According to a recent news release, MongoDB recently established distribution partnerships with Coursera and LinkedIn Learning to make its software development courses, offered through its online certification program, MongoDB University, available to more students wordwide. The company is also working with Women Who Code, MyTechDev and Lesbians Who Tech & Allies to help diversify the tech workforce and provide free certification to 700 software developers.
The news release said the platform is also offering professional development resources, including free credits, certifications and curriculum materials for educators, and reskilling courses for database administrators and professionals who use structured query language (SQL), a programming language for relational databases.
Raghu Viswanathan, vice president of education, documentation, and academia at MongoDB, said in an email to Government Technology that lessons involve a variety of learning methods, including video tutorials and hands-on labs, and cover topics such as CRUD operations, search, aggregation and indexing.
“The new MongoDB University initiatives announced in June make it possible for new and existing developers across the globe to quickly learn and become certified using MongoDB in order to build a wide variety of modern applications across high-demand industries,” he wrote, adding that the goal of recent initiatives is to “help close the widening software-development skills gap globally.”
According to a recent report from U.S. News and World Report highlighting the 10 best jobs in 2023, software developer roles were ranked as the No. 1 profession in terms of long-term demand among employers, current job openings and median income. What’s more, a 2017 report by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) estimated that 1.2 million software engineer roles in the U.S. would be unfilled by 2026. To help meet the demand, Viswanathan said MongoDB University has provided free courses to over 50,000 developers monthly and certified more than 600 users since last November.
“Our goal is to empower diverse women to excel in technology careers with more than half of our 343,000 members identifying as software engineers,” Women Who Code CEO Alaina Percival said in a public statement. “MongoDB is one of the most popular database options for building modern applications, so we’re thrilled to help our members get certified using the official MongoDB University course curriculum.”
Viswanathan said MongoDB hopes to expand its course catalog in the future and update content based on recent tech advances.
“Software has steadily become the engine of business growth and innovation, which has led to the demand for new applications — for businesses and consumers — to grow exponentially,” he wrote in an email. “That means there will be more applications built over the next few years than were built in the software industry’s first 40 years. ... When it comes to redefining what’s possible in the future, [developers are] the ones who will make it a reality.”
