By Rudra Narayan Sahoo, Mumbai: India is emerging to become a global leader in mobile app development. As per Evans report 2015, 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. To bridge the skills gap in mobile app development, Google India has launched a mega drive Android Skilling program for India. The Google’s skill program sets an ambitious target of training two million developers in India over the next three years in line with the Skill India campaign of the government of India.
The Android skilling program will provide easy and affordable access to a world-class skilling and educational program for Indian developers. The skill program is based on the following concepts: End-to-end Android training, training channels and associate android developer certification.
Peter Lubbers, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training said that the Android Developer Fundamentals course, a specially-designed instructor-led training program that will be made available across public and private universities and training institutes of the National Skill Development Corporation of India. This in-person training will be integrated with Computer Science curricula of universities within this calendar year. The Android Developer Fundamentals course material will also be covered on NPTEL (an IIT Madras project in collaboration with the IITs and IISc) as part of its online Mobile Computing course starting July 18, 2016.
The skill program has also a robust training channels system where Google has partnered with the National Skill Development Corporation of India along with leading training partners in India like Edureka, Koenig, Manipal Global, Simplilearn, Udacity and UpGrad. These training partners will operate as Authorized Android Training Partners in India. Google will work closely with them to train their trainers and to update their Android courseware to prepare their students for the Android Certification and a career in Android development.
To make them employable and to support potential Android developer employers, Google has also launched a globally-recognised, job-oriented, Associate Android Developer Certification. This is a performance-based exam that will help candidates obtain entry-level Android Developer jobs in the Industry.
Peter Lubbers informed that currently, developers who are ready to be certified can log on to the website: https://developers.google.com/training/certification/ and take the certification exam (priced at INR 6,500/-). The certification gives recognition to developer capabilities and is mapped to an actual job already in the industry, as determined by job task analyses.
