Education is evolving. The way organizations and individuals learn about digital transformation amid the Fourth Industrial Revolution looks very different from years past. One very specific example is how we are teaching and learning about datacenters.
As we all know, the cloud enables many activities that we do in both life and business, and it hosts large amounts of information that feed all these applications. The way I see it, to build a secure cloud environment, we need datacenters—and we need workers to help.
Enter the Microsoft Datacenter Academy, which helps individuals acquire skills and certifications for employment in the cloud computing and IT sectors. It is a workforce development program from Microsoft Datacenter Community Development team that helps education partners in datacenter communities deliver training and certifications to enable employment in this sector.
The program delivers on five core pillars including:
- Curriculum: Work with local education partners to augment existing curriculum.
- Datacenter Lab: Hands-on datacenter equipment for digital skills training and education.
- Scholarships and financial grants: Provide financial support for those students who come from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
- Mentorship: Connecting with others and learning from current employees.
- Work experience: Opportunity to gain valuable work experience at a Microsoft Datacenter.
This comes at a good time too. With the amount of data exponentially increasing—with the volume of data across the world doubling in size every two years—we need datacenters and datacenter experts now more than ever before.
Datacenters continue to evolve too, and workers need to stay on the cutting-edge of technology developments. As one example, earlier this year, Compass Datacenters launched a new business unit, Quantum, to deliver a WSaaS (white space as a service) solution for adding incremental local, remote, or edge capacity.
Quantum incorporates a modular data center within a comprehensive service package to eliminate the need to modify operational procedures or add the additional headcount normally associated with network expansion.
Here Compass personnel perform the full range of installation and operation activities. This includes site selection, site preparation and permitting, installation, monitoring, and operation for each of the company’s full function 100kW modular data centers’ deployment.
While this is simply one example, the bottomline is we need more workers to deliver the technology of tomorrow—and perhaps the best way to do this is through a new education model. The Microsoft Datacenter Academy gives workers to tools, training, and certifications required to work in the cloud computing and IT sectors. Perhaps this is one of the steps we need to be taking to reach a more connected tomorrow.
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