AWS cloud skills

We’ve tailored our learning recommendations to meet the needs of 6 groups of learners. The suggested courses provide the level of skills and knowledge, based by profession, to make effective and responsible decisions in the AWS cloud.

• Beginner the suggested course introduces learners to the AWS cloud, terminology and provides a basic concepts overview
• Understanding Cloud as an operational requirement recommended for learners that require a high-level understanding of the technical features and benefits of AWS cloud
• Decision maker recommended for learners that require a high-level understanding of the technical features and benefits of AWS cloud
• Financial decision maker recommended upskilling on cost optimisation and FinOps Pillars for the AWS cloud to make effective and responsible decisions
• Digital and technology professional role based training at associate level, specialty, or professional level
• AI skills learn how to use, build with, and govern artificial intelligence and generative AI on AWS 

I am new to cloud and looking to understand the basics.

This pathway is designed for anyone who is completely new to cloud computing and wants to build a foundational understanding of what AWS is and how it works. No prior technical experience is required. These courses introduce core cloud concepts, terminology, and the value cloud brings to healthcare organisations, providing a solid base for further learning.

Suitable for admin and corporate services staff, clinical staff exploring digital tools, project and programme coordinators, anyone new to an IT or digital role, staff moving into roles that involve cloud based systems, non technical managers who interact with digital teams.

Start with the 

AWS Foundations: Getting Started with the AWS Cloud Essentials  (1 hour) This course can help you build and validate an overall understanding of the AWS Cloud, key terminology, and help advance your AWS Cloud skills

Then progress to:

AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (4 hours) if you seek an overall understanding of AWS Cloud or wish to complete your first AWS certification

This pathway is aimed at those who work with cloud infrastructure on a day to day basis or are preparing to take on an operational role supporting AWS environments. It builds on foundational knowledge and moves into hands on, practical skills through interactive labs and gamified learning. The pathway culminates in preparation for the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification.

Start with:

• AWS Technical Essentials (4 hours) Learn the fundamentals of identifying AWS services to make informed decisions about IT solutions based on your business requirements. Want to dive deeper? Head over to AWS Essentials for further details

Then progress to:

• AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner (12 hours) is a role playing learning game that helps you develop practical cloud skills through interactive learning and hands on activities using AWS services. Complete all your assignments to earn your digital badge
• Cloud Essentials Knowledge Badge Readiness Path (7 hours) Learn foundational cloud concepts, AWS services, security, architecture, pricing, and support. This learning path presents domain specific content and includes courses, knowledge checks, and a knowledge badge assessment.
• AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Prep (4.5 hours)

This pathway is designed for those working with data, analytics, and business intelligence within NHS organisations. It covers the full spectrum of modern data architecture on AWS, from understanding big data fundamentals through to designing and building data lakes, data warehouses, and analytics pipelines. As the NHS continues to harness data for population health management, operational efficiency, and clinical decision-making, these skills are increasingly critical.

Start with:

• Fundamentals of Analytics on AWS Part 1 (2 hours) This course is the first of two offerings designed to introduce learners to the current market trends in analytics. You will learn fundamental concepts such as types of analytics, the 5 V’s of big data, and the challenges associated with processing high volumes of data. This course also maps the 5 V’s of big data to AWS services for analytics
• Fundamentals of Analytics on AWS Part 2 (1.5 hours) Building upon the concepts introduced in Part 1, this course introduces learners to an overview of data lakes, data warehouses, and modern data architectures on AWS. You will learn about which AWS services can be used to build a data warehouse, data lakes, and modern data architectures on AWS. You will also see common modern data architecture use cases and a reference architecture

Then progress to:

• Data Analytics learning plan  This learning plan is designed to help developers, data analysts, and data engineers design, build, secure, and maintain analytics solutions. The digital training included in this learning plan will expose you to the fastest way to get answers from all your data to all your users. (Also available with Labs*)
• standard exam prep plan AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate (17 hours)

This pathway helps learners understand the full range of AWS database technologies and how to select the right database for a given workload. The NHS operates numerous systems that rely on databases, from patient record systems to scheduling, referrals, and reporting. Understanding the differences between relational and non-relational databases, and when to use each, is essential for teams designing or maintaining digital health services.

Start with:

• AWS Database Offerings (4 hours) this course provides a basic overview of different database technologies and architectures and introduces you to the various Amazon Web Services (AWS) database services. The course also covers the concept of the purpose-built database, which changes the one-size-fits-all methodology that previously existed
• Introduction to Building with AWS Databases (3 hours) this course explores the various databases that Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers and helps you understand how each of them solve unique business problems. It introduces you to AWS recommended best practices when designing solutions with AWS databases, and common tools for data migration

Then progress to the learning plan that is most relevant

• NoSQL Foundation learning plan (11 hours) Learn fundamentals of managed non-relational (no SQL) database services. The digital training included in this learning plan will expose you to AWS nonrelational database services including Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon QLDB
• Database learning plan: AWS Relational Database Services (23 hours) The digital training included in this learning plan will expose you to AWS relational database services including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Aurora, and Amazon Redshift. (Also available with Labs*)

This pathway is designed for senior leaders and managers who need to understand the strategic benefits of cloud and AI without requiring deep technical knowledge. The courses cover how cloud and AI can support organisational objectives, improve service delivery, reduce costs, and drive innovation. In the context of the NHS, this includes understanding how cloud enables digital transformation at scale, supporting the objectives of the NHS Long Term Plan.

Suitable for chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), Chief Clinical Information Officers (CCIOs), directors of digital and rransformation, programme directors and senior programme managers, trust board members with digital portfolios, Integrated Care Board (ICB) digital leads, senior operational managers exploring digital solutions.

• AWS Cloud Essentials for Business Leaders (2 hours) - Learn the fundamental concepts of cloud computing and how a cloud strategy can help companies meet business objectives
• Machine Learning for Leaders (1.5 hours) - Learn how machine learning can help your teams maximize project results and gain critical insight into your business or customer needs
• Generative AI for Executives (13 mins) - provides a high-level picture of generative AI, how it can address executives' concerns and challenges, and how it supports business growth
• AI for Business Leaders Learning Plan (NEW) - comprehensive overview introducing generative AI, approaches for planning AI projects, and building AI-ready organisations

This pathway is tailored for finance professionals and budget holders who are responsible for managing, forecasting, and optimising cloud spend within NHS organisations. As more services move to the cloud, understanding how cloud billing works, how to allocate costs across departments, and how to implement FinOps best practices becomes essential. These courses provide the financial literacy needed to manage AWS cloud costs effectively and responsibly.

Suitable for financial directors and finance business partners, budget holders for digital and IT programmes, finOps practitioners and cloud financial analysts, commercial and procurement professionals or any one managing AWS cost allocation across NHS teams. 

Start with:

• AWS Billing and Cost Management (20 minutes) - Learn about the AWS Billing and Cost Management service and the functionality it offers

Then progress to:

• AWS Cloud for Finance Professionals (17 hours) - Discover Cloud Financial Management (CFM) best practices, including how to measure, optimise, and plan cloud usage. Learn how to report, monitor, and allocate your cloud costs

This pathway is the most technically advanced and is designed for experienced IT professionals who design, build, and maintain cloud-based solutions. The Solutions Architect learning path covers designing resilient, secure, and highly available architectures on AWS. It requires significant time investment but provides the depth of knowledge needed to lead technical cloud programmes across NHS organisations.

Suitable for solution architects and enterprise architects, senior software engineers and technical leads, cloud platform engineers, technical programme managers, security architects, team designing and delivering NHS cloud hosted digital services and anyone pursuing the AWS solutions architect certification. 

• Solutions architect Knowledge Badge Readiness Path (52 hours) Helps build knowledge on how to design applications and large distributed systems on AWS.  This learning path presents domain specific content and includes courses, knowledge checks, and a knowledge badge assessment.

Artificial intelligence is transforming healthcare, from improving diagnostic accuracy and automating administrative tasks to enabling personalised patient care and predictive population health management. This section provides structured learning paths for NHS staff at all levels, whether you're looking to understand what AI is, make informed decisions about AI adoption, or build AI-powered applications. AWS provides industry-recognised certifications that validate your skills and demonstrate competency to your organisation.

For NHS staff looking to understand what AI is and how it can be applied responsibly:

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (free) - covers fundamental AI concepts, terminology, and real-world applications
• Generative AI for Executives (13 mins) - a high-level overview of generative AI for decision makers
• AI for Business Leaders Learning Plan - a comprehensive overview introducing generative AI, approaches for planning AI projects, and building AI-ready organisations
• Generative AI Essentials on AWS (1-day classroom course) - for business professionals and IT specialists who want a solid foundation in generative AI concepts, methods, and strategies

The AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) is a foundational-level certification that validates your understanding of AI, machine learning (ML), and generative AI concepts in a business context. No prerequisites required.

Preparation pathway:

• Introduction to Generative AI: Art of the Possible (1 hour) - introduces generative AI, use cases, risks and benefits
• Planning a Generative AI Project (1 hour) - learn how to scope and plan a GenAI initiative
• AWS AI Practitioner Essentials - core preparation course for the certification
• Exam Prep: AWS Certified AI Practitioner (1-day classroom course, also available as self-paced)

This certification provides a recognised standard for AI competency across your organisation. It is ideal for clinical informatics leads, digital transformation teams, programme managers, and anyone making decisions about AI adoption.

For developers building AI-powered applications and services:

• Amazon Bedrock Getting Started (1 hour) - introduction to AWS's managed service for foundation models
• Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock (1.5 hours) - hands-on patterns for production GenAI apps
• Amazon Bedrock Agents and Knowledge Bases - build RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) applications and autonomous AI agents
• Foundations of Prompt Engineering (1 hour) - learn how to write effective prompts for foundation models
• AWS Generative AI Applications Professional Certificate (available on Coursera and edX) - practical, hands-on programme using Amazon Bedrock

Certification

AWS Certified Generative AI Developer - Professional - for developers building production generative AI applications on AWS.

For data scientists and ML engineers building and deploying models:

• Machine Learning Learning Plan - structured pathway covering the ML lifecycle on AWS
• Building Language Models on AWS - train, deploy, and customise large language models using Amazon SageMaker

Certification

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer - Associate - validates ability to build, deploy, and maintain ML solutions on AWS.

AWS provides a suite of AI-powered development tools that help teams write better code faster, maintain quality standards, and build production-ready applications. These tools use generative AI to assist with everything from writing individual lines of code to managing entire development workflows. Critically for NHS organisations, these tools are available on free tiers and are designed to work within compliance and governance constraints. They represent a step change in developer productivity and are relevant to any NHS team building or maintaining digital services.

Amazon Q Developer is a generative AI-powered assistant for the entire software development lifecycle.

What it does:

• inline code suggestions - real-time code completions as you type in your IDE
• conversational assistance - ask questions about your codebase, AWS services, architecture patterns, and best practices
• autonomous agents - can implement features, write and run tests, refactor code, perform security scans, and review pull requests
• software upgrades - automates language and framework version migrations (e.g., Java 8 to 17, .NET Framework to .NET Core)
• infrastructure as vode - generates and explains CloudFormation, CDK, and Terraform templates

Supported environments: VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, AWS Console, macOS, and the command line.

Getting started:

• Amazon Q Developer: Getting Started (30 minutes, free on AWS Skill Builder)
• Download and install - free tier available with no AWS account required for basic features

Helps development teams write more secure code, accelerates cloud migration projects, provides real-time guidance on AWS best practices, and can perform security vulnerability scanning across codebases. The free tier makes it accessible to all NHS organisations regardless of budget.

Kiro is an AI-powered integrated development environment (IDE) and command-line interface (CLI) from AWS, designed for building production-ready applications with engineering rigour.

What it does:

• spec driven: development translates your requirements into structured specifications, system designs, and implementation tasks before writing any code. This ensures AI-generated code aligns with your intent and governance requirements
• agentic: development autonomously completes long-running tasks across large codebases, from feature implementation to documentation and testing
• hooks: event driven automations that trigger in the background when you save, create, or delete files. Think of it like an experienced developer reviewing your work automatically (running tests, checking standards, updating documentation)
• steering: Kiro learns how your team works and adapts to your project's conventions, coding standards, and architectural patterns
• built on Amazon Bedrock uses multiple foundation models to complete tasks securely

Why Kiro matters for NHS teams:

• compliance ready: Designed specifically for teams working under regulatory and governance constraints. The spec-driven approach creates an auditable trail from requirements to implementation
• quality assurance: Hooks can automatically enforce coding standards, run security checks, and validate against NHS Digital service standards
• accessibility: No prior AI experience needed. Teams can start with natural language descriptions of what they want to build
• cost: Free to use

Getting started:

• visit kiro.dev to download
• available as both a desktop IDE (VS Code-based) and CLI
• works with any programming language and framework

AWS Amplify is a full-stack development framework for building web and mobile applications.

What it does:

• TypeScript-first full-stack framework with built-in authentication, data storage, file storage, and hosting
• AI integration - add generative AI capabilities to your applications using Amazon Bedrock with just a few lines of code
• hosting - fully managed CI/CD and hosting for web applications

Relevance to the NHS: Ideal for teams building patient-facing web applications, internal tools, or digital services who want to move quickly while maintaining security standards. Amplify handles common patterns (user authentication, data APIs, file uploads) out of the box, letting teams focus on the unique parts of their application.

Getting started

• AWS Amplify Documentation 
• free tier available

For technical practitioners who want to go deeper into machine learning and generative AI on AWS. It covers both the strategic understanding needed to plan AI initiatives and the hands-on technical skills required to build, train, and deploy models. The courses progress from understanding generative AI concepts through to building production applications using Amazon Bedrock and training custom models with Amazon SageMaker. Prior knowledge of data analytics on AWS is recommended.

Suitable for data scientists and machine learning engineers, software developers building AI enhanced applications, research teams working on clinical AI models. technical architects designing AI platforms and anyone with a data analytics background looking to move into AI or machine learning (ML). 

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) uses Foundation Models (FMs) to create new content and ideas, such as conversations, stories, images, videos, and music. Generative AI has the potential to transform how organisations accomplish their mission. The portfolio of GenAI services available on AWS enables organisations to reinvent their applications and create entirely new experiences that drive productivity and transform how organisations achieve mission goals.

Start with:

• Introduction to Generative AI: Art of the Possible (1 hour) - introduces generative AI, use cases, risks and benefits
• Planning a Generative AI Project (1 hour) - learn how to plan and scope an AI initiative
• Building a Generative AI-Ready Organisation (1 hour) - understand the organisational readiness needed for GenAI adoption
• Amazon Bedrock Getting Started (1 hour) - introduction to the AWS managed service for accessing foundation models

Then progress to:

• Foundations of Prompt Engineering (1 hour) - learn techniques for effective prompting
• Building Language Models on AWS - for those wanting to train or fine-tune their own models using Amazon SageMaker
• Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock (1.5 hours) - build production applications using Bedrock Agents, Knowledge Bases, and Guardrails

Data scientists and developers can learn how to integrate machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) into applications. You'll also learn the tools and techniques for data platform and data science to build ML applications.

We recommend that students have prior knowledge of data analytics on AWS.

Start with:

• Machine Learning Essentials for Business and Technical Decision Makers (2 hours) - understand what ML is and how it applies to your organisation
• AWS Foundations: Machine Learning Basics (30 mins) What is machine learning? How can machine learning solve business problems? When is it appropriate to use a machine learning model? What are the phases of a machine learning pipeline? In this course, you get an overview of the concepts, terminology, and processes of the exciting field of machine learning
• AWS Foundations: How Amazon SageMaker Can Help (30 minutes) Learn how Amazon SageMaker mitigates the core challenges of implementing a machine learning pipeline. In this course, you learn how SageMaker notebooks and instances help power your machine learning workloads and review the key Amazon SageMaker features

• Amazon Q Developer - Getting Started (30 minutes) Using Amazon Q Developer, an AI-powered productivity tool that generates code suggestions ranging from snippets to full functions in near real time, you can streamline your coding experience and reduce the amount of code you have to write to complete your tasks, increasing coding efficiency and productivity. Amazon Q Developer also scans your code for security issues from right within your editor

Then progress to:

• Machine Learning Learning Plan - The digital training included in this learning plan will expose you to the broadest and deepest set of machine learning services and supporting cloud infrastructure. This learning plan can also help prepare you for the AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty certification exam. (Also available with Labs*)
• AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer - Associate certification prep

AWS is offering any NHS employee in England, Wales and Scotland access to free training and exam preparation to help you build cloud skills for a digital career. The NHS England Skills Accelerator offers participants access to AWS online digital courses as well as instructor led training which offers live virtual learning with AWS experts. The program also includes opportunities to work alongside AWS solutions architects and professional services teams to help launch digital innovations in the cloud.

If you are interested in learning more about the NHS England Skills Accelerator please contact [email protected].

If you need further support as an NHS organisations planning or migrating to use Cloud Services contact us using our feedback form for an introductory 30 minute conversation with a member of the team.

Or find our more about our community of practice (you will need a FutureNHS account to login).

AQSS training materials

AQSS training materials can be redeemed through VitalSource. You can access VitalSource by using your existing AWS login or set up a new account by clicking on the Create a VitalSource account. You will need to use the same email address you used to register on the AWS training portal