Posted by Biswajeet Mallik, Program Manager, Google Developers India.
Image from Cloud Community Days India
Earlier this year, ten Google Developer Groups in India came together to host Google Cloud Community Days India, a two day event helping developers study for their upcoming Cloud Certification exams. To address the rising demand for professional certifications, the virtual event hosted over 63,000 developers, covered four main exam areas, and welcomed nine speakers. This was the second edition to the event series which started in 2019 in India.
By providing expert learning materials and mentorship, the event uniquely prepared developers for the Associate Cloud Engineer, Professional Data Engineer, Professional Cloud Machine Learning Engineer, and Professional Cloud Architect exams. Learn more below.
The Cloud Community Days event focused on helping developers study for four milestone certifications, tailored to engineers at four different stages of their career. The goal: help Google Developer Group members obtain the right credentials to improve their job prospects.
The event broke participants into breakout sessions based on which exam they were preparing to take. Since the certifications targeted professionals of all skill levels, study groups ranged from early career associates to late career executives. The learning groups were organized around the following certifications:
This learning session was created to help early career developers complete the first stepping stone exam. In particular, learning materials and speakers were curated to guide participants who had no prior experience, or very little, working on the Google Cloud Platform.
Workshops were mainly dedicated to assisting programmers who were familiar with building different applications but wished to show employers that they could deploy them on Google Cloud Platform.
The next group brought together were data practitioners with special interests in data visualization and decision making. Workshops and learning activities helped these developers hone their large scale data and data driven decision making abilities.
Improving these skills are essential for passing the Professional Data Engineers certification and growing a programmer’s early career.
For these sessions, the Google Developer Group Cloud community paired experienced programmers with a significant interest in ML to form their study groups. The main driver in these learning activities was to help seasoned developers gain a deeper understanding of how to utilize Google Cloud ML services.
With significant emphasis being placed on machine learning in the ecosystem right now, Google Developer Group community leaders felt this certification could help developers make the leap into new leadership roles.
Lastly, this event paired experienced Cloud executives and professionals working in leading capacities for their organizations. For these sessions, speakers and activities had a specific scope: help high level professions be at the forefront of Google Cloud Platforms innovative capabilities.
Specifically, the Professional Cloud Architect Certification was created to help senior software engineers better design, scale and develop highly secure and robust applications.
Overall, the community put together these resources to help developers feel more confident in their abilities, obtain tangible credentials, and in turn increase access to better job opportunities. As two participants recalled the event,
“This was the first time I attended the Google Developer Group event! It is an awesome package for learning in one place. All the fun activities were engaging and the panelist discussion was also very insightful. I feel proud to be a part of this grand GDG event.”
With Google Developer Groups, find a space to learn alongside a group of curious developers, all coming together to advance their careers from withinside a caring community of peers.
Want to know more about what Cloud Community days were like? Then watch their live recording below.
Ready to find a community event near you? Then get started at gdg.community.dev