 Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS ReInvent 2021. We're in person for a real event. I'm John Furrier, your host. We have two sets here on the floor, also a hybrid event online as well for Amazon. Also on theCUBE zone, go to cubereinvent.com and check out all the CUBE footage there. Maureen Launer again, VP of Training and Certification, maybe it was CUBE alumni. Maureen, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Nice to see you. So I remember years ago at Reinvent when you came on, first time on theCUBE. This was when cloud was just getting going. I don't know if it was just getting going, it was going. But it was just like training was going and rolling. Now you're swimming in needs. You get the big milestone for, what's it, 27 million people. What's the number? 29 million. 29 million people is the target for training. We hear the certifications are up. The pandemic has got everyone geared up for training. Give us the update, what's happening? Yeah, so we're doing a lot of interesting things. Obviously the pandemic changed the world for everyone, but it's been a really good opportunity for us to pivot the business and move things to virtual and digital. And in 2020, we did make that commitment to train 29 million people for free by 2025. And we're, you know, we've trained six million so far. So we're making great progress on that goal. We've largely done that through a couple of different programs. So we just a month ago launched our skill builder platform that provides 500 free training courses in 16 languages across 200 countries. We also launched the AWS skills center in Seattle, which is learner acquisition and getting that bringing in people from the community to learn about cloud. And we also launched a courseware on Amazon books. So we were really excited about- So you guys are genuine. No, this is free training. All free training. Free training. Everything I just mentioned. Important things, skills are people learning right now. I think it's still, you know, it's the same thing. It's solution architecture, security for sure. DevOps, developer. But we're also seeing a huge interest in business. The business roles really understanding what cloud is and how it can, you know, help them with their business. How about organizations? Cause they have skill issues too. You, I know you guys going all in on training, which is great. And by the way, congratulations on the mission. I know you're getting close to the numbers. I think through this announcement, we're getting an update as you guys, have you hit the numbers yet? The 29 million, yeah, so six million. We've done so far. Yeah, I don't agree. So you're on your way. What about organizations? How do they get involved? Because they're trying the same thing. Are you partnering with people? Yeah, so we partner with, well, for customers, they're looking for the same thing that we are. We also have a program for underserved and unemployed communities where we go in and do a kind of non-tact-to-tact training. And we're offering that program in 90 locations this year and really trying to address the early pipeline. What are some of the most important things that you're working on for AWS for training and certification that right now? The biggest thing that we're doing is just trying to make everything as free and accessible as we can and moving as much as we can to digital. Making it where we've really focused this year on experiential learning. So labs and getting engaged with the customer and keeping them. Because obviously we release services every day, and it's important that we just work with the organizations to have a learning, curious culture. Is there any way people can get involved or you guys have any open programs? What can we do to help on theCUBE? Do you guys have new cool digital ways to get the word out? What's going on? Yeah, so we, I mean, it depends on what you, we always are partnering with collaborating organizations, especially for programs like Restart. So organizations within communities that are trying to get their community skilled up. So we have, we work with a bunch of different partnerships. And I think for me, it's really just about, we really think we're very, very focused on building diverse builders. And so we want to make sure that we're getting the message out that cloud's accessible to anybody. And by providing free training, we hope that that will attract a new set of learners and start to close the gap on the training pipeline. So have you guys got the Gen Z nail down yet? Cause they're hungry for content. They're on the Discord servers. They're on Twitch. Yeah, we have, we actually, we were training to Twitch this year because you have to meet the learner where they are, right? And I think, you know, traditional instructor-led training just doesn't work for some people. And so we have content out on Twitch. We're working on some really cool interactive gaming stuff. And so we really have pivoted. So there's a Discord server called ASA Diamonds that's turning out to be quite the business vibe for the young kids. A lot of young kids from 13 to 17 years old in that kind of learning mode. And they want to talk about cloud. Like to them, they're geeking out on NVIDIA GPUs. They want to hear about the Graviton. They're nerds. We actually have a very cool program called Get IT. And it's very focused on girls intact. And we go into schools and run competitions and do hackathons and they present. And it's a really great way to get, you know, girls interested in tech in a big way. Cal Poly helps at a robotics competition that was pretty interesting. The women's division was phenomenal. There's divisions now. I mean, robotics is like a varsity sport now. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this shows you where the interest level is. Okay, so I'll say there's a young demographic and you've got the re-skilling on the higher end of the demographic of age-wise that maybe have come from IT. So you've got the IT folks and or people that had some business training or whatever. And then you've got the young. What's the programs that are working the best that you see to getting those folks, the older folks in re-training? For the younger ones? Older ones, not younger ones, older ones. I think what we're trying to do is work with organizations to make training accessible and comfortable. We always say it, you know, we want companies to build an environment where they can experiment and learn. So we're working with large organizations to try and transform them and make them cloud fluent and move people from traditional skills onto cloud skills. And we're having great success with customers in doing that. But I think providing a really comfortable environment and a place and space for them to learn and building communities within that organization is important. What did you learn during the pandemic and your evolution? Cause you guys were doing like mid-flight of training. I know you've been working really hard over the years. I know that for a fact. Pandemic hits, it's now virtual. Digital is now a priority. What are some of the new things that you, that have been spawned out to you from digital that are working? Yeah, I mean, we learned how to, you know, we're building out labs and we learned to cut content into smaller pieces so people could consume them. I think the biggest thing that we learned is that we just need to, that people were hungry to learn. Everyone was at home and we actually saw a tremendous increase in people taking training, especially digital training. And then we also pivoted all of our certifications to virtual very rapidly so that people could then validate their skills. I think in light of the pandemic, people are, you know, the great resignation is real, right? And people are assessing where they are. And so we'd like to acquire people that are interested in that. And those jobs that are available with certification are very high paying jobs. Yes, they are, yeah. So you walk through a certification, you're looking at some pretty good salary levels and you could be living anywhere. I met a guy last night at an event and he was in finance and he moved from a job making 30,000 to six figures and he did all through self-learning and he came to an event, was super excited about that. That's the top story right there, that we got to leave it at that. I know you got to go, I know you got a hard deadline. Thank you for spending the time to come on theCUBE and sharing this important information around the certification, your goal for free training. It's free, if you want to get a raise, get cloud certification. Pro tip, that's a pro tip right there. Thanks for coming on, Maureen, great to see you. Maureen, Launaghan, great work she's doing in Amazon, getting free content, you don't have to pay for it, it's free, just like theCUBE content here, bringing you free insights. I'm John Furrier, worldwide leader in tech coverage at theCUBE here in person in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.