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Since starting its first-ever platform engineering course in August, PlatformEngineering.org, a global community of developers, has now trained some 190 IT administrators in the processes of setting up and using a platform engineering initiative inside their companies. Now the organization is preparing to get started in March with its second and final course in its training curriculum, along with its first certification exams to follow.
But even before that second course begins, a growing number of IT administrators have been sharing their interest in inviting the PlatformEngineering.org course offerings and instructors to their corporate offices, where their entire IT admin teams can receive customized training on site at the same time.
For PlatformEngineering.org, this expanding interest in the certification course is showing organizers that the demand for specialized platform engineering training is growing and is appreciated in the marketplace, Luca Galante, lead instructor for the organization, told The New Stack.
“When we first launched this course back in August, we thought that 80% of the students would be DevOps people upskilling into platform engineering,” said Galante. “Actually, we found that 80% of platform teams inside companies already have a mandate and a budget, but they are still unsure as to what best practices look like. That is why they are taking these two courses. They are here to find out what do top performers do and how do I sell this thing internally?”
These positive results that company platform leaders are seeing in the lessons their IT admins are receiving through the coursework are now also causing platform leaders to look at ways to get their entire admin teams trained at the same time in this new development landscape, and not just a few of them at a time, he said.
That means some of them are deciding that instead of buying 20 online training seats for their admins to learn lessons online, it would be even more impactful to have PlatformEngineering.org trainers present these lessons live at company offices for a larger group, according to Galante. “They would much rather have something more customized and put them into the same room for two days and do it that way. That is where the idea of custom trainings came from.”
For students, the benefits of taking the courses in their workplaces with on-site trainers also means that each eight-week online course can be compressed into two days of impactful training, said Galante.
Interestingly, some of the first students for the first course have been platform product managers or platform heads, who realized after taking the course that it would be something they would like their entire platform team to experience, said Galante. “And this is whether it was a platform team that is already well-established, or in some cases a new head of platform. They take the course, and they have just inherited a DevOps team, an SRE team or they are trying to make sure that everybody is on the same page on platform engineering.”
Taken by students online, the two courses, Platform Engineering Fundamentals and an MVP (minimum viable platform) to IDP (internal development platform) course, will be followed by a certification exam combining platform engineering theory with hands-on tasks. Each of the courses will be held for eight to 10 weeks with live, interactive, online meetup sessions taught by platform engineering experts and some of the top platform architects in the industry, according to the group. The live nature of the courses will provide instant feedback, Q&As and an up-to-the-minute feel for the instruction. The live sessions are expected to run for up to 2.5 hours per class module. The courses will be taken in succession.
In the Platform Engineering Fundamentals course, students will master the key concepts of platform engineering and build their first internal developer platform on their own, based on detailed blueprints and templates that are designed to teach them best practices and more.
In the MVP to IDP course, students will dive deeper into their studies to design expansive rollout strategies and adoption paths across multiple workflows and teams, giving them the lessons and experience to drive platform engineering skillsets inside their companies.
Following satisfactory completion of both courses, students can then take their certification exam that will test their knowledge of the lessons. Successful students will earn a certification badge.
The courses are priced at $2,249 each, but they can periodically be found on sale for $1,799 each. The certification exam is priced at $299. A bundle price that includes the two courses and the certification exam is priced at 30% off its $4,498 regular price and is available at $3,149.
Two class sections have so far completed the first fundamentals course since August, with 80 students in the first section and 110 in the second session. A third group of students will take the first course from January to March 2025. Those groups of students will start the second course in March.
PlatformEngineering.org also plans to begin an “assessment” offering in 2025 that will match a PlatformEngineering.org trainer with a company to provide detailed assessments of what the company requires to bring platform engineering into their operations, according to Galante.
“We have this entire framework around MVPs, and then production readiness and adoption,” he said. “We would give you a trainer that follows you along, almost as a platform product manager as a service” to evaluate a company’s needs, he said. “It would be like a three-hour session, and at the end of it, we tell you what you need to do. “
That could mean needing to train 20 people on your team, or start building a platform from the backend, or getting the tools you need and other needed information, said Galante. “And we might or might not recommend other things as well. This is something separate that we want to run with technology consultancy Thoughtworks to make sure that it is vendor neutral,” he said.
