Day to celebrate the digital talent of Yogyakarta youth
On 14th of February, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held a special event in MAN 1 Yogyakarta school called AWS Cloud Innovation Day.
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n 14th of February, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held a special event in MAN 1 Yogyakarta school called AWS Cloud Innovation Day. This event is only one aspect of a larger on-going plan that AWS has implemented for Indonesia, in an effort to improve digital literacy and skills of Indonesian youth and educators across the country.
The main focus of this event was the Laptop for Builders program, a fully funded educational program that enables cloud computing fundamentals and the basics of web static to Indonesian talents.
This initiative started in 2019, when AWS announced their goal of empowering hundreds of thousands of Indonesians from all backgrounds with cloud services proficiency by 2025.
“According to research from AlphaBeta in 2021, 59 percent of Indonesia’s digital workers who are not applying cloud computing skills today, believe it will be a requirement to perform their jobs by 2025. Our findings from this year’s follow-up research discovered that 17.2 million of total employees, or 17 percent of the workforce, still need to participate in digital training programs. Meanwhile, 98 percent believed they would have to increase their digital skills in order to keep pace,” said Andrew Sklar, Director of AWS Training and Certification for Asia Pacific and Japan, highlighting the need for educational programs from the likes of AWS in Indonesia because of the continuously rising demand for digital literacy in the country.
The Laptop for Builders program started with a strong collaboration between AWS and local educational institutions in Indonesia.
Additionally, AWS made inclusivity a top priority, creating opportunities for students between 14 and 18 years old to participate in this initiative, which includes students from hundreds of General and Vocational high schools, including Islamic boarding schools, special needs schools and educators, over 15 provinces across Indonesia.
“AWS believes that access to technology should be inclusive. Every student, santri (Islamic scholar), boy and girl scouts and students with disabilities are capable of harnessing technology and transforming their future for the better and for the country’s future," added Andrew, regarding AWS’ focus on inclusivity.
One of the ways AWS highlights the positive impact that their program has had is through events such as the AWS Cloud Innovation Day. The main activity of the event was the web static cloud competition to encourage students to put their skills to practice and showcase their talents. Seven trainings took place concurrently, involving varieties of schools across the Greater Yogyakarta region, including SMK (vocational schools), Madrasah (Islamic High Schools) and Special Needs (SLB) schools. There was also training for dozens of representative high school teachers and Laptop for Builders alumnus on Internet of Things (IoT).
Through this competition, AWS hopes that by applying the skills that students learned from the Laptops for Builders program they are now better equipped with the right skills to create a proper portfolio that can enable them to pursue higher education and/or rewarding careers in the technology sector.
Since 2019, AWS has made over 300 free digital training courses available in Bahasa Indonesia, offered in varying levels of difficulty ranging from fundamentals to advanced and have exceeded their goal of several thousand learners to be trained by 2025, through reaching over 300,000 trained individuals by the end of 2022.
When asked if AWS has achieved the goals that they set out in 2019, here's what Andrew Sklar had to say. “At AWS we are deeply customer obsessed and here in Indonesia we have been obsessed with growing the digital skills of the people of Indonesia. This means setting bold and hard-to-achieve goals, like training hundreds of thousands of students. Many of the students participating in our Laptops for Builders program for Indonesia, lacked internet access or lacked a laptop to learn to code with. So, to provide this opportunity for the communities across Indonesia, AWS invested in the developers of tomorrow, providing for those that needed access. We can already see an immeasurable impact on learners being exposed to cloud-based technologies, learning and skills, in a way that previously was not available. We are only just getting started. AWS realizes that we still have more work to do and with the strong partnerships and collaborations we have with local institutions and our partners the work that we do now in educating the Indonesian youth can go even further to provide vital cloud skills, which will improve the future of this country as it goes through a digital transformation.”
