VMware will be enhancing its existing wellbeing benefits program, to equip employees to live a more healthy and balanced life. Under this program, all employees across offices in India will be eligible for an additional wellbeing allowance of 29,565 INR as equitable reimbursement. Employees can also choose to apply the wellbeing amount to help pay to vaccinate themselves and their family members.

This initiative is the latest offering in VMware’s unique wellbeing program portfolio. As the industry moved to a remote work model last year, VMware revisited some of its policies to ensure that teams had help and resources to help cope with the rigors of the new normal.
As the world embraced the new normal, VMware initiated a pandemic leave policy for its employees, a unique initiative where employees are entitled to 5 days of paid leave, to help employees take some time off during this unusual time. VMware also introduced EPIC2 days, declaring four company-wide holidays throughout the year to help employees switch off and spend time with their families. In addition, VMware introduced a new coaching, therapy, and work Life Services (ICAS) program that caters to the mental and emotional wellbeing of not just the employees but also their dependents.

“At VMware, we believe that true innovation is tied in with an environment where employees can bring in their best selves to work. Balance is key to employee happiness and enabling our employees to live healthy and balanced lives has always been an integral part of our work culture. Given the disruption of last year, we understand that our employees might need some additional support and we have revamped our wellbeing benefits program to do just that. Our people are our biggest strength. And we believe it is our responsibility to establish a work culture that is supportive and prioritizes employee health, both physical and mental,” said Ramkumar Narayanan, VP Technology & MD, VMware India.

VMware believes that people are the key to sustainable success. The company continuously strives to make it easier for its employees to pursue well-being on their terms while delivering excellence at work. At VMware, the focus remains on creating a culture where people are empowered to bring their best selves to work focusing on relevance, impact, and choice.

AWS to Introduce a Dedicated Database Certification

Amazon Web Services announced plans to launch a new database certification designed to validate AWS partner expertise across the company’s full portfolio of relational and non-relational database services. The formal curriculum and exam details were expected to be announced at AWS re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas in December 2019.

Maureen Lonergan, AWS Director of Worldwide Training and Certification, confirmed the initiative: “That is something that we’re very focused on right now. They are centered around our products today.”

Database Services Covered by the Certification

The certification is designed to span AWS’s broad database portfolio, which at the time of announcement included:

Relational Databases

• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
• Amazon Redshift

Non-Relational Databases

• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
• Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached
• Amazon Neptune
• Amazon DocumentDB

How AWS Designs New Certifications

At the time of the announcement, the database certification was still in the design phase. Lonergan explained that AWS evaluates certification candidates by looking at technologies being developed internally by AWS engineering teams, alongside broader marketplace trends — specifically what partners and customers are doing to modernize skill sets aligned with emerging job roles.

The process involves working with a third-party vendor and conducting a psychometric analysis, developing a blueprint based on actual customer usage patterns, and determining when customers make specific choices between database services. According to Lonergan:

“We have a really strong product management team that works very closely with the service teams to identify products, and we look at how our customers use them. We go through the whole process with a third-party vendor and do a psychometric analysis. We do a blueprint, and we talk about how customers are using and when they’ll make certain choices to use a database service. Training is largely aligned to that.”

Maureen Lonergan, AWS Director of Worldwide Training and Certification

Why a Database Certification Matters for AWS Partners

Bharath Terala, Practice Manager at Apps Associates — an AWS Premier Consulting Partner based in Acton, Massachusetts — highlighted the business value such a certification would provide:

“Customers are still questioning whether or not to migrate databases to the cloud. An AWS certification would reinforce their commitment to the AWS cloud being the best choice for workloads, helping to reassure customers that migrating is the right choice. Within our organization, it will enable our database administrator team to better support customer needs and create alignment with their preferred skillsets.”

Bharath Terala, Practice Manager, Apps Associates

Terala added that the certification would serve as a learning platform that validates partner competency and holds partners accountable to AWS standards of service — creating measurable value for all stakeholders, including end customers.

AWS Certification Program Growth

AWS launched its certification program in 2012 and by mid-2019 had grown to 11 certifications. The scale of adoption has been significant.

“We have over 200,000 certified individuals across the globe now, and that number is growing rapidly. We think it’s been wildly successful in terms of just the number of people that are interested in it and the growth in the program. We continually evaluate quarter over quarter, look at trends and then determine what our certification roadmap is going forward.”

Maureen Lonergan, AWS Director of Worldwide Training and Certification

Lonergan noted that partners view certifications as competitive differentiators, partly because customers actively look for certified expertise when evaluating partners:

“There’s a tremendous cloud skills gap, as everybody knows, and we’ve been working with our customers to say these are ways that you can identify skilled talent, whether it’s talent that you’re hiring or partners that you are partnering with.”

Maureen Lonergan

Partner Involvement: The Subject Matter Expert Program

AWS partners are not just consumers of certification content — some actively participate in writing exam questions through the AWS Subject Matter Expert (SME) Program, which launched at re:Invent the prior year. Partners who pass an AWS vetting process can enroll in a formal class covering how to write psychometrically sound exam questions.

“Getting our partners involved in that process has been probably the biggest game-changer for us and has allowed us to scale much more rapidly.”

Maureen Lonergan

AWS declined to disclose specific pass/fail rates for certification exams, but Lonergan stated that pass rates are monitored monthly and are considered to be in line with industry norms.

AWS Digital Training Platform

Beyond certification, AWS’s training team oversees a digital learning platform that by mid-2019 offered more than 500 free courses — including 60 launched in June 2019 alone. The team had shifted strategy in the 18 months prior toward shorter, modular content formats:

“We’ve really made a pivot in the last 18 months to really focus on this digital training in smaller bite-sized chunks. For us, it’s even more important given the large number of services and updates that we give in a year.”

Maureen Lonergan

At re:Invent 2018, AWS was able for the first time to launch training courses for nearly every new service announced at the conference — a milestone that reflects this shift toward agile content development aligned with service launches.

AWS also invested in a learning needs analysis tool on the AWS Partner Network (APN) website, which generates a personalized learning path based on a partner’s existing knowledge and goals.

Third-Party Digital Training Partners

AWS works with four external digital training platforms to extend its content reach:

• edX
• Coursera
• Udacity
• Udemy

Each platform serves a distinct audience segment. At the time of reporting, approximately 15 courses were available across those four providers, with a commitment to continue expanding free content through those channels.

AWS Cloud Curriculum in Academia

AWS has been expanding its presence in higher education as a way to address the cloud skills gap at the talent pipeline level. By mid-2019, more than 1,000 universities across 38 countries were delivering AWS cloud curriculum to students.

A notable development was the integration of AWS cloud curriculum into MBA programs. Lonergan cited Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics as examples of institutions making AWS cloud courses mandatory for MBA students, reflecting broader recognition that cloud fluency is becoming a core business competency.

“They understand that shift in the market right now and how important having cloud fluency is.”

Maureen Lonergan

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Cloud Engineers

• A dedicated AWS Database Specialty certification was planned for announcement at re:Invent 2019, targeting both relational and non-relational AWS database services.
• The certification is aimed primarily at AWS partners but is broadly valuable to any professional managing AWS database workloads.
• AWS uses a rigorous psychometric design process involving third-party vendors and partner subject matter experts to ensure exam quality.
• AWS’s free digital training library had grown to 500+ courses by mid-2019, with a strategy of modular, service-aligned content releases.
• Partners can influence certification content by applying to the AWS Subject Matter Expert Program.
• Cloud fluency is increasingly being embedded into formal academic programs, indicating long-term institutionalization of cloud skills.

Original reporting by CRN. Quotes attributed to Maureen Lonergan and Bharath Terala are sourced from that reporting.