Developer bootcamp Coding Dojo is planning 30 Amazon Alexa Skills Workshops for at least 1,500 developers by the end of 2017.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based coding school worked with Amazon to develop the curriculum for the workshops, which will be held at Coding Dojo’s campuses in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Silicon Valley and Washington D.C.
Students will learn how to build skills for Alexa, the voice-controlled assistant that powers Echo devices. They will also receive training on how to get their skills certified for publication in the Alexa Skills Store. Each workshop will last for four hours.
“It’s impressive how many skills have already been created, and we’re honored to work with Amazon to help developers make Alexa as useful as possible,” Coding Dojo CEO Michael Choi said in a statement.
The program is designed to teach students how to build skills for Amazon’s growing library of voice-controlled devices. There is no formal job placement program for students who take the classes — with Amazon or other companies. The workshops are designed to provide general training for this novel technology.
“Learning how to develop skills for Alexa could certainly make graduates more appealing to Amazon if they applied to work there,” said Ketul Patel, head of operations and finance at Coding Dojo. “They could also easily apply this skill to work for other companies. These workshops also teach building block technologies like AWS Lambda and Node.js that are used to create an Alexa Skill, which are valuable for any developer.”
This isn’t the first time Amazon and Coding Dojo have collaborated. The two Seattle-area companies have co-hosted Alexa workshops in the past and they worked together to produce a series of Alexa developer how-to videos last year.
