Amazon Web Services has revealed an initiative designed to encourage more girls into the technology industry.
AWS Get IT', which was introduced during the cloud giant's London Summit on Wednesday, is a programme to attract 12-13-year-olds, specifically female students, to consider careers in cloud computing and digital roles.
The programme has been developed together with non-profit organisation Future Foundations and will educate students on cloud computing technology and then invite them to create an application to solve a real-world issue faced by their school or community.
Darren Mowry, the business development director at AWS, made the announcement during his keynote speech at the start of the event at London's ExCel saying that AWS was "completely convicted" that it needed more diverse, skilled and motivated people.
"The way that we're going to do that is not to just attract those people from all around the world, we're gonna go build this workforce," he said. "And the way that we're doing that is by capitalising on a programme that we've already piloted in the UK, that's focused on inspiring, training and developing year eight young ladies, in UK schools to come and consider technology jobs.
"We're doing that by actually forming partnerships with schools, providing some AWS specialists from the business and technology, to come and spend some time with these groups of young people, to help them understand the opportunity they have ahead."
AWS will shortlist ten teams to present to an expert panel of judges at the AWS Summit London 2020, where a winning team will be selected. The most innovative application idea will be developed and maintained for the school by AWS.
The Get IT programme is explained as a sort of digital skills boot camp, where students can learn about the different stages of developing software, such as how to identify a target audience for their application. Each attendee will learn about problem-solving, brainstorming, research techniques, prototyping and test and development methods.
What's more, students will spend time at AWS's offices learning about Amazon's approach to innovation and receive guidance from the company and industry experts about application development.
For further inspirations, the students will also be introduced to female leaders within AWS and other organisations to show them the different types of career paths available in technology and learn about the positive impact that women are having on the industry.
