Introducing Android Skilling Program for India
India will have four million software developers* by 2018, becoming the largest population of developers in the world. But today, less than 25% of these developers are trained to develop and build for the mobile platform. The majority of India’s Internet user base today access the Internet from their mobile phones and almost all the future Internet users in India and many of the world’s emerging countries will be mobile only. There is a huge opportunity for India to become a global leader in mobile app development and we want to contribute and bridge the skills gap that exists today.
We are excited to announce the launch of the Android Skilling program. 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, we hope to provide easy and affordable access to a world-class skilling and educational program for Indian developers, The key elements of this initiative are:
- End-to-end Android training
- Training Channels
- Associate Android Developer Certification
End-to-end Android Training:
Last year, together with Udacity, we introduced the Android Nanodegree program in India. Today we are seeing over 11,500 students across India enrolling every month. And only two weeks ago, we launched the Android Basics Nanodegree with Udacity so that we have an end to end path—from zero to hero—for Android Development without having to send all of our students to many different places to learn the prerequisites.
Today we are announcing 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.
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.
Training Channels:
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. We are working closely with them to train their trainers and to update their Android courseware to prepare their students for the Android Certification and a career in Android development.
Associate Android Developer Certification
To support potential Android developer employers, we are also launching a globally-recognised, job-oriented, Associate Android Developer Certification—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 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.
India’s developer ecosystem is well-established globally and we believe that the Android Skilling program addresses the need to produce world-class, skilled-up developers and scale up the mobile developer ecosystem to help make India a global leader in mobile app development.
*Evans report 2015
Posted By: Peter Lubbers, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training