Nano Degree Program Bridging the Educational and Skills Gap in IT Industry

The company offers intelligent tech courses like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Self-Driving, Deep Learning etc

Many new skills like automation and AI are becoming the need of the hour for both professionals and students. People are constantly looking at upskilling themselves in order to compete in the industry. Due to growing skill gap, there is an increased interest by recruiters in all sectors to hire candidates with specialized tech skills. Udacity is a quintessential hub for upskilling/reskilling and is bridging the gap between talent curation and resourcing. The company offers intelligent tech courses like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Self-Driving, Deep Learning etc, to make the world future ready for job roles for tomorrow. The company was launched in India last year to scale up job ratio and to provide best possible trainings to both students as well as professionals.

Recently, Udacity launched its career fair ‘Udacity Propel’ to provide a networking platform to organizations and professionals in collaboration with companies like Paytm, MapMyIndia, Innerchef, 1Mg, Indiarush, Simform, Witty Feed, Rivigo, Qualtech, GoFro, Healers at Home, Kayako and Trade Logic.

” With the launch of Udacity Propel, we aim to provide opportunity to both the organization as well as the students. We provide a platform for students to fast track their careers by conducting interviews with top companies in the Indian ecosystem. With this partnership we will be able to offer the best talent to the industry for all dynamic tech roles” said Ishan Gupta, MD India, Udacity.

How Does Course Help Students
The platform contains 175+ free courses for beginners. The company has a career path for all those who do not have a technological background. One can take the beginner’s course and can also explore the field and make a career in that field. The student can increase the depth of their learnings by taking Nano degree program where hitech skills are taught to students.

“Nano degree program is a collection of 7-8 degree courses curated together. Every time a student
does a program, he has to submit a project where he gets reviewed by reviewers available around the world. These programs are available in areas like Machine Learning, VR, AI, Android, IOS, Full-stack, Front End, Data Science, Self-Driving Car Technology etc. We have 800+ reviewers globally. The reviewer evaluates the work and gives feedback for improvement and students work on the same.

The course will give a fundamental understanding and will help students land in the right job in today’s time. The three months course will equip a person with the core skills that programmers use while programming webpages, mobile apps, or analyze data. Successful completion of this course will enhance the skills, broaden opportunities and lay the groundwork for a future in technology. The programme comprises of interactive quizzes, videos and hand-on projects which are reviewed by industry experts” he added.

The company claims to have a strong enterprise presence globally. The company is dealing with big
names like Capital One, Google, Mercedes, Flipkart, AT&T, IBM Watson and more. “In India we are already proving training at Infosys and we are in touch with many other companies to launch training centers for the employees. These companies are building products for the future and for that they are hiring today. Hence, both are important to hire talent and to upskill the current talent for the large IT services company”.

Recently, the company did a survey for online skills demand:
Metros:-
• The maximum demand for online courses in India is in Bangalore, closely followed by Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai
• Bangalore contributes the most to advanced skills like deep learning, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence respectively
• Delhi wants to learn more of artificial intelligence followed by machine learning and data analyst skills
• Mumbai, on the other hand, is looking at machine learning, android and web development
• Hyderabad wants to learn deep learning, data analysis and artificial intelligence
• Chennai wants to learn data analysis, deep learning and android respectively
• Pune is witnessing maximum search demand for deep learning, followed by Android and Artificial Intelligence

Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities:-
• Smaller cities together contribute to about 35% of the Nano degree courses taken online
• Cities like Chandigarh, Alipur and Bhatinda are equally interested in learning online skills
• While AI and deep learning are most popular in metros, small cities want to learn more Android and full stack development skills

Overall Presence in the World
“We have more than 5 million students globally who are pursuing more than 8 million courses. We have 25,000 students pursuing Nano Degree courses. India is the largest market for Udacity outside US” he said.

The USP of the company is that the platform is technology focused. We bring technology areas such as mobile development, web development, big data, robotics etc under one roof.

We don’t see others as our competition as we believe that we all are working towards the same goal transforming the student’s life and we believe in delivering programs online.

Challenges Faced by Companies in India

Ishan Gupta told that sourcing of talent is the biggest challenge for many companies in today’s world. These companies are hiring AI engineers. Our company bridges the gap between talent sourcing and talent curation. Our platform teaches the skills which the company is looking for. We hope that these courses will help bridge the gap between what is really required and what is available in the industry today.

Details of courses offered:
Artificial Intelligence training program - The program was built through collaboration with leading innovators in the field to bring a world-class curriculum and expert instructors. There are many learning outcomes of the Artificial Intelligence Training Program such as search and optimization, computer logic, reasoning and planning, building models of probability, natural language processing and computer vision.

Deep Learning Training Program - Through the Deep Learning Training Program, Udacity provides an introduction to the field of Artificial Intelligence and teaches the workforce the foundations of this futureshaping technology. The program helps students develop skills in Neural Network Architecture, Cloud computing and sentiment analysis.

Virtual Reality Developer Training Program - The goal of this program is to equip the student with the skills and experience he/she will need to take advantage of all this incredible opportunity. As a student of this program, the student will master the core principles and foundations of virtual reality, develop and refine a keen sense for great VR design, and build performant and comfortable VR experiences as he/she becomes familiar with the most important SDKs and APIs of the major platforms, including PC and mobile.

Self-Driving Car Engineer Training Program - This is one of its kind program. The company has partnered with the leading companies in the field to offer best-inclass content, projects and instructors. This course will help students develop skills in deep learning, controllers, computer vision, vehicle kinematics, sensor fusion and automotive hardware.

Machine Learning Training Program - The Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree program is ideal forlearners who are an intermediate-level developer and want to develop the skills needed to engage in the rapidly growing, integral field of machine learning. Key learning programs from this course are:
• Analyze the class and complexity of a given problem, and identify an appropriate algorithm and/or tools to apply towards solving it (like gesture recognition, robot control)
• Design an intelligent system that can act on the basis of input data towards optimizing some desired goal metric, with minimal supervision from a human
• Analyze the performance of an intelligent algorithm/ system and present key metrics (such as accuracy, recall, computing time, etc. as appropriate) in an easy to understand and visually appealing form
• Handle the entire machine learning pipeline from data to system