 From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE, covering Imagine a Better World, a global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education Event. First time ever, 900 people registered, over 20 countries represented. Teresa gave the keynote, a lot of exciting stuff. And one of the big announcements is some of the work that's happening down in Los Angeles with all the community colleges there. And we're excited to have, right off the keynote stage, he's Bill Allen, the CEO of the LA Economic Development Corporation, who's been instrumental in getting this thing off the ground. Bill, good to see you. Jeff, it's great to be with you today. This is an exciting moment for us, rolling out this very successful pilot program to all 19 colleges that are part of the LA Regional Consortium. So let's jump in. It's called the CA Cloud Workforce Project. Yeah, the California Cloud Workforce Project. We have, obviously, millions of businesses in California in our own region, 250,000 businesses with employees that are looking to convert to the cloud, take advantage of the exciting tools and resources available to them in the cloud. But they need the skilled workers in these firms to help migrate this transition. And that's what our community colleges are stepping up to provide with the help of Amazon Web Services and AWS Educator. So it's really interesting, because it's a special role that community colleges play within the whole education system. And we could have a whole long debate over adult beverages on a Friday about the state of the education system. But specifically here, there is a huge gap and people think technology's taking jobs away. They're taking some jobs away, but they're opening up a ton of new jobs and go no further than looking at the jobs open recs, that there's lots and lots and lots of jobs to fill. So how did it come to be to tie that back directly to real skills that you can actually have real kids take real jobs? Well, we see these transitions happening all across the industry sectors in Los Angeles, and we have a broad array, aerospace, entertainment, digital media, life sciences, transportation, logistics, fashion, and advanced transportation. They're all undergoing significant changes, and they're all becoming more technology-enabled, more technology-dependent, and the opportunity exists to train workers for these technology-enabled jobs that provide good wages and good benefits and help our businesses compete globally and take advantage, fully leverage all these advances and innovations. We formed a center for a competitive workforce with all of our 19 colleges using their label market research economists and our own economists in the Institute for Applied Economics at the LAEDC to study the evolving demand for labor and skills in the various occupations in these industry sectors and to compare that against the supply side of our labor market. To enhance our talent development pipeline, and it's led to new programs such as this. This was one of the clear areas of opportunity is cloud computing skills. The first program we launched at Santa Monica College had two sections. They rapidly sold out, we had to expand it to seven sections. More than 300 students participated in the first year of courses. 230 are signed up for this fall, 2018, and it's an extraordinarily successful program. And now, the other 18 community college presidents have all stepped up and said, we're going to roll this out on our campuses beginning this August at East Los Angeles College and the historic East LA part of our community, which speaks to the diversity opportunities. We have a very diverse population in Los Angeles and many of our communities have been underrepresented historically in the technology fields. They are really interested in accessing the skills and opportunities, and they are really taking up these courses with enthusiasm from our local high schools to our community colleges. And I think it's going to help us in Los Angeles really diversify our technology workforce, and that helps our companies expand globally. Right. So I'm just curious, what are some of the skills when you did the research that popped up in terms of specific types of jobs? Because we've all seen the pictures of data centers. They're usually pretty clean. There's not a lot of people walking around. But there are people that really need to make it go. So what were some of those kind of job titles and job skills that leapt out that have such demand and unfilled demand? There's so much need for data scientists. There's so much need for machine learning capabilities. There's so much need for basic cloud computing, cybersecurity, really all of these advanced technologies that are data dependent, data analytics, data science, really are emerging as important components of each and every industry sector that I mentioned earlier, that exists in our community and throughout the world. And so our job is to try and share that knowledge with our community colleges, our state universities, our four year public and private institutions, and even our K through 12 institutions so they can begin to adjust their curriculum to ensure that they're creating pathways of learning at the earliest ages and then specific coursework in these emerging opportunities throughout the career ladder, throughout the career development pipeline in the LA area. So I want to touch base on the K through 12 because I think an interesting component of this program is each community college is paired up with at least one. I don't know if there's more than one a high school in their area. And it's always been kind of interesting to me that it's been so hard to get kind of CS faked into kind of the standard high school curriculum. You've got kind of the standard math track with trig and calc and algebra one, algebra two. You've got kind of the standard science track with physics and bio and chem, but it's been really hard to wedge CS into that. So are you finding with programs like this that kind of the adoption or the embracing of a CS curriculum at these lower, lower levels is finally getting some steam? We are, interestingly, our students have often been head of our institutions in understanding the demand and the opportunity and they've been clamoring for these kinds of opportunities. And our industries are becoming more aware of the role that they can play in helping our schools develop the curriculum, purchase, acquire, maintain the equipment associated with this, whether it's hardware or software. And these partnerships that are emerging originally around some theme based academies in our schools, both charter schools and traditional public schools have been helping the broader school districts engage more deeply in the development of curriculum to prepare a more technologically literate workforce for the future. Right, now what if you could speak a little to kind of the public-private partnership? You're with the Economic Development Corporation. You mentioned LA Chamber of Commerce is involved and now you've got to be a company like AWS as a lot of resources to bring to bear and also a lot of open job wrecks. How does that work and how have they helped you partnering with Amazon AWS to kind of move your initiatives forward? So Amazon and the AWS platform have been terrific partners and specifically the AWS Education Initiative have been terrific partners and are really shining the way, lighting the path for other major employers in our region. The students who graduate with this program will not only be valuable to Amazon itself but so many of its customers who are migrating to the cloud platform. But we have companies like Northrop Grumman who are partnering with community colleges to develop talent for their Joint Strike Fighter program in the north end of our county and hiring people for well-paying jobs. Amazon has premier partners in their AWS Educate Partner program like Annika who are providing internships for the graduates of this program. So the public and private sector are working closely together. That's why the LADC and the LA Chamber were asked to get involved in this so we can bring employers to the table who are really forward-looking in their approaches to developing their future talent pipeline and really desire us of developing the more diverse talent base that is in Los Angeles to fill the needs as so many of the workers in these industries are aging out of the workforce. We need a significant number of newly skilled young people in our communities to take on the future of each of these industries. So we're both big fans of Theresa Carlson. She kicked things off today. If we come back a year from today, which I assume we will, what are we going to be talking about? How do you see kind of the next year what are your kind of short-term goals and more medium-term goals? I don't even ask you about long-term goals. As I mentioned, we had a few hundred students sign up for this so much so that we had to expand the sections from two to seven. I think you're going to see thousands of students taking advantage of this across our region. We have 300,000 students in our community colleges in this LA Regional Consortium. 300,000. 300,000 students. Make a big impact. And I think a significant number of them are going to want to avail themselves of these types of opportunities. We're projecting through our Center for Competitive Workforce thousands of job openings in this area. And so we have a ways to go of scaling this up to the thousands of students who should be taking these courses and preparing themselves for the well-paying jobs in these careers in Los Angeles and the broader Southern California mega region for which our community colleges train such a healthy percentage of our workforce. All right, Bill. It sounds like you're off and running and wishing nothing but the best. Jeff, thanks so much. Great talking to you. All right. He's Bill. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS Imagine Education in Seattle. Thanks for watching.