Google Launches Android Skilling & Certification Program to Skill Two Million Developers in India

Google has launched a program called 'Android Skilling' which aims to create Android more secure and advanced by growing the developer talent in India.

India is predicted to 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. 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. There is a huge opportunity for India to become a global leader in mobile app development and Google wants to contribute and bridge the skills gap that exists today.

Google has partnered with various universities and training institutes to offer certification cousers at different levels. It has partnered with the online training portal, Udacity, to offer 'nanodegrees' for Android development at different levels – with a full course launched in 2015 and one for beginners last month. The courses with Udacity can be costly for those getting started, but the company will be soon making its Android Developer Fundamentals courseware available for free. 

The Android Developer Fundamentals course is a specially-designed instructor-led training program that will also be made available across public and private universities and training institutes of the National Skills 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 Android Developer Fundamentals reference course and all practicals and courseware will be available as Open Source to everyone for free. More details on the program and courses available can be found here.