Google India has announced new “Android Skilling program” in the country that is supposed to educate and certify around two million developers. The company announced the program to run for next three years under the Skill India initiative led by the Government of India. With this program, Google is aimed at offering end-to-end Android training with the help of certain training channels in addition to developer certification.
Google’s training program is going to be accessible to several public and private universities in addition to training institutes that are under the National Skill Development Corporation of India. According to the company, the training course will be a part of Computer Science curricula of universities within this year itself.
“India will have four million software developers by 2018, becoming the largest population of developers in the world. But today, less than 25% of these developers are trained to develop and build for the mobile platform,” Peter Lubbers, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training said in a blog post.
The course material will also be integrated with NPTEL, which a project by IIT Madras in association with IITs and IISc starting July 18. Apart from these university-level collaborations, Google has also partnered several training companies such as Edureka, Koenig, Manipal Global, Simplilearn, Udacity and UpGrad that are going to be treated as Authorized Android Training Partners in India.
“The majority of India’s Internet user base today access the Internet from their mobile phones and almost all the future Internet users in India, and many of the world’s emerging countries will be mobile only,” Lubbers added.
Google also announced Associate Android Developer Certification test to ensure candidates jobs in Android development. The certification costs INR 6,500 that evaluates industry-level requirements and real-world problem-solving methodologies, which is important from career’s perspective.
“There is a huge opportunity for India to become a global leader in mobile app development and we want to contribute and bridge the skills gap that exists today,” said Lubbers.
