Snowflake Launches One Million Minds + One Platform Program, Investing $20M Toward AI Upskilling
Jan. 13, 2025 -- Snowflake today announced the launch of its One Million Minds + One Platform program with the goal of training and certifying more than 100,000 users on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud by 2027 at no cost for learners, and upskilling one million people on data and AI by 2029. Fueled by Snowflake’s $20 million investment, the One Million Minds + One Platform program will provide Snowflake-delivered training and certification courses to students and workers in high growth and emerging markets around the world.
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By delivering curriculum resources for workers and educators, as well as credits to use the Snowflake platform, Snowflake is unlocking AI upskilling for the next generation of business and technology users, empowering them to expand their skill sets to gain a competitive edge.
According to a 2024 Gallup poll, 22 percent of workers express concern that their jobs will become obsolete as a result of technology advancements like generative AI. The same study found that 72 percent of Fortune 500 CHROs foresee AI replacing some jobs within their organization in the next three years. In order to remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving and highly competitive job market, workers must build and expand their skill set with the latest technologies to set themselves apart and deliver valuable expertise to the startups and enterprises of the future.
“To succeed in this digital age, every employee must be equipped with the skills that enable them to contribute in a data and AI-centric world,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake. “This requires that AI must not only be accessible for users at every skill level, but that users also have knowledge of how these applications work across the data lifecycle, as well as how to best engage with them. Through our investment, Snowflake is giving academic institutions and workers in regions around the world the tools and training to build successful careers as the technologists and founders of tomorrow.”
One Million Minds + One Platform seeks to address the needs of students and workers looking to both build, as well as expand their skill sets and become certified on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud platform. The program has two primary focuses:
Snowflake for Academia
To empower the next generation of AI, data, and application professionals, Snowflake is providing students with free access to Snowflake software, training materials, as well as industry leading data curriculum and training for educators. Today, the Snowflake for Academia program provides educators with enablement courses to get them certified on Snowflake and ready to teach in the classroom. Once certified, they receive teaching curriculum materials ranging from foundational courses to advanced self-paced tutorials, which include Academia Lab access for the entirety of the semester at no cost.
“The role of academia is to expose students to the various kinds of people, tools, and technologies they’ll encounter in the real world,” said Nate Crawford, Software Engineering & Data Science Faculty, University of St. Thomas. “Through the no-cost Snowflake for Academia program curriculum, as well as the free Snowflake credits, we’ve been able to deliver a robust course that provides essential skills to those soon to enter what is a rapidly changing work landscape. Exposure to these technologies at this stage plants the seed for future leaders and supports the development of the skillsets employers are looking for in candidates.”
Within the next year, Snowflake intends to more than double the total enrollment of educators and academic institutions around the world who teach, train, and ultimately certify students on the Snowflake platform.
Snowflake Training for High Growth and Emerging Markets
Snowflake will deliver new Snowflake Platform Trainings designed for individuals with limited experience using Snowflake and looking to accelerate their knowledge with the AI Data Cloud to workers and students across ASEAN, Canada, Germany, India, Korea, LATAM, Saudi Arabia, and more. Delivered by a Snowflake-certified instructor, the Snowflake Platform Training program is a step-by-step live and free introductory course to give users the hands-on experience and confidence to get started with their organization’s data transformation journey.
Snowflake-certified instructors will take program enlistees through the AI Data Cloud architecture, including data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, AI/ML, data applications, and data sharing. Once completed, students can achieve certification by successfully completing the SnowPro Platform Associate Certification, available starting February 2025, to validate their newly acquired skills, including how to:
- Setup and navigate the Snowflake user interface and Snowflake Notebooks
- Create database, stages, and use compute resources
- Load and leverage structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
- Understand Snowflake roles, and data access management
- Understand and manage the Snowflake Account structure
- Call the Snowflake Cortex LLM functions
The One Million Minds + One Platform program is only one part of Snowflake’s broader education and upskilling strategy. Snowflake University offers instructor-led, on-demand, self-directed courses that have helped hundreds of thousands of data professionals accelerate their data initiatives, whether they’re just getting started or driving advanced data projects.
About Snowflake
Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) makes enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted. More than 10,000 companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to share data, build applications, and power their business with AI. The era of enterprise AI is here.
Source: Snowflake
