New AI and ML Certifications from AWS

Raghuveer Varahagiri | Updated 11-Jun-2024 | This fall, AWS is launching two new certifications covering proficiency in AI use cases and ML engineering.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) is arguably the hottest technology space right now. The interest and investments in this space have picked up tremendous pace ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT (and to a smaller extent Dall-E before that) broke new ground and captured the public imagination, making “Generative AI” a household name. For those of us in the technology industry, not a day goes by without us hearing, reading, or uttering this mantra.

We noted earlier on this blog that the AWS Machine Learning Specialty certification is showing its age. Amazon SageMaker - the flagship AWS offering for end-to-end Machine Learning engineering - has seen a ton of new features from Clarify, to Canvas, to two iterations of SageMaker Studio, and SageMaker Jumpstarts to name a few. And in the era of GenAI we had the brand new service Bedrock - seemingly launched to GA with only a few months of product development under the belt. With so many changes piled on, the official exam outline for MLS-C01 (the 01 indicating this exam NEVER had a major content upgrade) reads like an archived whitepaper. So the USD 300 price tag for this certification was looking increasingly hard to justify.

That is now about to change.

Just as AWS dove into action creating and launching Bedrock in record time – to secure a spot among the GenAI leader space and analyst reports – they are also rapidly overhauling their portfolio of certifications. We saw a bunch of certifications being retired and a new one being launched in recent months. Evidently there’s more yet to come.

Starting August 13, 2024 there are two new exams launching – in Beta.

AWS Certified AI Practitioner (Foundational level)

This is unique in that it is the only skill – other than Cloud itself – that AWS deems essential for workforce to require a certification at “foundational” level. In the current scheme of things at least. (Blockchain / Web 3.0, anyone?). Hopefully this era lasts longer than that of Alexa skills builder and SAP specialty.

Being a foundational level certification – this one should be fairly approachable. If you have basic familiarity with the definitions of AI related terms, and with AWS service offerings in this space, you should be able to clear this pretty easily. Most questions in foundational level exams are of recall type. Can you recall what is the AWS Service used for intelligent document processing (Amazon Textract)? for Entity Recognition in Medical documents (Amazon Comprehend Medical)? for quickly deploying pre-built ML solutions with a few clicks (SageMaker JumpStart)? You are good.

More information about this certification exam will be available at this page:

https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-ai-practitioner/

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer - Associate (Associate Level)

This is a welcome addition. The AWS Machine Learning Specialty certification was/is a significantly high bar in terms of the breadth and depth of topics covered. Having an intermediate level of validation of basics of ML engineering and familiarity in use of AWS tooling in this space will definitely help make this journey more structured. This will also provide a stepping stone for early-career ML engineers to benchmark their skills and gain industry validation of marketable skills, and peer recognition.

More information about this certification exam will be available at this page:

https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-machine-learning-engineer-associate/

Beta Exam : How it Works

These new exams will launch as “beta” exams. This is a period of time during which AWS will test the new exam’s content with willing participants in the beta program. Participation is not free however.

The exam fees is typically discounted at 50% of the regular fee to encourage beta participants. The length of the exam is also longer – with up to 30 minutes more and around 100 questions instead of 65. The other catch is that beta test takers will need to wait 1-2 months after taking the exam to know whether they have passed the exam. The result is typically announced on the day the general exam launches for regular test takers.

Here are some official FAQs about the Certification Exams and Beta Exams: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/faqs/

TIP: If you have previously taken and passed any AWS certification exam, you will be eligible for a further 50% discount. Look for a discount voucher in your AWS Certification profile. This means that you can take these new BETA exams for as little as $38.

Conclusion

This is an exciting new direction for those looking to specialize in the area of AI/ML centered on AWS tooling. I anticipate a few more (Professional level?) certifications to be added to the AI/ML and Data Engineering space.

The blog by AWS Training & Certification team is a good place to keep tabs on what’s happening in this space: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/training-and-certification/

Stay tuned to learn more about these exams as they launch in BETA soon. Bookmark this page: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/coming-soon/