Unlock and accelerate growth with AWS Partner Training

Brian Henry: Hello, everyone and uh welcome. My name is Brian Henry. I've been with AWS about five years. I'm in charge of GSI training and enablement strategy. My background has primarily been consulting and business development or partner development, I should say. Years ago, I started my own company as a professional services provider for Adobe when they entered their enterprise space. Since we were early in that space, we actually built out the training that enabled their partners and enabled them to build out their partner network. Years later, I took on a new opportunity and moved to Silicon Valley and worked for a bunch of mid-stage startups. My focus was building out their professional services capabilities and their partner capabilities. So I've got a lot of experience when it comes to consulting companies and partner development.

Phoebe Trung: Hi, everyone. I'm Phoebe Trung. My journey to tech was unexpected. I was working with geriatric patients in skilled nursing facilities while getting my doctorate in physical therapy. On my way home from work one day, I was involved in a horrible four car accident that resulted in an eight month hiatus of me recovering and figuring out what to do next in my career path. During that time, I decided to take up temp jobs and the first one happened to be at VMware in February of 2007. Silly me, I had asked my temp agent, "Is that a clothing company?" Though I had worked in the health industry, I also focused on the business management side a lot and that came in handy. But what really boosted my abilities and confidence was the opportunity to take training and have access to all the resources available for me to quickly ramp up. Within four months, I was offered a permanent role. Since then, I've worn many different hats within the channel, working with partners as they build their business with my employers across hardware, software and cloud computing. I have over 17 years of experience and enjoy being in a very diverse group at AWS. I also continue to learn and be curious to stay up to date. With that, Brian and I get to work with very innovative builders and we are so excited to share the offerings with you today in this session.

What we'll talk about is:

• Trends AWS partners are currently facing
• What's happening industry wide
• Delivering value to your customers
• How AWS partner training and certification can support you
• Training options for every learner
• How to identify your team's needs
• Connecting with Partner Training to get started

As more customers turn to the cloud to make the impossible possible, they face the barrier to harnessing their full potential. The skills gap drops. A 2023 white paper currently puts the cloud talent supply demand gap at a staggering 4.15 million, which is a 56% growth since 2021. A recent Soft Skill report expands on that perspective, saying that 66% of IT decision makers worldwide face a critical skills gap within their departments and that cloud computing ranks as the most challenging hiring area.

This is a major opportunity for partners with credentials to fill the gaps, whether it's building chatbots using machine learning and generative AI to produce conversational responses or using large scale data analytics to inform strategic business moves. Customers are looking for partners who can help them leverage AWS services to add value to their solutions and they care if you're certified.

A recent survey of AWS partners calls out the importance of training and having trained and certified staff. 60-66% of partners say that their customers call this one of the most important things. And 83% of partner customers say that the number of certifications was a deciding factor in the partner they chose.

So let's zoom out and get a clearer view of the industry. Of the IT workloads that are great cases for migration to the cloud, only 15% have been migrated, leaving a whopping 85%. I know we can all do the math. This represents a huge opportunity for partners with migration and application practices, but also a great opportunity to expand your practices.

So use cases like advanced analytics, IoT integration, automation, even 5G and quantum - in fact, McKinsey projects that $3 trillion in IT spend is up for grabs for companies that expand their services beyond just cloud adoption. So it's our job to take this information and ask some important questions of how does this connect to what AWS can do for partners? How can we help partners take advantage of economic opportunities and support their growth and expansion with minimal disruption?

AWS Partner Training is your support system, investing in training and certification positions you and your organizations for more success. It fosters benefits like faster project deployment, improved customer satisfaction, less employee burnout and of course revenue growth. But allocating time to training, we know that's a challenge. You and your teams are billable. We get it and we're here to tell you or reaffirm that it's worth it.

A study by Canalys found that partners with deep AWS engagement and breadth of services are more profitable. Whether it's co-selling if you have your own services or just reselling, partners with a deep AWS portfolio of offerings can achieve a 6.4x multiplier for every dollar of AWS spent.

Also an internal downstream impact - research indicated services partners who obtain AWS certifications originate 18% more AWS opportunities over 18 months than similar partners who have not received certifications. And the impact is higher with more advanced certifications.

In addition to new business, partners see operational efficiency. With a recent survey of decision makers reporting that AWS trained and certified staff significantly improved operational efficiency, accelerated growth delivery by sometimes up to 20%.

Also, if your business is planning to get any competencies, which can further increase your business, we can help you get the required certifications to meet that threshold.

Now, let's look at some of our partners. Alpha Omega worked with our Partner Training and Certification to upskill their employees while addressing their customer needs using self-paced digital training and a Skill Builder subscription. Alpha Omega saw a 250% increase in certifications over two years. The investment in training helped Alpha Omega increase customer satisfaction significantly in the same two year stretch because their workforce is more efficient. Alpha Omega's quarterly customer satisfaction score increased from 80 to 93. This helped them achieve increased revenue with more contract renewals and create additional new lines of business.

Another organization we witnessed strong return on investment for training is IBM Consulting. They mentioned 18,000 certifications in February. They've now surpassed 23,000 certifications and are still climbing. I'd also like to call out Ali Raza - this person has achieved all 12 certifications and was awarded the coveted Golden Jacket. So IBM Consulting is all in. And if you see anybody here this week from IBM, you should have a conversation with them and they can tell you about the growth in their business around AWS.

The power of AWS training and certification is not just with our partners but also with our customers. So I've got a few quotes here from some of our key customers:

• Volkswagen Financial Services says AWS training helped identify new architectures to reduce costs and increase efficiencies.
• Sara echoed this sentiment - as a result of training our new services fully leverage available AWS capabilities which results in better architecture, more scalable services that are more robust, cost-effective to operate and track
• Phone tells us the biggest benefit besides cost is agility - the ability to give new functionality to solve our business problems for our business teams quickly

These quotes highlight the role of training in cost savings as well as opportunities for revenue gain for our AWS partners.

Another partner, CMD Solutions, has been experiencing an uptick in demand for moving to the cloud. The company needed to hire more people but just couldn't find qualified candidates. So they really had to build their own workforce. They collaborated with AWS Training and Certification and built a unique deep dive program that features some of the free training we offer as well as pairing that up with consultants teaching the practical use of AWS in the field.

Through this process, they also became an Authorized Training reseller, resulting in another revenue stream. CMD Solutions saw a 30% increase in revenue in the past year and 130% ROI from this new revenue path already. Jumped in with both feet, right?

So Partner Training and Certification supports our partners with several learning modes and different resources that learners can use. They include:

• Free digital training with over 600 courses
• Partner exclusive Learning Plans - currently over 320, more being built
• Partner Certification Readiness programs which offer resources to reduce the time to certification
• AWS PartnerCasts, our weekly webinar series that provides the latest and greatest updates

All available to you as AWS Partners.

We'll dive into those shortly. Now with AWS Skill Builder, it unlocks access to hands-on learning with individual and team subscriptions. They include:

• AWS Builders' Labs
• JAM journeys which are gamified experiences with collaboration, competition, real-time scoring, relevant in-scenario clues
• Also allows learners to build risk-free within an AWS Management Console
• Subscriptions also contain access to enhanced certification prep resources like CloudQuest and more

So AWS continues to invest in these different training modalities because we want to stay on the leading edge of training so that you and your teams can stay on the leading edge of cloud.

And if you've been anywhere in the cloud tech industry this year, generative AI has been a hot topic. At AWS Training and Certification, we constantly develop and release new training curricula to empower partners to offer solutions their customers are asking for.

One of our newest offerings is the Generative AI on AWS Essentials course. This fundamental course shares the same use cases and best practices from customer engagements that is used to train our internal AWS sales team. It also provides non-technical foundational knowledge of Generative AI on AWS. You can learn more via the QR code at the end of the presentation.

With Partner Enablement at Cognizant, we saw a positive impact of introducing training that aligns with the edge of new technology.

In AY is a consultancy that specializes in advanced analytics, data science and generative AI on AWS. Whose team is its own unique selling point, making nurturing and retaining talent paramount to their success.

Because of that, they made AWS training and certification a priority by balancing training and committed projects. By allocating dedicated training days annually and also enabling team members to prioritize and focus their skills development based on their assigned projects.

By combining live workshops and on-demand learning in AWS Skill Builder, In AY opened up the training beyond their technical teams to include project managers and the sales teams, which established a common language across the teams that helped deepen expertise and helped their customer engagements.

The training and certification also accelerated their achievements of AWS certifications and partner accreditation badges. And within this year, over half of the team took the Generative AI on AWS essentials course, allowing them to earn these badges just 45 days within its launch, showing their customers how they stay at the forefront of technology innovation and ahead of their competitors.

Of course, course development can be a lengthy process and we understand the need to stay with the trends in the industry and stay up to date. So we need flexible methods to train our partner learners.

AWS PartnerCast keeps our partners in the know with the latest and greatest from training and certification. These sessions cover topics like products, services, AWS marketing updates, AWS best practices and other timely training.

We have a PartnerCast option that fits any schedule - shorter sessions, multi-day multi-week webinars - and each of these are hosted by subject matter experts that feature a two-way conversation for you to have your questions answered live. You can also access the playback within Skill Builder to see upcoming sessions globally.

Visit the PartnerCast section within the Training and Certification site. Some PartnerCast sessions to highlight are:

• How to Leverage AWS Machine Learning Services to Drive Value for Your Customers

• Amazon CodeWhisperer: Your AI Coding Companion

• The Future of Contact Center Automation and Modernization

• Advanced Domain: Anatomy of an Attack - Most Common Compromise Scenarios and How to Avoid Them

• What's New with AWS Glue

PartnerCasts also is an option for everyone's voice to be heard. Partners can suggest upcoming topics, which enables us to produce training on more session topics that you’d like to hear.

And speaking of that, when it comes to digital training, we’ve heard you loud and clear partners. The number one request is to have more sales training and we don’t blame you.

Recent research shows that when sales teams are unable to have joint go-to-market efforts, it attributes to revenue gains. Specifically, ESG research shows that 82% of learners have a higher ability to work with their customers to select the right solutions to fit their needs with these skills improvements among others.

You can see a positive return on investment with partners like Fortinet and Claro y Patel, where Fortinet saw 83% growth in PO opportunities, and Claro y Patel saw a 4x increase year over year in sales opportunities in just 5 months.

So to continue to support our partners to make the possible, possible, we have introduced new courses to our AWS training, which includes:

• Sales Accreditation
• Pricing and Licensing
• Security and Compliance
• Migration
• Sales Essentials
• Selling into the Public Sector
• AWS for Data
• The Generative AI on AWS Essentials course

Upon completing these courses, you can achieve a badge which you can showcase on social media or your email signature.

We’ve also made upskilling your sales team a lot easier by introducing the Sales Essentials partner learning plans, where it includes many of these courses in a prescriptive list.

And looking more broadly, sometimes the skills gap in your organization can overlap with the needs in your community. Let’s take a look at how this AWS partner EPAM leveraged the AWS re/Start program to meet the needs of Ukrainian refugees, adding new skills and creating new careers.

I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering. For the last 11 years I had been working for a small Ukrainian company in furniture production. Each and every business had been shut down when the war has started. Our life changed completely. I had to pack my whole family and move to a safer place. I was driven by the desire of changes and by responsibilities for my family.

From the first day of this war, EPAM decided to help all Ukrainians in this situation. The AWS re/Start program from AWS provides free training and certification exam. Graduates of the AWS re/Start program, including most of the graduates, receive job offers and start their contribution on real projects in development teams.

The AWS re/Start training helped me get a better understanding of how to build robust and resilient solutions in the cloud. The online course allowed me to learn and study from anywhere. And this led me to the certification. The certification benefited me in my job interviews, so I got my job maybe because of it.

This program had a significant impact on my career path because it helped me gain my current role. This gave me confidence in my knowledge for my day-to-day work because my project is highly related to AWS.

This year we’ll celebrate 25th anniversary. We are really proud to be a global provider of digital transformation services. We encourage our specialists to continuously improve their skills in cloud – from entry level specialists to high level specialists.

Now I’m working as a junior systems engineer to enable developers to code to AWS infrastructure. But I really hope my career will grow up. And it’s really important for Ukraine right now to have solid infrastructure. That’s what we want for our customers, to feel safe, for us to feel safe. That’s what Ukraine needs.

That’s great and it feels good. Another data point from one of our many studies is that 80% of respondents reported improved job effectiveness upon receiving a certification.

So to enhance our offerings, we’ve added a new role-based certification for 2024 – AWS Certified Data Engineer. This new certification is focused on core data related AWS services and candidates would be data architects, data analysts, data scientists – anyone working with data in the cloud, essentially.

It’s currently released this week in beta and will be generally available next April. So I encourage you, if you feel like you’re in that wheelhouse, to take this exam and give us some feedback.

Also launching today is AWS CloudQuest: Recertified Cloud Practitioner. This is a gamified version focused on recertifying Cloud Practitioner. So again, if anybody in this audience is in that position where they need to recertify their Cloud Practitioner, we’d love to hear your feedback.

And remember, you don't just have certification learning plans, you have over 320 learning plans available to you that range from foundational to specialization and includes industry and solutions as well.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the Partner Certification Readiness program. This program was built and piloted by several team members across the organization, including partner enablement managers, development managers, trainers, program managers, and solutions architects who support partners and also went through the certification journey themselves.

Leveraging best practices from their own journey and from piloting with several partners and students, they created a very prescriptive hybrid multi-week program that meets learners at any stage they’re at within the certification journey.

On the screen, you’ll see an example of the Cloud Practitioner program. Like all programs, each session is built off of one another.

The kickoff is where learners can join, get an introduction to the program, the commitments, as well as how to go through the exam scheduling and get their questions answered.

Then Session 1 is where an AWS Certified Trainer will go through the exam structure and the content that may be on the exam, and then also review other materials with the attendees.

Session 2 is where learners can then learn best practices, exam strategy, and be provided resources to continue their readiness to attempt an AWS Certification.

And then Session 3, our most popular, is a fun quiz show. This is where you can put your knowledge to the test with other learners. And we have the highest rated CSAT for this because the trainers will go through questions with you in a fun quiz so you can select your answer. And if you select it wrong, here's your opportunity to get more explanation from that certified trainer.

Speaking from my own experience, I try to have my own discipline with 1.5 hours every night and my own learning plan. But at the end of the day, I’m exhausted from a long work day and I’d like to prioritize my nighttime with my family. So having this program available to me where I know when to take courses, when to show up to learn with others and get to ask questions and go through labs, it works perfectly well for me. For others, self-paced may just be their preferred method and that works great as well. But again, we have all of these options available to all different learner types.

In addition to the 600 free courses and learning plans that you can assign subscribers, Skill Builder has AWS Builder Labs, role-based games, Jam Sessions which are another version of hands-on role-based games, and Exam Prep - exam prep questions and feedback from your exam prep questions.

AWS partner employee John Dyke from Insight Enterprises shared his experience with Skill Builder’s subscription. John said “Skill Builder has directly helped me to achieve at least two certifications including specialty level certifications for my organization.” Well, that’s great because that helps demonstrate competency to AWS and to our partners.

The team Skill Builder subscription also includes admin features that help organizations drive and track adoption across your workforce. Cisco is a big user of this. They used the team subscription with the admin dashboard and the ability to assign individual training to support their global hybrid workforce, according to their Director of Cloud Governance and Operations.

Scaling up with Skill Builder and allowing learners access to just-in-time training raised morale, created a culture of learning, helped achieve more robust architectures, and allowed them to adopt new services and ideas.

There’s more info in the QR code at the end of the presentation. And we’re doing demos regularly, I believe at 5pm in the Venetian on Wednesday in the Lightning Talk, you can see a demo as well.

Alright, so you may have some questions, which is: How do I know where to start? How do I know what my team needs? How do I know what I need?

For individual learners and small teams, we recommend taking the Partner Accreditation followed by the Cloud Practitioner Certification learning plan, and then continue your journey on with the 320+ partner exclusive learning plans available to you.

For partners in the enterprise space with 50+ learners, we can help you have a customized training plan based upon your AWS business plan. Our Partner Enablement Managers, also known as PENs, are experts in this area.

They’ll work with you to review your AWS Partner business plan. From there, they will work on an adaptive survey to deploy and gauge where your employees’ skill sets are. Then they can create a customized learning plan.

Partner Learning Needs Analysis is the tool we use and it's 3 easy steps:

1. They'll create that survey and it will include all the info for the cloud roles and other roles that support the business. It should take no longer than 20 minutes per person.

2. Once that's done, they'll take all the data, analyze it, and create a learning plan to review with you and your stakeholders.

3. Once you sign off on that plan, we move to step 3, which is implementing those plans with your organizations and individuals as well.

This does include hybrid learning - so earlier I spoke about live workshops as well as on-demand learning. And it also includes recommendations for certification journeys.

If there's one thing you take away from this presentation, it's that you will have 100% of our support to help you be more cost effective, improve jobs, improve employee satisfaction, and delight your customers.

All of the partner training offerings that I spoke about earlier, from PartnerCasts to digital training, Partner Learning Needs Analysis, certification readiness programs, are all available to you through the QR code.

If you're interested in a Skill Builder demo, we have demos available to you as well. And if you're looking to transform your workforce, get in touch with us through the Partner Learning Needs Analysis form and we'll have a Partner Enablement Manager contact you.

We also have a booth available throughout this week with partner training subject matter experts, ready to talk to you at any time.

Thank you for spending your hour with us and please take the survey in the mobile app. We hope you found the information valuable and let's break the rules of Vegas - whatever was shared here, please share it with your colleagues and organization. We hope to hear your journey as you take the next leap into training and certification or if you already started, that's great. And we hope you have an amazing rest of your time here at re:Invent. Thank you!