 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 Seattle, Washington at the AWS. I think it's called the Meeting Space. There's a lot of AWS buildings around here. It's AWS Imagine Education. First year of the conference, about 900 registered folks, 22 countries represented. We're really excited this thing is going to grow. We've seen it before with AWS. We saw it with Summit, Reinvent, AWS Public Sector. So we're excited to be here for the very first time. And our next guest is Dr. Scott Rawls. He is the president of Northern Virginia Community College. Scott, great to see you. Thank you. It's great to be here, Jeff. So a lot of mentions of NOVA and that's you guys. That's us. That's us. Not the PBS programming. You guys are kind of out front on some of these initiatives with RISA and AWS Public Sector. So I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the Veterans Apprenticeship Program, which has been in place for a little while. Sure, sure. Well, just a little bit about NOVA. We're a community college just right outside of the Virginia suburbs of DC. We're the, I'd say the biggest college that nobody's heard of outside of our region. We have about 100,000 students. 100,000? 100,000. And how many campuses? Oh, six campuses. Six campuses. And for us, our niche is information technology is sort of the internet runs through our region. And so that cloud computing, we have the highest concentration of cloud computing, cyber degrees. And so that's why the AWS partnership is so key for us because it's about the opportunity for our students and for AWS, it's about filling those jobs. Also, we have a lot of employers in our region that hire based on AWS credentials, AWS, the backbone for them. And so that's why for us as a community college, being jobs focused, filling that gap, that's why it's key for us. It's Tyson's Corner, right? I mean, that's where AOL started and you know, there's a whole history of it. You got all the cyber right around there. And so it's a, you know, one writer has said, you know, that we're the bullseye of the internet. So it's a unique place, but it's a unique opportunity for our students. Right. And the smart money's, smart money's on the AWS second headquarter being in that neighborhood, but we don't have any other information on it. Knock on wood. We would love to see that. So I'm just curious that if you've been, you know, really educating people to get jobs in this IT sector, how you've seen that evolve over time? Yeah. Because it used to be, you know, there are a lot of sys admin jobs or a lot of jobs that now automation and cloud is taking away. On the other hand, there's a lot of new jobs that the technology's enabling. That's what happens every time. So how are you seeing when the latest get changed? You know, I really think that's the way it has been. 30 years ago when I was breaking into this workforce world, that same conversation was going on. Automation was going to take all the jobs, but there's been all kinds of new opportunities that emerge and that's the same thing we see. And certainly in Northern Virginia, we see that. And so for us as a community college, we're doing it in two ways. You asked about the apprenticeship program. That was our first entree with AWS. So we, we are one of their primary training providers, education providers for apprenticeship. Those are the veterans and others that are hired by AWS. They come to our college for the education component, the certifications, the IT skills. The second part for us is the new cloud degree, which we introduced in February, which is a two year first to cloud degree in the country that will help other students who are not those coming through apprenticeship to also break into this important area. Right, so this is an associate degree like all the other degrees that you guys offer as a two year program. So I'm just curious, what are some of the curricula? What are some of the core classes that they take that are part of that degree? Well, one of the things that we've been doing, we have a, we kind of use a lot of data analytics on the workforce side that others do not. So part of it's our engagement, just talking with AWS leaders about what's needed. Part of it's also watching what AWS, who, what credentials, what skills AWS is hiring for, and then others who use the AWS platform. So you will see certain types of credentials that are built in security plus, Linux plus, the AWS solutions architect built in. Also, even programming languages like Python because of its importance in that regard. So we kind of use that as the, using that intelligence, if you will, to be able to build out what the degree should look like because we're paying attention to how AWS hires and how the IT users of AWS, how they're hiring and what the skills are that they're looking for. Right, and how hard is it to get that through at the school to actually have an associate degree based on cloud where they receptive the idea that everybody see it coming. Was it a hard push? We did it within one year. We did it within one year. We did it within one year. Everything in the cloud happens fast, right? So, you know, we move fast on this. It is built off of our IT degree. So it's a specialization of that degree. And so it was really, I think what made it move faster for us was two things. One is AWS has a great program called AWS Educate which essentially provides a lot of the curriculum content. It's the kind of things, if you were starting a degree, you would have to go out and create on your own. So having that rich content, other partners like Columbus State who is also Santa Monica, others that are working on cloud degrees and we can partner with each other and then having the apprenticeship as sort of a North Star to tack on with respect to how companies are hiring and what skills are needed. That allowed us to move fast. Right, so beyond educate and the actual materials and curriculum materials, what does partnering with AWS do for you guys? What does that enable you to do as part of this program that you couldn't do or it'd be a whole lot harder? Well, you know, not everybody looks to community colleges and so being partnered with AWS, who they are is key for us, it's important for us. I think it's also, they recognize how important it is for them. So not everybody recognizes that. You know, one thing that's unique for us as a community college, we have a lot of students who come to us who already have four-year degrees to get that skills part. It's almost like a graduate school. They're apprentices or that way. Most of the apprentices already have four-year degrees in computer science and we're providing that finishing piece. So I think AWS sees in us how to broaden to scale to fill that talent gap and I really think the only way you're going to diversify the talent gap and scale the talent gap is through institutions like ours. Right, it's really an interesting kind of statement on the role of community colleges in this whole kind of refactoring of education. One, as you said, a lot of people have four-year degrees so this kind of concept of ongoing education continue to get new skills as the opportunities dictate and have that very specific knowledge in these certifications that are not intro philosophy or English Lit 205. These are very specific things that people can apply to their job. And the curriculum changes so fast so we have to be willing to change. We have to, our instructors have to be willing to kind of get that new thing. The history curriculum doesn't change that quickly but the IT curriculum and particularly as it relates to cloud and cyber in other areas, if we're not doing that then we're out of the ball game and when we're out of the ball game that means our students are out of the ball game and that's what it's all about. So when you come to an event like this, what are you hoping to get out of an event like this? Flu across the country, unfortunately, through all the terrible smoke and stuff we have on the West Coast, what are some of the things you hope to gain here with some of the educators? Well one thing that always happens and it always happens at AWS events is the connections that you make. So part of it is you do hear people like we heard this morning that you wouldn't have the opportunity to hear before on machine learning other areas but a lot of it's about the connections so actually tomorrow morning a lot of the community colleges and others who are creating cloud programs will be working together tomorrow. So it's really, AWS does a great job of maximizing our time. So we're part of the program but we're also breaking off to really partner and that allows us all to move quicker when we can build off of each other and then have the resources like AWS makes available to us. Well sounds like you're moving pretty quick. We're trying, we're trying. We're trying, we're trying. We get it done in a year. We have to keep up with where they're going. It's not what academic institutions are generally known for, speed and change. We're not your average academic institution. There you go, all right. Please talk to Scott Walls. Thanks for taking a few minutes with you. And I'm Jeff Frick and you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS Public Sector Imagine in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching, catch you next time.