AWS Contact Center

Elevating Amazon Connect digital enablement with learning plans and badges

In the fast-paced world of cloud innovation, staying ahead of the curve can be a challenge. At Amazon Connect, we’ve recognized the need to provide comprehensive and up-to-date training resources to our customers and partners.

Since its launch in 2017, Amazon Connect has disrupted the contact center industry with as a secure, scalable, and feature-rich Amazon Web Services (AWS) service. Over the years, we’ve expanded Amazon Connect at a rapid pace, launching over 450 major features driven by customer feedback.

However, our analysis revealed that the existing digital training offerings are not meeting the needs of our diverse user base. You highlighted several pain points such as:

  • Courses are product-focused and lack personalization for different roles.
  • The length of courses made it challenging for you to complete them in a timely manner.
  • Frequent feature releases render content outdated within 6-12 months.
    There is no way to validate your knowledge, or track your progress.

Amazon Connect Communications Specialist learning plan

To address these issues, we’ve redesigned our new digital enablement strategy. Learning plans are a structured approach to gaining AWS cloud skills. They map out a plan for you to gain the necessary and essential knowledge and skills, to qualify and perform a specific job role. Learning plans provide a customized roadmap to guide your AWS education in the most efficient way possible. Instead of learning all the concepts related to one application or service, you only learn the specific concepts, across multiple applications, services, and product offerings that help you be effective in your role. This approach to learning saves time by focusing only on the areas needed for your target role.

For the first learning plan, we selected one of the most critical personas in the contact center: the Communications Specialists. Whether you are a contact center implementation engineer, a telecommunications engineer, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) specialist, an IVR application engineer, a senior telecommunications analyst, a technical consultant – call center application, or a telephony administrator, you will find all the Amazon Connect core concepts you need to do your job, in our first learning plan.

Image example of curated series of short (30-60 minutes) and interactive free digital courses

We created a curated series of short (30-60 minutes) and interactive free digital courses. The courses cover learning outcomes related to telephony, IVR, flows, routing, and omnichannel deployment, but also include relevant information about the AWS services integrated with Amazon Connect. The courses feature videos, graphics, and knowledge checks to enhance your learning experience. They use practical real-life use cases and scenarios to guide you through the learning.

You will discover Amazon Connect as a single application foundational knowledge: Amazon Connect console and instances, agent applications, and conversational analytics functionality. Then you will dive deeper into Amazon Connect IVRs by learning about flows, conversational interfaces, and routing. The out-of-the-box and extended functionality for chat and messaging channels complements our voice channel offering learnings. Whether you are covering managed telephony concepts, or learn about in-app, web, and video calling setup and pricing, these skills help you build and maintain your core contact center workloads using best practices recommended by our Amazon Connect specialist teams.

Amazon Connect Communications Specialist Badge

Amazon Connect Communications Specialist Badge

Completing the curriculum curated for you in the Amazon Connect Communications Specialist Learning Plan helps prepare you thoroughly for the final knowledge check assessment. When you pass this assessment with a minimum score of 80%, you earn the Amazon Connect Communications Specialist Badge. The Credly badge is issued within two weeks from the date you successfully passed your free knowledge check assessment. The badge brings formal recognition of focused Amazon Connect and AWS abilities gained through your training. It serves an important role in signaling your valuable cloud skills and experiences to advance your career.

Why would you want a badge? Benefits of digital badges include:

  • Validate your Amazon Connect and AWS skills and knowledge. Earning an AWS badge shows you have completed AWS training and have skills in your specific job role.
  • Signal your expertise to employers. Displaying Amazon Connect AWS badges on your resume and online profiles lets hiring managers and tech recruiters know you have relevant AWS cloud and contact center skills for their open positions.
  • Empower you to stand out from other candidates. Given how sought-after cloud skills are in the job market today, having a badge can give your resume an edge over others without cloud contact center qualifications.
  • Are easily gained via bite-sized learning. AWS badges represent completion of short, focused courses targeting specific skillsets you can quickly gain.
  • They are shareable to broader networks. AWS badges have digital credentials you can easily share and link to via sites like LinkedIn, bringing visibility of your skills to your wider professional networks.
  • Digital badges build a pathway for career advancement. Earning badges can chart a path to wider accreditation levels and career growth.

Expanding role-specific Amazon Connect qualifications

Our next immediate focus is on Amazon Connect developers. For developers, we curated courses that complement their responsibilities in flow building and various Amazon Connect integrations. Courses cover foundational Amazon Connect developer knowledge (AWS CLI, REST APIs, SDKs), AWS Lambda integration options for Amazon Connect flows. Other integration options using data streaming with Amazon Kinesis and Amazon EventBridge. Additionally, you will find front end development courses that teach you how to expand applications functionality by integrating your systems of record with Amazon Connect. Last but not least, you will learn fundamental knowledge about how to use infrastructure as code services such as AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to deploy Amazon Connect workloads.

As your job role evolves, our learning plans will expand to cover: contact center architect, data and analyst specialist, operations, cloud contact center infrastructure administrator, contact center administrator, workforce optimization, and outbound campaigns specialist roles. We continue to work backwards from our customer needs, and we are looking forward to get your feedback.

With our new digital enablement strategy, we aim to provide personalized, up-to-date, and validated training experiences that empower our customers and partners to leverage the full potential of Amazon Connect. Get your Amazon Connect Communications Specialist Badge today.

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