Many of our clients are currently working on cloud transformation. To better support our customers, we have recently qualified as an AWS Training partner. We have four AWS authorised instructors, who can deliver official courses from the AWS curriculum. All the instructors have a strong hands-on background and they are also working on customer projects. The delivered curriculum includes courses for people new to cloud as well as for technical professionals.
Business essentials is recommended for sales and business persons, whereas Technical essentials is an entry-level course for IT persons. Associate level courses are suitable for architects and software developers who want to get AWS certified. From the Associate level courses, we recommend starting with Architecting on AWS, which is aimed at achieving AWS Certified Solution Architect certification. It gives a very good overview of AWS services and teaches the fundamentals of building your own AWS infrastructure. Our complete course offerings are available on the Gofore website.
At Gofore, we believe teams are the key factor in successful software projects. We have had a recruitment campaign to attract complete teams. Also, we believe that training teams is a very efficient way for companies to gain cloud competence. There are two clear benefits. The first is that a cloud infrastructure team is the key enabler in cloud adoption by creating company standards and reusable cloud infrastructure. The second is that, when the business grows, it is essential for software teams to take responsibility for their AWS infrastructure and can maintain it. Transforming teams to the cloud era increases teams’ productivity and autonomy. Increased autonomy enables scaling as the number of projects increases.
The duration of official AWS courses is from one to three days. Last autumn we did something quite different. We organised an intensive three months AWS Developer Academy program together with Academy Finland (a part of Academic Work). It was a holistic program on software development in AWS cloud, including programming, scrum, CI/CD, APIs, databases, containers, and infrastructure as code. And, of course, we studied all the essential AWS services. We covered various compute options from virtual machines to container services and serverless, as well as relational and noSQL database services. The whole course was very much hands-on. As teachers, we were committed to follow the Academy’s action learning methodology. This means very short theory lectures followed by a lot of hands-on exercises and group work. All the stakeholders, including the client and trainees, were very happy with the results in terms of the learning outcomes. The program concluded with two weeks of final project work. As a result, ten junior AWS consultants graduated just before Christmas. All of them started a new IT career at the beginning of 2020.
Anna Ruokonen
Cloud Specialist
