There’s no way through this problem other than education …

Talent Transformation

A companies success will be measured by their investment in talent transformation

“There’s no way through this problem other than education and we have a long way to go” — Marc Andreessen

If software is eating the world, then the forward progress of companies is directly related to their ability to develop software effectively. — Joe Emison

Software is eating the world — and many businesses are being served for dinner by the fast and furious who leverage Amazon Web Services’ ever-expanding infrastructure and platform services.

The adoption of cloud is now mainstream, and AWS makes it possible for progressive companies to focus on their marketplace differentiators — while AWS does the heavy-lifting.

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Enterprise like @CapitalOneDevEx are using #AWS in meaningful ways to focus on differentiators and not the heavy lifting @ajassy #AWSSummit

— @drewfirment

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With every release of new features and services, AWS is creating even more opportunities for companies to enjoy the benefits of frictionless innovation_. A_nd for what it’s worth, the opportunities to feast at the table of AWS applies as much to enterprises as it does to start-ups.

Emerging serverless architectural patterns are accelerating the insane pace of innovation, along with the ability for companies to efficiently disrupt at scale. The endless opportunities are now only limited by your imagination as serverless seamlessly integrates with maturing AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence services such as Polly, Lex, and Rekognition.

As Joe Emison highlights in his series on modern programming practices, a company’s forward progress is directly related to their ability to effectively develop software — and take advantage of infrastructure and platform services from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services.

In the blog, Joe references the famous Wall Street Journal essay published in 2011 by Marc Andreessen — Why Software Is Eating the World — that outlines the shift toward an economy dominated by software-based companies.

Most notable in Marc’s essay is the now cliché statement that “every company needs to become a software company” — regardless of your industry. He accurately predicts that companies who fail to embrace the transition should prepare to be disrupted by the next Uber.

While most companies are focusing on the bright and shiny aspects of the technology disruption outlined in the essay, very few heard Andreessen’s most important call to action — one that’s tables takes for overcoming the challenges of the technology transition. Education.

Overcoming the lack of skills is the most critical — and often overlooked — ingredient for companies to participate in the software revolution.

Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. […] This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

There’s a simple path to determining the success of a company trying to compete in today’s software-driven marketplace: assess how much they are investing in a meaningful talent transformation program that focuses on modern software development skills and cloud fluency.

With over 25% of corporations identifying the lack of cloud expertise as the #1 challenge with cloud adoption, there’s no other way through this problem other than education.

And we have a long way to go.

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