AWS Offers Course on Basics of Machine Learning Posted on : Apr 19 - 2021

A new course offered by AWS offers business leaders a foundational understanding of machine learning and its use cases without the need for a deep understanding of Python and coding.

For organizations considering machine learning projects, there's often a big gap between ambition and reality.

On one hand, organizations recognize the potential value of machine learning to scale operations, gain faster and deeper insights, respond to quickly changing conditions, and more. On the other hand, it's hard to get started on something that is novel to your organization. You may not have the talent in-house, and you don't have any experience.

What's more, even for those organizations that have run successful pilots, many have struggled to move those pilots into production for a variety of reasons. It feels like many organizations are stuck.

With that challenge in mind, AWS has added another course series to its free educational catalog. But this one won't teach you Python or SageMaker. This one is targeted at a different audience. Machine Learning Essentials for Business and Technical Decision Makers is aimed at getting business leaders up to speed with machine learning.

This course does not teach coding or data prep. Instead, it is squarely targeted at those in the business who need to know how machine learning can be used but won't necessarily be doing the implementations themselves.

"This is really about that foundational understanding about what machine learning can mean for your business," said Scott Barneson, director of learning products for AWS training and certification. "It's thinking practically about whether you are ready and then how to land machine learning in the organization."

It's the kind of training business leaders who are focused on strategy will need when they are considering use cases for machine learning. Because it's a free AWS offering, of course the lessons incorporate how Amazon approached particular problems and how AWS tools such as SageMaker can be used to tackle particular machine learning challenges. But the course also provides a solid overview of brand-neutral concepts needed to understand machine learning and its requirements. Perhaps most importantly, it gives instruction on the types of business problems where machine learning can be helpful and also the types of business problems where machine learning may not be the best choice. View More