Outside the US, India has the largest number of app developers. The community in India is growing widely, and taking a note of that, to empower these by giving quality education, Google is taking a leap to help these by training them massively.
The Internet giant along with Tata Trust have tied up with US based renowned online education platform Udacity to provide certification for the online courses.
Its an interesting course module, not like the existing ones we have lying all over the Internet. It is called Android Nanodegree. It will be of great help to developers who want to learn new skills but are out of resources. It is going to be of help to those who are working professionals as we have seen that it gets difficult to get out of your zone and take up a course when you need to ear for a living.
Another interesting facet to this story is that Google and Tata Trust will offer 500 scholarships each to candidates through the programme. This will again ease the burden of those who are not financially sound.
Here is an introductory video on Android Nanodegree
There has been a huge rise in number of smartphone users in the country since 2011, there are hence growing number of app developers coming up to cater to the growing needs of smartphone users, however, they haven’t reached the much needed mark of efficiency yet.
The course offered by Google will take about six to nine months and costs Rs 9,800 per month with Udacity refunding 50 per cent of the tuition fees upon completion. That’s a quite good deal.
Udacity is also trying its best to overcome the language barrier. “We are working on translations and captions for videos on YouTube. We have been already providing it in 12 languages across the world, but are yet to start working on Indian languages,” said Peter Lubbers, senior programme manager, developer relations at Google.
There couldn’t be a better online trainee for a country like ours which has a base of over 3 million software developers. At this pace, we are likely to overtake the US till 2018. However, these developers lack quality. Though they are plenty in numbers, not a single app from this Indian community is on the list of top 100 at the Google Playstore.
Google, hence wants to become the backbone of this workforce, strengthening them with pivotal knowledge, easily obtainable online, so that they are not just large in numbers but also good in quality of apps they create.
“With the launch of this programme, we want to bridge the gap by providing India’s developer community an easy access to learn and build high quality apps for the world. Today, only two per cent of apps built in India feature in the top 1,000 apps globally and our goal is to raise this to 10 per cent in the next three years,” said Rajan Anandan, vice-president and managing director, Google South East Asia and India.
Over a million of engineers graduate from India every year. Five percent of these train to become developers, and just one fourth of them become app developers. These figures clearly state how bad India needed this. Some rigorous training of international standards, and our developers would be well developed to aim at the stars!
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