The flaws in our collective education systems globally have been widely documented, in particular how we are educating our children for jobs that will not exist in the near future. In the World Economic Forum Regional Community Briefing document: Human Capital Outlook (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 2016, it was stated that “By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist. In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and this pace of change is set to accelerate.”
The exponential evolution of technology means there are many jobs today that did not exist ten years ago including app developer, social media manager, uber driver, driverless car engineer, SEO specialist, data scientist and cloud computing engineers. To work in technology space, which is essentially every space because technology is so pervasive, we need to start looking at things differently.
We are also going through an explosion of data. According to a 2016 post by Gwava, the amount of data can be broken down as follows:
- 500 Million Tweets sent each day!
- More than 4 Million Hours of content uploaded to Youtube every day!
- 6 Billion Instagram Likes each day.
- 3 BILLION Facebook messages posted daily!
- 75 BILLION Facebook likes every day.
- 40 Million Tweets shared each day!
- 6 BILLION daily Google Searches!
And if, like me, you store a lot of the data you generate on the cloud via platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, etc have been developed to fully exploit our increasing need for places store said data. There are countless private ones as well and all the major players are working on capturing this realm at all levels. To do so, it is important to have the necessary skills to work in technology which is why Google has launched the African Cloud Certification Training Centre with Siatik Systems to meet the skills shortage on the continent. We are, of course, considered the ‘new frontier’ with the sheer numbers that will come from development being a mouth-watering prospect for multi-nationals.
Siatik Systems are Google’s Premier Google partner in Africa and, in a press release to announce the launch of the Centre, they say, in 2017, “We will see a rise in the number of data scientists operating in the cloud, software engineers building products and scripting infrastructure setup in the cloud, and system operators becoming cloud engineers who will no longer build but script instances and monitor systems.”
According to Dean Vandeyar, CEO of Siatik Systems, “Basically, these are Global Certifications from Google for Data Engineering and Systems Architect. The data scientist extrapolates information from data while trend analysis, for example, goes a lot deeper. What we do is combine data analytics with machine learning, a first in the industry. But we take students through demos and practicals that you can use without previous machine learning knowledge.”
With the Google Certifications:
- You will be able take advantage of the full potential of cloud computing with its ability to crunch huge algorithms;
- You can become proficient in new technologies such as building Bots and Natural Language systems for new digital platforms; and
- You will be trained to the level of a Google staff member.
For too long, we, as Africans, have been playing catch-up in a game that excludes us. I do not know if this is the answer but we do need to gain the skills – which we are doing in certain spaces – to play and work in technology. Also, as we work to reimagine education, it is important to identify where trends are and the spaces that will enable us to preempt where the world is shifting to.
For further detail on what this means, check Google Cloud Training and to sign up for the training, check Siatik Systems.