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I know many people who are twitchy about AI taking their jobs away. I hear you, and I understand. But AI is also opening the door to new jobs. While the top positions demand esoteric skills, such as knowing how to program with OpenCV, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, there are also jobs out there for people who aren’t computer scientists. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is opening the doors for you and me with a suite of training courses and new certifications.
At first, prompt engineering — a fancy way of asking AI chatbots nicely for the best answers — seemed like the way for non-experts to get AI jobs. It turns out that large language models (LLM) can write and optimize their own prompts just fine.
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However, there are many other AI-related jobs where you can make good money. Indeed, according to AWS, employers are willing to pay you up to 47% higher salaries if you’ve got AI skills. While top dollar goes to IT professionals, AWS has also found that sales and marketing workers can get 43% higher salaries, while finance professionals can make up to 42% higher. That’s not hay!
To help workers build and prove their AI expertise, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new AI training portfolio to equip you with the necessary AI skills and two new certifications to show that you know your stuff. These include:
AWS Certified AI Practitioner: This foundational-level certification is designed for non-technical workers. It helps you to demonstrate that you know your way around AI, machine learning (ML), and generative AI concepts and tools. This certification is ideal for professionals in marketing, sales, project and product management, HR, finance, and other non-IT roles who want to identify AI opportunities and collaborate effectively with technical teams.
AWS
AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer — Associate: This certification is for a technical worker. It’s meant to show that you have the skills needed to build, deploy, and maintain AI and ML solutions. It covers essential aspects like optimizing model performance, managing computational resources, updating model versions, and securing AI solutions. This certification is crucial for IT professionals leveraging AI to meet business objectives.
To prepare for these certifications, AWS has launched eleven new training courses on AWS Skill Builder, its digital learning center. Individual subscriptions to this site are $29 a month or $449 a year.
The AI courses include foundational topics such as:
For those aiming for the higher-level AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate certification, additional courses cover advanced topics like data transformation techniques, feature engineering, bias mitigation strategies, and data security.
The AWS Certified AI Practitioner training resources include eight free courses. In these, you’ll learn about real-world use cases for AI, ML, and generative AI, how to select a foundation model (FM), the concepts and techniques involved in crafting effective prompts, and more.
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Altogether, AWS offers more than 100 AI, ML, and generative AI courses and learning resources on AWS Skill Builder and AWS Educate to help you prepare for the future of work.
This follows Amazon’s “AI Ready” initiative, which was meant to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people globally by 2025. It’s also, of course, part of the AWS Certification system.
On August 13, you can register for the beta exams of AWS Certified AI Practitioner and AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate. The complete certifications should be available by the end of the year.
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Certifications are valuable for getting jobs. That’s especially true in a field like AI, which is so new that it’s difficult for employers to know if you really know your way around AI. I strongly suggest that if you think your future lies in AI work, or if just having AI skills can help you with your current job, you give these programs a try. The financial benefits speak for themselves.