Knowing the ins and outs of cloud computing isn’t just for the next generation of computer geeks. As the world becomes increasingly connected and artificial intelligence an indispensable assistant, understanding the technology that underlies these tools is fast becoming fundamental in every position and every industry.

“Data permeates everything,” said Ken Eisner (pictured), director, worldwide education programs at Amazon Web Services Inc. “It’s not just in pure data-science jobs and machine-learning jobs, though those are brilliantly important, but it’s also in marketing jobs, and business jobs, and so on.”

Eisner joined Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Imagine event last week in Seattle. They discussed the importance of cloud computing education (see the full interview with transcript here).

Cloud reaches the classroom

The world has changed almost beyond recognition over the past hundred or so years. But one place that would be instantly recognizable to a time traveler is the school room, where pre-digital-era skills still dominate the curriculum. Not that grammar and geography aren’t important, but today’s students require more modern skills alongside the tried and true education basics, according to Eisner.

A Gallup poll that showed that only 11% of U.S. businesses strongly agree with the statement that “higher education institutions in this country are graduating students with the skills and competences that my business needs,” versus 17% that strongly disagree, according to Eisner. “Cloud computing’s been the No. 1 LinkedIn skill for the past four years in a row … but we’re not preparing kids for this market,” he said.

Stepping up to correct this imbalance is a key topic in education. “I was just moderating a panel where we had Virginia, Louisiana and California all sitting down talking about that scaling statewide strategy,” Eisner said.

The City University of New York and State University of New York systems currently have programs in cloud computing, and the state of Louisiana is introducing courses into their higher education and K-12 systems. The U.S. Marine Corps and Northern Virginia Community College recently announced a new Data Intelligence course. Developed in partnership with AWS Educate, the course focuses on cloud computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Sharing and collaboration across educational institutions has become a mark of these new cloud computing courses, with institutions opening their syllabi to each other. “So the stuff that was done in Los Angeles is being learned in Virginia. The stuff that the U.S. Marine Corps is doing is being available to students who are not in military occupations,” Eisner said. “I think that collaboration mode is amazing.”

Hands-on helps kids engage

Team projects such as FIRST Robotics and Project Lead the Way, and fun gizmos such as AWS RoboMaker and DeepRacer encourage interest in high-tech concepts. “Education becomes more relevant when kids get to do hands-on stuff,” Eisner explained.

Hitting the “fear of missing out” opportunity, has led to a major increase in enrollment in technology programs, according to Eisner. Less than a year out from launch, the California Cloud Workforce Project now has 825 students, and the Northern Virginia Community College cloud associate degree “grew from 30 students at the start of the year to well over 100 now,” he added.

“There’s the excitement of the cloud,” Eisner said. “Cloud is like the new sport. Robotics is the new sport for these kids to help bring them on pathways to careers.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Imagine event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE