Delivering on a promise CEO Pichai made in the company’s Google For India event last year, Google has today announced the launching of its hugely anticipated, Android Skilling program for India. Google says, that it will train close to 2 million android devs in India in the next three years.

Aimed at training two million developers in India over the next three years and in support of the Skill India initiative of the Indian government, Google hopes to provide easy and affordable access to a world-class skilling and educational program for Indian developers. The key elements of this initiative include:
  • End-to-end Android training
  • Training Channels
  • Associate Android Developer Certification

The entire skilling program is actually levels of various courses, which Google has designed and developed in partnership with a number of governmental as well as private organisations. In fact, if you remember the Android nanodegree program which the company had announced in partnership with Udacity last year, that is also a sort of part, of this new skilling program.

While starting up with this program, devs will first go through the Android Developer Fundamentals course, a specially-designed instructor-led training program that will be made available across public and private universities and training institutes of the National Skill Development Corporation of India.

This in-person training will be integrated with Computer Science curricula of universities within this calendar year. The Android Developer Fundamentals course material will also be covered on NPTEL (an IIT Madras project in collaboration with the IITs and IISc) as part of its online Mobile Computing course starting July 18, 2016.

Next up, will be an Associate Android Developer Certification up for grabs. This certification program — though already available globally to devs — will finally make its debut in India. It is a performance-based exam, that will help candidates obtain entry-level Android Developer jobs in the Industry.

As of today, developers who are ready to be certified can log on to the Google developers website and take the certification exam (priced at INR 6,500/-). The certification sets a benchmark for the industry to evaluate developer capabilities and is mapped to an actual job already in the industry, as determined by job task analyses.

Partnering with Government

If there’s one thing which the current Modi Government has achieved — with definitive results — is a great, momentous relationships with silicon valley giants — specially with the likes of Google and Microsoft — all having CEOs with Indian roots. This was one thing which our previopus governments did not even try to achieve — build a strong, direct connection with these folks, so as to bring some much needed developemental environment to India.

And this Government’s (or shall we say, PM Modi’s personal) achievement is pretty much evident with the current Android Skilling program launch. Google says, that in addition to partnering with the National Skill Development Corporation of India, we have teamed up with training partners like Edureka, Koenig, Manipal Global, Simplilearn, Udacity and UpGrad who will operate as Authorized Android Training Partners in India.

The Android Developer Fundamentals reference course and all practicals and courseware will be available as Open Source to everyone for free. All details of the program and courses can be found here.


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