At major business schools ranging from Berkeley to Wharton, students are flocking to classes on blockchain and cryptocurrency. As CNBC recently reported: “According to a new survey of 675 U.S. undergraduate students by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Qriously, 9 percent of students have already taken a class related to blockchain or cryptocurrency and 26 percent want to take one.”
College course offerings include “Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Distributed Ledger Technology” taught by Kevin Werbach and engineering professor David Crosbie at the University of Pennsylvania; and “Blockchain and CryptoEconomics,” taught by computer science professor Dawn Song at the University of California at Berkeley.
Meanwhile, job postings related to blockchain and Hyperledger are taking off, and knowledge in these areas is translating into opportunity. Careers website Glassdoor lists thousands of job posts related to blockchain.
Effectively, blockchain is becoming part of the required lingua franca for those entering the world of business as well as others. Outside of the big business schools, there are many learning resources worth knowing about, including these courses offered by The Linux Foundation:
Hyperledger Fabric Fundamentals (LFD271)
Teaches the fundamental concepts of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
Blockchain for Business – An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies (LFS171)
A primer to blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Learn how to start building blockchain applications with Hyperledger frameworks.
“In the span of only a year or two, blockchain has gone from something seen only as related to cryptocurrencies to a necessity for businesses across a wide variety of industries,” said The Linux Foundation’s Clyde Seepersad, General Manager, Training & Certification, in introducing the course Blockchain: Understanding its Uses and Implications. “Providing a free introductory course designed not only for technical staff but business professionals will help improve understanding of this important technology, while offering a certificate program through edX will enable professionals from all over the world to clearly demonstrate their expertise.”Aside from full courses, webinars focusing on blockchain technology offer chances to see how individual technologies work, and how industry segments are being influenced by blockchain. On Wednesday, September 26, at 9 a.m. Pacific, you can tune into “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Deploying Hyperledger Fabric on Kubernetes,” a free webinar presented by Alejandro (Sasha) Vicente Grabovetsky and Nicola Paoli of AID:Tech. It’s ideal for DevOps workers and others interested in the increasingly popular Hyperledger Fabric platform.
Conferences also provide good learning opportunities. The Open FinTech Forum in New York City, coming up October 10 and 11, will provide a great opportunity to hear about the latest distributed ledger deployments, use cases, trends, and predictions of blockchain adoption. Panel discussions are scheduled to cover:
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Distributed Ledger Technology Deployments & Use Cases in Financial Services
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Enterprise Blockchain Adoption – Trends and Predictions
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Blockchain Based Compliance Management Systems
Taking advantage of these opportunities to learn about blockchain makes more sense than ever.