Julia White Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure
The demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and data science roles continues to rise. According to LinkedIn’s Emerging Jobs Report for 2020, AI specialist roles are most sought after with a 74 percent annual growth rate in hiring over the last four years. Additionally, the current global health pandemic has powered a shift towards remote working as well as an increased interest in professional training resources. To address this demand, we’re announcing our collaboration with Udacity to launch new machine learning courses for both beginners and advanced users, as well as a scholarship program.
Through these new offerings, Microsoft aims to help expand the talent pool of data scientists and improve access to education and resources to anyone interested. I recently sat down for a chat with Udacity CEO, Gabe Dalporto, to talk about this collaboration.
Udacity is a digital education platform with over 250,000 currently active students. Their students have expressed continued interest in introductory machine learning (ML) content that doesn’t require advanced programming knowledge. In response, Microsoft Azure and Udacity have created a unique free course based on Azure Machine Learning. This Introduction to machine learning on Azure course will help students learn the basics of ML through a low-code experience powered by Azure Machine Learning’s automated ML and drag-and-drop capabilities. Students will have the opportunity to learn using Azure Machine Learning hands-on labs directly within the Udacity classroom and develop the foundations for their data science skills.
For advanced users, we’re offering a new machine learning Nanodegree Program with Microsoft Azure. In this program, students will further enhance their skills by building and deploying sophisticated ML solutions using popular open source tools and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, and ONNX. Using Azure Machine Learning’s responsible ML and MLOps capabilities, students will gain experience in understanding their ML models, protecting people and their data, and controlling the end-to-end ML lifecycle at scale.
As part of this collaboration, we are offering the top 300 performers of the free introductory course with scholarships to the Nanodegree Program, so they can continue to develop their data science skills. These new courses will empower more students to gain proficiency in data science and AI. More details on the program can be found on the course page.
