If you are an Indian, you could soon join Google for Android skill and certification course. Search giant Google is now making inroads into Indian universities with its “Android skilling and certification” programme in an effort to boost government’s Skill India initiative.
The programme, which was launched in the capital on Monday aims to train two million Android developers from India by offering a slew of initiatives to train and certify talented students and developers in Android development in the next three years.
In order to make its Android app development training programme available in 31 Indian universities — both public and private, the tech giant has partnered with the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL).
“With nearly four million developers, India is expected to have [the]largest developer population globally by 2018. But today, only 25 percent of them are building for mobile,” Caesar Sengupta, Vice President (Product Management) at Google, told reporters in New Delhi.
“The aim is to help make India the global leader in mobile app development” he added. India has about 1 million developers building applications for the Android platform. Google’s Play Store has over a million applications, and less than four percent of the top 1000 applications come from India.
India is exclusively placed to transform and shape the internet experience of billions of users “who are and will come online on the mobile platform,” he added.
Google also launched an instructor-led training programme on Android fundamentals to provide in-person training to students in universities.
Among the courses and modules under the skilling programme is an Android fundamentals course to be made available at public and private universities, in addition to NSDC institutes. The course will be available free of charge on NTPEL (an initiative of IITs and IISc) as part of its online “Mobile Computing” course, starting from July 18.
“We designed the curriculum with India in mind. The demand for certification in India is much stronger than in other areas of the world,” Peter Lubbers, head of Google Developer Training, said. “In India, there are some unique demands around building your apps in a high-performance, low-bandwidth environment. We built that into the curriculum and the certification,” said Lubbers.
“We are hoping to get in about 2,000 different universities, training about 4,000 faculty to reach in excess of 250,000 students in these universities every year,” added Lubbers.
Google has tied up with training partners like Edureka, Koenig, Manipal Global, Simplilearn, Udacity and UpGrad who will operate as authorised Android training partners in India to help Google train the trainers and update Android courseware to prepare students for Android certification.
“By building a world-class curriculum and making it easily accessible to the students, we want to contribute to the Skill India initiative and make India the global leader in mobile app development,” Sengupta added.
Google also announced the launch of its globally recognised job-oriented “Associate Android Developer Certification” exam that will help candidates get an entry-level Android developer job.
After training, the aspiring candidates can log on to the Google Developer training website and take the certification exam priced at Rs. 6,500.
“We introduced the Android Nanodegree programme in India last year with Udacity and today, we have over 11,500 students in India enrolling every month in our courses,” said Lubbers.
Google will also open-source all Android Developer Fundamentals practical and courseware and make these available to everyone for free.