Google to sponsor 130,000 scholarships for tech developers by 2018

Google kicked off the developer training programme last year, says it has so far reached half a million students and developers in the country

In keeping with its effort to train two million developers in India before the end of 2018, Google has partnered with technology learning platforms, Pluralsight and Udacity, to provide scholarships to 130,000 developers and students in the country.

The scholarships will focus on skilling developers in emerging technologies such as mobile and web development, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Cloud Platforms.

"Since we announced our skilling initiative in India, 210,000 students have completed Google developed courses on Udacity, with 117,000 students completing the course this year. To build on this momentum, this scholarship program, will make it easy for students and developers to gain the skills they need to be successful in the changing technology landscape," said William Florance, Developer Products Group and Skilling Lead for India at Google, in a statement.

Since Google kicked off the developer training programme last year, it says it has so far reached half a million students and developers in the country.

While India has one of the largest technology developer bases in the world, a very small percentage of them work on new age technologies. The focus of the programme is to increase the employability of engineering graduates and reskilling of tech workers in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

"Large outsourcing companies have been focused on a different part of the stack and that has been extremely lucrative. But I think it is true that we don't see mobile development happening as an offshore outsourcing industry in India," said Florance, in an interview with Business Standard last month.

Google also plans to partner with large IT services firms to help reskill their workforce with the latest technologies. While the company invests in developer skilling programmes across the world, India by far has been the largest in terms of scale as well as investment.

While 100,000 scholarships will be on Pluralsight, the remaining 30,000 will be on Udacity. From this, Google will also grant 1,000 scholarships for developers to get nano degrees on Udacity.

For the tech giant, some of these trained developers will begin building apps and services for India which will run on its Android operating system, which already runs on 95 per cent of all smartphones here. Going forward, the company is looking at fostering meaningful solutions on mobile which will bring first-time users onto Android.

"The Scholarship program would have two phases. The first phase would have free access to our courses in mobile and web development along with mentorship and community support. The top 1,000 students earn an additional 6-month scholarship to our Mobile and Web Developer Nanodegree programs," said Ishan Gupta, Managing Director at Udacity India.