The energy around our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program right now is incredible. It seems like only yesterday that Sebastian Thrun announced the program at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Since then, we’ve reviewed and accepted applications, and confirmed the enrollments of our first groundbreaking students. We’ve opened a Slack channel that is now buzzing with thousands of conversations. We’ve even started conducting challenges for people to begin contributing to our very own autonomous vehicle!
But today’s news takes things to a whole new level of amazing.
Hiring Partners
When we first launched the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program, we were thrilled to announce four outstanding companies as hiring partners: Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, Otto, and Didi Chuxing. Being able to directly connect our students to employment opportunities through hiring partnerships represents a powerful step forward in our mission to support each Udacity student’s career goals.
Which is why we are so excited today to announce the addition of 10 new hiring partners, for a total of 14 partner companies!
Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, Otto, Didi, BMW, HCL, AutonomouStuff, McLaren Applied Technologies, NextEv, Elektrobit, HERE, Local Motors, Polysync, LeEco
Meet Our Hiring Partners LIVE!
Want to learn about the different kinds of career opportunities this Nanodegree program opens up for you? Join Udacity hiring partners including Mercedes-Benz and McLaren Applied Technologies as they answer your questions in a livestreamed event on Thursday, October 27th at 3pm PDT.
Send in your questions via this link, and make sure to bookmark the event!
Career Opportunities
Our hiring partners are located across the globe, and together represent a vast array of career opportunities in the rapidly growing autonomous vehicle space. Having hiring partners like these means our job-seeking students have direct and preferential exposure at these companies, giving our students a significant leg-up in their job hunt.
As just reported in Fortune, job growth in this field is rising rapidly:
There are more than 2,000 job postings related to autonomous vehicles, according to Indeed Hiring Lab. However, the actual number of these jobs likely far exceeds that figure because one listing can be for multiple positions.
This, combined with Boston Consulting Group’s widely circulated projections that the autonomous vehicle industry will likely become a $42 billion industry within the next ten years, makes clear that competition for the best jobs will only get more fierce—these hiring partnerships are accordingly all the more critical for students pursuing careers in this exciting new field.
What Our Hiring Partners Are Saying
Our hiring partners are some of the most important and influential innovators in this space, and their collective visions together define the future of autonomous vehicle technology.
“By helping develop the curriculum for the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program, we are investing not only in potential talent to contribute to our cutting-edge developments, but in the future of autonomous driving.” —Axel Gern, Head of Autonomous Driving, MBRDNA
“The Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program will enable prospective hires to quickly contribute to an industry in need of innovation. The race towards an autonomous vehicle future is an important and extraordinary technological challenge—one which McLaren is well suited to meet.” —Christian Klender, Head of Systems Engineering, North America at McLaren Applied Technologies
“The autonomous vehicle industry is one of the fastest growing job sectors and very soon engineers with autonomous vehicle experience will become invaluable.” —Wolfgang Juchmann, VP at AutonomouStuff
“Udacity has one of the most innovative programs to prepare an entirely new kind of engineer to build a future few of us can yet imagine.” —Josh Hartung, CEO, Polysync
In partnering with these companies, we achieve two key goals: 1) We help ensure a steady stream of exceptionally well-prepared engineers for a rapidly growing industry of immeasurable importance to the future of our planet, and 2) We help provide our students with unprecedented opportunities to become part of this amazing new field.
We are currently accepting Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program applications for early 2017 enrollment. Apply now, and you too can start building the future!
