Amazon will now help computer science students find internships at a bunch of companies (AMZN)

Amazon on Wednesday announced that it had expanded its AWS Educate program to provide an internship job board.

Students who sign up and complete the AWS Educate coursework will get access to internship opportunities beyond those available at Amazon. Other companies recruiting include Cloudnexa, Instructure, Salesforce, Splunk, and Udacity.

Specifically, AWS Educate is an online training program that computer science students can use to train up on all things cloud computing, particularly Amazon's own cloud. Amazon has divided the training into four main buckets: cloud architect, software developer, operations-support engineer, and analytics and big data specialist.

The materials include instructional videos, lab exercises, podcasts, and the like. Over 30 courses were designed by online training school Udacity. And students also get a bit of free access to the Amazon's cloud so they can learn and practice. 

But the classes are not intended to be DYI study. Applicants must be students enrolled in school. As you might expect, Amazon is also recruiting teachers and universities to use this program to train students. For instance, Dr. Majd Sakr at Carnegie Mellon University uses AWS Educate for a cloud computing course and likes it because students can practice their computer science skills, learn about Amazon's cloud without cost to the university. It is used at Penn State, too.

With AWS Educate, Amazon is stealing an old play from a playbook Microsoft and Apple perfected. By giving away materials to students for free, these students will become proficient and comfortable with Amazon's tech and take it with them as they enter the job force. Now, Amazon is also trying to help broker those first jobs for its students.

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