Amazon Inc.’s computer science program, Future Engineer, is reportedly coming to India, which in turn demonstrates the increase of Amazon’s interest in the world’s second-largest internet market, the education space.
In a job recruitment post, the American tech giant said that initial research for Amazon Future Engineer in India is “currently underway”. Through the Future Engineer initiative, Amazon aims to provide underserved and underrepresented children and young adults of India, computer science education. The chosen candidate for the jobs would be tasked with working with local nonprofits and government officials.
The program is scheduled to launch in India in 2021. Amazon said in a press release earlier this week that the ‘childhood-to-career program’ is currently operational in its home country, where it serves more than 5,000 schools and 5,50,000 students with computer science coursework.
“Amazon India has a specific focus on equipping children and young adults from underserved and underprivileged communities to build better futures for themselves,” the company said in the description, according to TechCrunch.
This is not Amazon’s first venture into the education space in India as last year it launched an app named JEE Ready, aimed at helping students who are preparing for entry into India’s prestigious technology institutes. The app has since been rebranded as Amazon Academy, and the total investment by Amazon into India’s education space has crossed $6.5 billion so far.
With 260 million school-going children in India, Amazon isn’t the only American firm that is paying attention to India’s growing education market, as earlier this year, Facebook partnered with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), to launch a certified curriculum on digital safety and online well-being, and augmented reality for students and educators.
Unacademy, a Bangalore-based startup that offers online learning classes, has also received investments from Facebook this year. According to TechCrunch, another of the tech giants, “Google, which invested in Indian educational tech startup Cuemath this year, also partnered with CBSE to train more than 1 million teachers in India and offer a range of free tools such as G Suite for Education, Google Classroom and YouTube to help digitize the education experience in the nation.”
Microsoft has also contributed to the Indian education space by collaborating with several Indian government and industry bodies including National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), and Nasscom to help more than 1 million people increase their skills.
