Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal at Amazon’s annual Smbhav event at Jawahar Lal Nehru Stadium on January 16, 2020 in New Delhi, India.
Pradeep Gaur / Mint by Getty Images
Amazon is further promoting education with a new learning platform designed to help students in India enter prestigious engineering colleges.
The so-called Amazon Academy, announced on Wednesday, will be available through a new Android application and a website. It is designed to help students prepare for the joint entrance exam, which is an assessment conducted for admission to certain engineering colleges in India.
Amazon said Amazon Academy will include clean learning materials, live lectures and assessments in math, physics and chemistry. The platform will also include live simulated tests, which are designed to mimic the experience of the JEE exam.
“Amazon Academy aims to bring high quality and affordable education to all, starting with those preparing for engineering entrance exams,” said Amol Gurwara, director of education at Amazon India, in a statement.
“Our mission is to help students achieve their results, while providing the ability of educators and content partners to reach millions of students. Our main focus was on content quality, in-depth learning analysis and student experience. This launch will help aspiring engineers better prepare and get edge winners in the JEE. “
Amazon said the content is currently available for free and will “continue to be available for the next few months,” suggesting that it will eventually start charging students.
Amazon has a number of other educational platforms and initiatives, including AWS Educate, which is designed to help people cope with Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services. There’s also Amazon Ignite, which connects educational content creators to Amazon customers and helps them sell things like lesson plans and class games as digital downloads.
US tech giants Google and Apple have their own education offerings. Google for Education, for example, offers customizable versions of several Google products, while Apple offers discounts to students and teachers on its hardware.
Amazon in India
Also home to over 1.3 billion people, India is a huge market. Amazon has intensified its operations in the last few years in the country, which still has a relatively incipient e-commerce market compared to neighboring China and Western countries.
Reports suggest that Amazon now has more than 65,000 employees in the country, although Amazon declined to comment when CNBC tried to confirm the figure. In May, Amazon said it needed to hire another 50,000 temporary workers in India to meet Covid’s demand.
In December 2019, the Seattle-based technology giant opened a large office with space for more than 15,000 workers in Hyderabad, which is apparently the company’s largest building in the world.
Amazon’s online career portal shows that the company is looking for software development engineers and front-end engineers in India to work at Amazon Pay, which is an online payment processing service owned by Amazon.
“We are looking for Sr. Ingineri to build a payment platform that provides new payment mechanisms for our millions of customers and enables the ‘cash to digital’ economy,” an advertisement said.
He continues: “Amazon India Payments has a bold vision to become the most trusted payment solution widely accepted, both within Amazon and for online and offline transactions. To achieve this vision, Amazon India is systematically investing in local product innovation in the fields. payment experience, payment processing, innovative payment instruments and business solutions. “