Through a series of recent breakthroughs, even programmers who know close to nothing about deep learning technology can use simple, efficient tools to implement programs capable of learning from data.
If they’re lucky, they might find a book like O’Reilly’s Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow, which provides concrete examples to help learners gain an intuitive understanding of the concepts and tools for building intelligent systems. (See link below for free download of chapter 2, “End-to-End Machine Learning Project.”)
But if someone on your tech team wants to dive even deeper into ML—or any new technology, for that matter—where can they turn?
Learning platforms give tech teams a real advantage
The future of work is becoming increasingly remote. Certainly that’s been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but many studies have shown that working from home, whether full time or on a hybrid schedule, is here to stay. But when you’re working remotely, who do you turn to when you’re stuck? There’s no cubicle mate to rely on. Slack messages aren’t always instantly returned. Where can remote workers go to get the solutions they need so they can get back to work fast?
Here’s where learning and development (L&D) solutions can really shine—and they’re only growing brighter as we look toward how we’ll be working tomorrow. And accommodating remote work is just the latest in a long list of transitions L&D solutions have made to help employees over the decades.
The publisher of the book noted above, O’Reilly, is a learning company, and for over 40 years it’s worked to meet tech learners where they are. But where learners are has changed over time. That’s why O’Reilly has transformed itself—to its book publishing enterprise, it added live global conferences, and now it has consolidated all its services into one of the most comprehensive learning platforms for tech professionals. And that transformation has resonated across the industry. Today more than 60 percent of Fortune 100 companies count on the O’Reilly learning platform to train their tech teams.
How do learning platforms like O’Reilly work?
L&D solutions—especially those that offer certifications—are a great way for employees to learn new skills and tools that they may not have encountered during their formal education. That’s particularly true for technology professionals; often by the time they graduate, the technologies they learned in school are already becoming obsolete.
But the potential for L&D goes beyond attaining greater knowledge or advancing in title or compensation. It can also help eliminate some of the headaches all tech teams experience while tackling their daily work. For remote employees in particular, it’s crucial to learn “in the flow of work”—to quickly and easily find the answers they need to overcome obstacles and get back to the task at hand.
This leads to the most recent step in O’Reilly’s evolution to meet learners where they are (both figuratively, with what they’re learning, and literally, while they’re at home). It recently added AI-enabled capabilities to create O’Reilly Answers. Members simply ask a question, and the platform instantly scans thousands of titles to find the best answer that solves their tech problem—sometimes down to a specific line of code. Imagine all the time saved from scouring pages upon pages of books! What once took hours now takes seconds—a natural language processing engine is the new cubicle mate.
The O’Reilly learning platform also offers thousands of live online events and training courses, where teams can ask questions and get answers from industry experts. So now if they want to attend a tech conference, they can do so from home—without all the travel costs. Another standout feature is O’Reilly’s interactive learning scenarios and sandboxes, where teams can access safe live development environments to practice with new technologies and tools before trying to put them to work in real-world situations.
Download chapter 2 of Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow for free
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow is just one of over 60,000 titles that are available on the O’Reilly learning platform. In chapter 2, “End-to-End Machine Learning Project,” author Aurélien Géron walks you through every step of standing up an ML project, from seeing the big picture to launching and maintaining your system. And right now O’Reilly is offering a free download of the chapter so potential customers can see the high-quality content available on its learning platform. It’s a highly recommended read.
