 Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech, International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I have two guests from AWS here with me. Carolina Pina joins us, the head of Enterprise Enablement for Lightham, and Laura Alvarez-Modernel is here as well, Public Sector Programs Manager at AWS. Ladies, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Nice to meet you for having us. Carolina, let's start with you. Talk to me a little bit about your role, what it is that you're doing there. My role in AWS is to actually create mechanisms of massive training to try to close the tiling gap that we have in the region. And when I mentioned tiling gap, I'm talking about obviously digital and cloud computing skills. So that's in a nutshell what my role entails. Got it. How long have you been in that role? Just curious. So I've been at AWS a little bit over two years. I was actually in the public sector team when I joined, leading the education vertical for Latin America and Canada. And I recently joined the commercial sector now leading these massive training efforts for the region, for Lightham. And Laura, you're in public sector. Talk to me a little bit about your role. Yes. I'm in public sector. I'm also based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So I am from Latin America. And I lead educational and community impact programs in the southern cone of Latin America. I also lead diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And I'm part of the Women at Amazon Global Board. That's our affinity group to make sure we make efforts towards building a more equal world. And on a personal note, I'm really passionate about the topic of gender equality because I truly think it affects us all as women and as Latin. So that's something that I'm always interested in collaborating with. Excellent. Carolina, back to you. If we think about from an enablement perspective, how is AWS partnering with its customers and its partners to train and employ women, particularly in technology? No, sure, Lisa. So it's not a surprise. We, like I mentioned, we have a big cloud skills tallying gap in the region. In fact, 69% of companies have reported tallying shortages and difficulty hiring. So this represents a 15-year high. So many of these companies are actually our own commercial customers. So they approach us asking for support training and developing their talent. So like I mentioned in my role, I create massive training efforts and initiatives. So we always take into consideration women, minorities, underrepresented community. And not just for the current talent, meaning like the people that are currently employed, but also to ensure that we're proactively implementing initiatives to develop a talent of younger generation and a talent so we can to inspire them and ensure that we're seeing them represented in companies like AWS and our customers and in our partners. And obviously, when we sit down with customers to craft these massive trainings, leveraging their ecosystems and communities, we actually try to use all our AWS training and certification portfolio, which includes in class with live instructors, in classroom trainings. We also have our AWS skill-building platform, which is the platform that allows us to reach a broader audience because it has over 500 free and on-demand classes. And we also have a lot of different other programs that touches in different audiences. We have AWS Restart for underrepresented and under-employed minorities. We also have AWS Academy, which is the program that we have for higher education institutions. And we have AWS Educate, which also touches and Cloud Beginners. So in every single of these programs, we ensure that we are encompassing and really speaking to women and developing training and developing women. That's a great focus there. Laura, talk to me about upskilling. I know AWS is very much about promoting from within. What are some of the things that it's doing to help women in Latin America develop those tech skills and upskill from where maybe where they are now? Well, Lisa, I think that is super interesting because there's definitely a skills gap problem, right? We have all heard about. And what's funny is that we have this huge opportunity in Latin America to train people and to help further develop the countries. And we have the companies that need the talent. So why is there still a gap, right? And I think that's because there's no mashing solution to solving this problem. No, like Epic Hollywood movie scene that it's going to show how we close the gap. And it takes stepping out of our comfort zone. And as Carolina mentioned, collaborating. So we at AWS have a commitment to help 29 million people globally to grow their technical skills with free cloud computing skills training by 2025. I know that sounds a lot throughout educational province, but we do have, as Carolina mentioned, a skill builder. You can go into the website for free, enter, choose your path, get trained. We have academy that we implement with universities. We start that is a program that's already available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Costa Rica. So there are a lot of opportunities. But you also mentioned something else that I would like to type a bit deeper that is Latin American women. And yesterday we had the opportunity to record a panel about intersectionality with three amazing Latin women. And what we have to learn from that is that these are two minorities that intersect, right? We're talking about females that are minority, Latinas are minority and in tech that is also something that is even bigger minority. So there are more difficulties there. And we need to make sure that we're meeting that talent that is there, that is in Latin America that exists. We know for sure we have unicorns in Latin America that are even AWS customers like Mercado Libre, and we have to meet them with the opportunities. And that's why we created a program that came from identifying how this problem evolves in Latin America, that there is a lack of confidence in women also that they don't feel prepared or equipped. There's a cultural component why we don't choose tech careers. And we partner with universities, more than 12 universities in Latin America, in the International American Development Bank as well to create tech skills that's a free five weeks program in order to get students and get female in Latin America into the tech word. And we also have them with mentorship. So I think that is an opportunity to truly collaborate because we as AWS are not going to solve this by ourselves, right? We need everyone pitching on that. Right. It's absolutely a team effort. You mentioned something important in terms of helping women and especially minorities get out of their comfort zone. Carolina, I'm curious, when you're talking with women and getting them into the program and and sharing with them all of the enablement programs that you have, how do you help them be confident to get out of that comfort zone? That's a hard thing to do. Yeah, no, for sure. For sure, Lisa. Well, I, you know, a lot of times I actually, I use myself as an example, because, you know, I started engineering and industrial systems engineering many years ago. And, you know, a lot of my career has been in higher education and innovation and startups. And as I mentioned in the intro, I've been at AWS for a little bit over two years. So I, my career has not been in cloud and I recently joined the cloud. So I actually had to go through our own trainings and get our own certifications. So I, that's, you know, a lot of times I actually use my own example. So people understand that you don't have to come from tech. You don't have to come. You can actually be a non-tech person and also see the benefits of the cloud. And you don't have to only, you know, learn cloud if you're in the IT department or in an IT team. So sometimes I also emphasize that the cloud and the future is absolutely the cloud. In fact, the World Economic Forum, you know, teaches us that cloud computing is the technology that's going to be mostly adopted by 2025. So that's why we need to ensure that every single person, women and others, are really knowledgeable in the cloud. So that's why, you know, technical and non-technical. But I, you know, I use myself as an example for them to say, you know, you can actually do it. And obviously also I collaborate with Laura in a lot of the women at Amazon Latin America group to also, you know, ensure that we're doing webinars and panels. So we show them ourselves as role model, like Laura is an incredible role model for our community. And so it's also to show examples of what the possibilities are. And that's what we do. I love that you're sure. Oh, please. Yes. To add to that, I think it also requires the companies and the private sector to get out of their comfort zone, right? Because we're not going to find solutions doing what we are already doing. We truly need to go and get near these persons with a new message. The interest is there in these programs. We have reached more than 3,000 women already in Latin America with tech skills. So it's not that women are not interested. It's like how do we reach them with a message that resounds with them, right? Like how we can explain the power of technology to transform the world and to actually improve their communities. I think there's something there also that we need to think further of. It's so important. You know, we say often when we're talking about women in tech that she needs to see what she can be. Or if she can't see it, she can't be it. So having those role models and those mentors and sponsors is absolutely critical for women to get, I call it, getting comfortably uncomfortable out of that comfort zone and recognizing there's so many opportunities. Carolina, to your point, these days every company is a tech company, a data company, whether you're talking about a car dealer in grocery market. So your point about, you know, and obviously the future being cloud, there's so much opportunity that that opens up for everybody, really. But that's an important thing for people to recognize how they can be a part of that, get out of their comfort zone, and try something that they maybe hadn't considered before. Yes. And actually, Lisa, I would love to share an example. So we have a Grupo Boticario, which is one of our customers, one of the leaders of retails in Brazil, and they've been a customer of AWS since 2013, when they realized that, you know, the urgency and the importance of embracing state-of-the-art technology, to your point, like, you know, this is a retail company that understands that needs to be, you know, embraced digital transformation, especially because, you know, they're getting very busy during mother's days and other holidays during the year. So they realized that they, instead of outsourcing their IT requirements to technology experts, they decide to actually start developing and bringing the talent, you know, within itself, within, you know, technology and in-house. So they decided to start training within. And that's when we obviously, we partner with them to also create a very comprehensive training and certification plan that started with, you know, a lot of the infrastructure and security teams. But then it was actually then implemented in the rest of the company. So going back to the point, like, everybody really needs to know. And what we also love about Boticario is they really care about the diversion and inclusion aspect of this equation. And we actually collaborated with them as well through this program called Desenvolvi, with the Brazilian government. And Desenvolvi means developing Portuguese. And this program really ensures that we are also closing that gender and that race gap and ensuring that they're actually, you know, developing talent in cloud for Brazil. So we, you know, obviously have been very successful with them. And we will continue to do even more things with them, particularly for this topic. I've always known how customer-focused AWS is every time we get to go to a re-invent or some of the events. But it's so nice to hear these, the educational programs that you're doing with customers to help them improve DEI, to help them enable their own women in their organizations to learn skills. I didn't realize that. I think that's, that's fantastic. Very much a symbiotic part of AWS. If we think about the theme for this year's International Women's Day, breaking the bias. I want to get both of your opinions on Laura. We'll start with you. What that means to you and where do you think we are in Latin America with breaking the bias? Well, I think breaking the bias is the first step to truly being who we are every day and being able to bring that to our work as well. I think we are in a learning curve of that. The companies are changing culturally. As Carolina mentioned, we have customers that are aware of the importance of having women. And as we say at AWS, not only because there is a good business reason, because there is, because there are studies that show that we can increase the country's GPD, but also because it's important, it's the right thing to do. So in terms of breaking the bias, I think we are learning and we have a long way to go. I talked a bit earlier about intersectionality. And that is something that is also important to highlight, because we are talking about females, but we are also talking about other minorities. We are talking about underrepresented communities, indigenous people, Latins. So when this overlap, we face even bigger challenges to get where we want to get. And to get to decision making places, because technology is transforming the ways we take decisions. We live and we need someone like us taking those decisions. So I think it's important at first to be aware and to see that you can get there and eventually to start the conversation going and to build the conversation. Not to just lead it, but to make sure we hear people and their inputs and what they're going through. Yes, we definitely need to hear them. Carolina, what's your take on breaking the bias? And from your experience, where do you think we are with you? Yeah, I'm as passionate as Laura on this topic. And that's why we're collaborating in the women at Amazon Latin America chapter, because we're both very, I think breaking the bias starts with us and ourselves. And we're very proactive within AWS and externally. And I feel it's also, I mean, Lisa, what we've been doing is not only obviously gathering the troops and really making sure that we have very, very aggressive goals internally, but also bringing our male counterparts and other members of the other communities. Because the change, we're not going to make it alone. It's not women only talking to women is going to make the change. We actually need to make sure the male and other groups are represented and the dialogue that we're very conscious about that. And I feel like we're seeing more and more that the topic is becoming more of a priority, not only within AWS and Amazon, but we also see it because now that I meet with when I meet with customers around the region, they really want to see how we can collaborate in this diversity and inclusion initiative. So I think we are breaking the bias because now this topic is more top of mind and then we're being more proactively addressing it and training people and educating people. And I feel we're really in a pivoted point where the change that we're really being wanting to, we will see in the next few years, which is very exciting. Excellent. And we'll see that with the help of women like you guys. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what you're doing, how you're helping organizations across AWS's ecosystem, customers, partners, and helping, of course, folks from within you, right? It's a holistic effort, but we are on our way to breaking that bias. And again, I thank you both for your insights. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa, for the opportunity. My pleasure for Carolina Pina and Laura Alvarez-Modernel. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech International Women's Day 2022.