The world is facing a global talent shortage, and the solution just might come from an ambitious effort launched by an organization in Africa.

The African Leadership Group is working on a scalable solution for connecting highly skilled, diverse global talent to careers in tech. The talent matching effort, called The Room, will leverage Amazon Web Services Inc. technology to reach across five continents for talented individuals.

“Our mission in The Room is to help the world’s most extraordinary doers fulfill their potential,” said Fred Swaniker (pictured, right), founder and chief curator at The Room. “We see this as an opportunity to curate exceptional talent in fields like software engineering, data science, UX/UI design and cloud computing — and help identify diverse talent as well from pockets that have been typically untapped for technology.”

Swaniker spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. He was joined by Sandy Carter (pictured, left), vice president of worldwide public sector partners and programs at AWS, and they discussed how the initiative will leverage AWS services in providing a global opportunity to access untapped pools of technical talent. (* Disclosure below.)

Seeking the right skills

The Room is using AWS to develop an intelligence platform that will utilize a data lake built on Amazon S3, containerized microservices with Amazon Fargate, and AI and machine learning support with Amazon SageMaker.

“As AWS grows, obviously, we are going to need more talent, especially in Africa because we are growing so rapidly there,” Carter said. “We see a gap around the world, and part of my responsibility with partners is making sure they can get access to the right skills. We’re counting on The Room and what Fred has built to produce some of those great skills.”

The Room’s process for identifying people with the right skillset involves a rigorous selection process. Candidates participate in online assessments, followed by an in-person interview and culminating in a one to three-month boot camp, according to Swaniker.

“The Room is not an online community; it’s really an offline community powered by technology,” Swaniker said. “One thing we’re learning is that talent is truly evenly distributed around the world, but what is not is opportunity. It’s a community of exceptional talent that we are building, connecting this talent to each other and connecting them to the organizations that are looking for people who can really move the needle.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: AWS Public Sector sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE