Rackspace Receives $2.5 Million Grant to Train Workers for Cloud Skills

Rackspace Hosting has received a $2.5 million job training grant from the Texas Workforce Commission.
The San Antonio-based company will use the grant, in partnership with Alamo Colleges, to train 1,000 new employees, as well as current employees.
Rackspace will be hiring the new workers in San Antonio, Austin and Dallas and paying them an average hourly wage of $25.38, under the terms of the grant.
The announcement is being made at a news conference this morning at Rackspace’s headquarters with TWC Chairman Andres Alcantar, Alamo Colleges Chancellor Bruce Leslie, Rackspace’s Chairman Graham Weston and its CEO Lanham Napier.
“We’ve committed to hiring 1,000 new employees in the next two years,” said Duane La Bom, Rackspace’s director of training and development.
The grant will be used to create and provide a new online curriculum on cloud-based technologies. The training will be for technicians, Linux administrators and software developers.
“It’s no secret that the shortage of these skills exists today,” La Bom said.
The research firm IDC reported that 1.7 million cloud computing jobs went unfilled last year and that’s expected to grow in coming years, he said.
Rackspace is also partnering with Geekdom to launch the Open Cloud Academy to provide training to veterans and the public on Cloud Computing technologies. The first class will start training at the end of February. The official ribbon cutting for the Cloud Academy, which is based at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio, is March 19th.
This is the second Texas Workforce Commission training grant Rackspace has received. In 2008, Rackspace got a $4.7 million grant to provide training to more than 3,000 Rackspace employees.
Rackspace, with 4,600 employees, is the second largest cloud computing provider worldwide. It launched the world’s largest commercially-operated open cloud platform in 2012.