Amazon Wants to Make You an ML Practitioner— For Free

The What and Why

Amazon has long been striving to fix the issue of excess demand (vs supply) of individuals who have proficiency across the fields both Machine Learning and Software Engineering. To date, they have developed sloths of internal resources to get employees up to speed on the essentials. This is typically referred to as OJT, for “on the job training.”

OJT only goes so far — the size of your workforce. Aside from hired workers, companies depend on the education system to routinely supply capable talent to the workforce. This system has performed sufficiently for hundreds of years. However, the tide is turning. The speed of machine learning’s integration into industry workflows has largely outpaced the education system’s ability to provide fully-equipped talent. This is partially due to large systems necessarily moving slowly, but also due to a lack of convergence of dominant algorithms and tools in the field. Education systems are basically faced with a choice between overfitting on current trends versus sticking with classical techniques and allowing for OJT to solve the last-mile problem.