Involving myself in the Nexascale Cloud Mentorship Program has allowed me to gain some valuable insight after participating for the past couple of weeks. There are tracks available ranging from general DevOps to the use of specific services like GCP or AWS. I chose to proceed with AWS due to my familiarity with the service.
The program is great at providing a streamlined and organised way of learning AWS. This is achieved with each of the mentees having 1 one 1 mentors that are available for them along with having group classes once a week. As mentioned before I had some familiarity with AWS on the user side so it was insightful to gain a better understanding of the other side of the AWS ecosystem setup.
Although personalised mentoring in the program is very beneficial, it sometimes overlooks peer learning which I would argue is equally as important. I have a couple of suggestions that could address this.
For one, having a weekly group session outside of the main lectures could greatly enhance the collaborative learning experience. It may consist of practical workshops, team projects or study sessions led by students/mentors themselves. The intention of these sessions wouldn’t just be to strengthen technical skills but also to nurture important soft skills like collaboration and communication that are necessary for professional workplace success. Regardless I appreciate how difficult it can be to organise this as everyone could have vastly different time commitments that it may not be feasible enough.
A slight variation of this could involve just having a Google Meet channel that is open for use between specific times of the day (say from 7pm to midnight) and anyone who wants to use it for a shared co-working space. This suggestion is because I’ve found that people are more motivated to work on things when they see other people working on either the same thing or something similar.
In conclusion, as the digital landscape continues to evolve, organisations like Nexascale are vital for producing future cloud experts. The Cloud Mentorship Program forms a good basis for learning and professional growth in cloud technologies. Its effectiveness can be increased by introducing more organised group learning chances. These improvements will not only make the educational experience better but also equip learners for teamwork and high-speed technology-related jobs.
