 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone to our nation's capital. We are theCUBE. We are live at AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We're joined by Ken Eisner, Director of Worldwide Educational Programs at AWS. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Director of Educational Programs. Sure, I head up a program called AWS Educate. AWS Educate is Amazon's global initiative to provide students and teachers around the world with the resources that they need really to propel students into this awesome field of cloud computing. We launched it back in May of 2015 and we did it to fill this demand. If we look at it today, we're kind of right in the midst of this fourth industrial revolution. It's changing the means of production, obviously in the digital and cloud space, but it's also creating this new worker class all around the cloud, advanced services like machine learning, AI, robotics, IOT and so on. And if you looked at the employer demand, cloud computing has been the number one LinkedIn skill for the past four years in a row. When we look at cloud computing, we kind of divide into four families, software development, cloud architecture, the data world, you know, like machine learning, AI, data science, business intelligence and analytics, and then the mill skill opportunities like technical customer support agent, cybersecurity, which can range all the way from mill skill to PhD. But yet the time to hire these people has grown up dramatically. Glassdoor ran a study of companies over their platform between 2009 and 2015, and showed that the time to hire had increased by 80%. Yeah, just think about that. We talk about, I mean, this conference, it's all about innovation. If you don't have builders, if you don't have innovators, how the heck can you innovate? Ken, I got to ask you, Andy, Jesse, I've known him for over eight years and reporting on him and covering Amazon when everyone didn't understand yet what it was. Now everyone kind of does, congratulations and success. But to see him on stage, talk passionately about education. Yeah. I mean, and knowing Andy means it's kind of boiled up. I mean, because he's very reserved, he's a very conservative guy, pragmatic, but for him to be overtly projecting his opinion around education, which was really pretty critical, means something's going on. This is a huge issue, not just in politics, but in real state, local areas where education where- Well, it's the root of income inequality. It's a lot of- There's a lot of challenges. People just aren't ready for these new types of jobs that are coming out that pay well, by the way, and there's a zillion of them out there that are unfilled. For the first time, there are more jobs unfilled than there are candidates for them. You're solving this problem. Tell us what's going on on Amazon. Why the fewer? What's going on with all this? Why is everyone so jacked up on this? Yeah, and a great point, Andy, I think we said that education was at a crisis point today, and really talked about that racial inequality piece. The time to hire people in the software development space, cloud architecture, technical cloud support agent, it's incredibly long, so it's just creating excess costs into the system, but we're so passionate, like, if you look at going to the cloud, Amazon wants to disrupt areas where we do not see that progress happening. Education is an area that's in vast need for disruption. There are people who are doing amazing stuff. We've heard from Cal Poly, we've heard from Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, there's Joseph Aoon at Northeastern. People are doing great stuff. We're looking at some places that are doing dual enrollment programs between high school and community college and higher ed, but we're not moving fast enough. But you guys are providing with Educate Your Program. This is, people can walk in the front door without any kind of going through gatekeepers or any kind of getting college. This is straight up from the front door. It could be dropouts, it could be post-college reskilling, whatever it is. They can walk in the front door and get skilled up through Educate. Is that correct? Yeah, we send people to awseducate.com. All you need is some element of being in school. Activity or some phone. You can be going back from a reskilling perspective and you gain free access into resources, whether you're a student or a teacher, you get free access into content that's mapped to jobs because again, what do people want from education? Yeah, we all want enlightenment, contributors to society, all important, but really they want careers and all the stats, Gallup ran some good stats about both students and what industry want. They want them to be aligned to jobs and we're seeing that as a match. I'm asking specifically, if I'm unemployed and I want to work, what can I, do I walk into you? You can come right on and we can sign up, we'll give you access to these online cloud career pathways, we'll give you micro-credentials so we can badge you, credential you against, we launched something on Sumerian, RoboMaker, so individual services and full pathways. So this is a direct door for someone unemployed looking to get some work and a high-paying job. Right, right, absolutely. And we also give you free access into AWS because we know that hands-on practice, doing real-world applications is just vital. So we will do that and by the way, at the end of this, we have a job board, Amazon customer and partner jobs where we're all saying, these are jobs that are super high in demand. You can apply to get a job as an intern or as a full-time or through our job board. This is what people don't know about, Rebecca. The word's not out there. I mean, people talk about the problems. This is a solution. Exactly, but I actually want to drill down a little bit. This initiative is not just for grown-ups, it's for kids. I mean, this is for, it starts in kindergarten. So I'm really interested to hear what you're doing and how you're thinking about really starting with the little kids and particularly underrepresented minorities and women who are not, who are also underrepresented in the cloud industry, how you're thinking expansively about getting more of those people into these jobs and careers. Yeah, absolutely. And it's still day one within all, you know, all the work, always day one at Amazon, we know that. So we started with 18 and older because we saw that as the key lever into that audience and started with computer science. But we've expanded greatly our, we last year re-invent, we introduced pathways for students 14 and over and cloud literacy materials such as a cloud inventor, cloud explorer and cloud builder bat. To really get at those young audiences, we've introduced dual enrollment stuff that happens between high school community college or high school and higher ed. And we're working on partnerships with Scratch, First Robotics, Project Lead the Way that introduce whether it's block-based coding, robotics, we're finding robotics is such a huge door opener. Again, not just for technically inclined, absolutely, because it's hands-on stuff. It's relevant, they want relevant stuff that they can touch, that they can feel that they can open their browser, make something happen, build a mobile application. But they also want to have pathways into a future. They want to see something that they can eventually wind up in. And AWS, the cloud just makes it real because you can do real-world stuff from a browser by working with the First Robotics or using Scratch to develop AI extensions and recognition and Lex and Polly and so on. So we've entered into partnerships with them right to open up those doors and create that long-term engagement and pipeline into the high demand jobs of tomorrow. In terms of the colleges that you mentioned and you mentioned Northeastern and Cal Poly, Arizona State, what are you seeing as the most exciting innovations there? Yeah, so first of all, we happen to be, we're in over 2,400 institutions around the world. We actually, by the way, began in the U.S. and it was 65% U.S. Now it's actually 35% U.S., 65% outside, we're in 200 countries and territories around the world. But institutions such as those, doing amazing stuff, Polo Chow at Georgia Tech, the things that he's doing with visualization on top of AWS is absolutely amazing. We launched a cloud ambassador program to reward and recognize the top faculty from around the world that are truly doing amazing stuff. But even more, we're seeing the output from students. There was a student, Alfredo Cologne. He lived in Puerto Rico, devastated by a hurricane, Maria. So lost his economic mobility, came to Florida and started taking classes at local schools. He found AWS to educate and just dove headlong into it. Did eight pathways and then applied for a job as in DevOps at Universal Studios and received a job. He is one of my favorite evangelists. And it's not just at higher ed. We found community college students. We launched a dual enrollment with between Santa Monica College and Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, focusing again on majority minority students, largely Hispanic in that community. And Michael Brown finished the cloud computing certificate, applied for an internship at Mission Cloud. So again, a partner of ours and became God's internship and they started a whole program around. So not only we're seeing excitement out of the institutions, which we are, but we're also seeing excitement out of students and businesses because they all want to get involved in this hiring brigade. So Ken, I got to ask, we're learning so much about Amazon. We've covered Amazon for a long time. I know all the key buzzwords, you know, raise the bar, all these terms, working backwards. So tell us about what's your working backwards plan because you have a great mission and we applaud. I think it's super critical. I think it's so under promoted. I think we'll do our best to kind of promote. It's really valuable to society and getting people their jobs. But it's a great opportunity in and of itself. But what's your goal? What's your objective? How are you going to get there? What are your priorities? What do you need to do? We are a pure educational workforce and today, our job is to work backwards from employers and this cloud opportunity. The thing that we care about, our customer still remains our student. And so we want to give excessive mobility to students into these fields in cloud computing, not just today and tomorrow. That requires a lot. That requires machine learning, the algorithm that changed the learning objectives based on careers. So content maps to these careers and we're going to be working with educational institutions on that. Recruiting, does recruiting does it do an effective job at matching students into jobs? Or are we looking at all of just the elite institutions as signals for that? That's a big problem. So students are your customer and customer. But you've got stakeholders in support systems that support you, right? Like Cal Poly and others. Absolutely. We've also got governments. So we were down in Louisiana just last month and Governor Bell Edwards said we're going to go statewide with AWS Educate's cloud degree program across all of their community college system, across the University of Louisiana, the state system, and into K-12 because we believe in those long-term pathways. Never before have governors, have ministers of country working with the Ministry of Education for Singapore and Indonesia and we're working deep into India, never have they been more aligned to workforce development. It creates huge unrest. We've seen this in Spain and Greece. We see it in the US. But it's also this economic imperative. And Andy is right. Education is at a crisis. Education is not solving the needs of all of their constituents, but also industries to blame. We haven't been deeply partnered with education. That partnership is such a huge part of the media. There's some structural things involved in the educational system. It's linear. The internet's non-linear. You've got progressions are different. Absolutely. This is an opportunity because I think it's just like competition. Hey, if the US Department of Education is not going to get their act together, people aren't going to go to school. I mean, Peter Deal, another political spectrum was paying people not to go to college. Again, it was a little bit different radical view. Andy over here saying, look it. So you see the data points starting to boil up. I see some of my younger son's friends all saying, questioning what they can get on YouTube, what's accessible now. They can learn about anything digitally now. This is, people are starting to realize that I might not need to be in college or I might not need to be learning this. I can go direct. And we pay lip service to lifelong education. If you end, if you terminally end education at X year, well, what's happening with the rest of your life? We need to be lifelong learners. And yes, we need to have off-ramps and on-ramps throughout our education. The other thing is it's not just skills. The skills are important. And we need to have people who are certified in various AWS skills and come. But we also need to focus on those competencies. Education does a good job around critical decision-making skills and stuff like collaboration. But do they really do a good job at invent and simplify? Do they teach kids to fail? Are we walking kids through terminal exams? Absolutely. Are we teaching kids to think big, to move fast, and have that bias for action? I think we've all done it. And have fun too. Have fun doing it. It's really good. Absolutely. All right. Well, so fun having you on the show. Great conversation. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. Stay tuned.