Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, today announced the launch of its One Million Minds + One Platform program with the goal of training and certifying more than 100,000 users on Snowflake AI Data Cloud by 2027 at no cost to students and educating one million people in data and AI by 2029. Powered by Snowflake’s $20 million investment, the One Million Minds + One Platform program will provide Snowflake-delivered training and certification courses to students and workers in emerging and emerging markets around the world. By providing curriculum resources for workers and educators, as well as credits for using the Snowflake platform, Snowflake is unlocking AI upgrades for the next generation of business and technology users, empowering them to expand their skills to gain a competitive advantage.
According to one Gallup poll from 2024 22 percent of workers express concern that their jobs will become obsolete as a result of technological advances such as generative AI. The same study found that 72 percent of Fortune 500 CHROs anticipate that AI will replace some jobs within their organization within the next three years. To remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving and highly competitive job market, workers must build and expand their skills with the latest technologies to differentiate themselves and deliver valuable expertise to the startups and business.
“To succeed in this digital age, every employee must be equipped with the skills to contribute in a data- and AI-centric world,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake. “This requires that not only must AI be accessible to users at all skill levels, but that users also have the knowledge of how these applications work across the data lifecycle, as well as how to best engage with them. Through our investment, Snowflake is providing academic institutions and workers in regions around the world with the tools and training to build successful careers as the technologists and founders of tomorrow.”
One Million Minds + One Platform strives to meet the needs of students and workers who want to both build and expand their skills and become certified in Snowflake AI Data The cloud platform. The program has two main focuses:
Snowflake for the academy
To empower the next generation of AI, data, and application specialists, Snowflake provides students with free access to Snowflake software, educational materials, and industry-leading data curriculum and teacher training. Today offers Snowflake for Academia The program provides educators with courses to get them certified on Snowflake and ready to teach in the classroom. Once certified, they receive teaching materials ranging from basic courses to advanced tutorials at their own pace, which includes access to Academia Lab for the entire semester at no cost.
“The role of academia is to expose students to the types of people, tools, and technologies they will encounter in the real world,” said Nate Crawford, Software Engineering & Data Science Faculty, University of St. Thomas. “Through the free Snowflake for Academia curriculum, as well as the free Snowflake credits, we have been able to deliver a robust course that provides essential skills for those soon to enter a rapidly changing work landscape. Exposure to these technologies at this stage plants the seeds for future leaders and supports the development of the competencies that employers are looking for in candidates.”
Within the next year, Snowflake intends to more than double the total enrollment of educators and academic institutions around the world teaching, training, and ultimately certifying students on the Snowflake platform.
Snowflake Training for High Growth and Emerging Markets
Snowflake will deliver new Snowflake Platform Training courses designed for individuals with limited experience using Snowflake and who want to increase their knowledge of the AI Data Cloud to workers and students across ASEAN, Canada, Germany, India, Korea, LATAM, Saudi Arabia and more. The Snowflake Platform Training program is delivered by a Snowflake certified instructor and is a step-by-step live and free introductory course to give users the practical experience and confidence to get started on their organization's data transformation journey.
Snowflake-certified instructors will take software users through the AI Data Cloud architecture, including data warehouses, data lakes, data engineering, AI/ML, data applications, and data sharing. Upon completion, students can achieve certification by successfully completing the SnowPro Platform Associate Certification, available starting February 2025, to validate their newly acquired skills, including how to:
- Set up and navigate Snowflakes user interface and Snowflake Notebooks
- Create database, steps, and use compute resources
- Load and utilize structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
- Understanding Snowflake roles and data access management
- Understand and manage the Snowflake account structure
- Call the Snowflake Cortex LLM features
The One Million Minds + One Platform program is just one part of Snowflake's broader education and skills development strategy. Snowflake University offers instructor-led, on-demand, self-paced courses that have helped hundreds of thousands of data professionals accelerate their data initiatives, whether they are just starting out or running advanced data projects.
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