[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARA SOSS: Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us
during Google Cloud Next 2022.
We're thrilled to have you at our session,
Building Your Workspace Administration Career
with Google Cloud Credentials.
I'm Mara Soss, the Google Cloud Credentials Certifications
and Engagement Lead.
And during today's session, we're
going to start with the benefits of Google Cloud certification.
Then we're going to talk a bit about the preparation resources
available to those who are preparing
to become Google Cloud certified;
and then we're going to hear from Jason Butler, Senior
Workspace Deployment Engineer from SADA; and then finally,
your next steps on your certification journey.
So jumping into the benefits and kicking things off with a look
at some important industry trends that we're
seeing in the market today.
Google Cloud skills are critical to enabling customer success
and fueling our ecosystem.
IT leaders are acutely aware of this,
and the industry has seen a 40% increase in cloud job
postings between 2019 and 2021.
Cloud skills are the top skill set in demand
by IT departments.
And as tech leaders plan to expand their cloud services
in the next one to three years, they're
also faced with a talent deficit,
as 80% of these IT leaders identified
a lack in cloud skills and cloud knowledge on their teams.
And with this growing gap in the cloud skills needed,
it is critical to prepare yourself
and your teams with the knowledge and credentials
that meet this demand.
Google Cloud skills are particularly high in demand,
as the top two paying IT certifications in 2021
in the US were Google Cloud certifications.
Now, to further measure the impact
that Google Cloud certifications have
had on businesses and on individuals,
Google Cloud commissioned an independent third-party
research organization to conduct a web survey of around 2,000
recently certified Google Cloud individuals.
The results of the survey detailed in this report
make it clear that industry-recognized Google
Cloud certifications help organizations
grow the expert cloud talent that they need to effectively
transform their business and help individuals
elevate their IT careers.
The stats are powerful, with 78% of Google Cloud
certified individuals feeling more
confident in their professional future and 85%
feeling more confident in their cloud skills.
So taking a closer look at why we're all here,
the Google Workspace Administrator certification.
The Google Cloud certified Workspace Administrators
have a really important role to play at any organization.
They really enable people to work together, communicate,
and access data in a secure and efficient manner.
Operating with an engineering and solutions mindset,
they use the tools, programming languages, and APIs
to automate workflows.
The Google Workspace training and certification
offers the opportunity to grow and showcase you
and your team's skills, helping them
gain the confidence in their abilities
and stay current to give your company a competitive edge.
So for those of you who are preparing
to become Google Cloud certified and a Google Cloud certified
Professional Workspace Administrator,
I'd like to dive into the resources available to support
your path forward.
Now, our learning journeys prepare you
for certification and beyond.
And to help you on that path forward,
I'd like to highlight a particular learning path just
dedicated and curated by our instructional designers
for becoming and preparing for the Google Cloud Workspace
Administrator certification.
So we recommend that anybody first
complete the end user learning path
that's available on our Google Cloud Skills Boost.
That's our on-demand learning platform.
And before you jump in to the other on-demand courses,
we definitely recommend pausing and taking a closer look
at the exam guide.
The certification exam guide is going
to be super helpful as far as giving you
a sense of what topics might show up on the exam.
And it's a good way to navigate the areas that you
feel confident in or less confident in
and help you spend time in building out what your study
plan might look like.
Now, your study plans should definitely
include the Google Workspace administration on-demand
learning path.
And then also we have a skill badge,
configure your Google Workspace for IT admins.
Now, that skill badge we'll talk a bit more about in a minute.
But I also wanted to highlight the preparation
tool available to you, which are our sample questions.
And these are practice questions that
give our learners and our candidates
a sense of what the questions will look and feel
like on the exam.
And they are, again, a great way to assess the areas that you're
feeling super-strong in or not and help devise your learning
and study guide.
So those are some helpful tips curated by our Google Cloud
Learning Services Team to help you on your way
to certification.
Now, I mentioned a skill badge.
Google Cloud skill badges are digital badges
issued by Google Cloud in recognition of an individual's
cloud proficiency with Google Cloud products and services.
A skill badge is earned by completing
a series of hands-on labs and taking a final assessment
challenge lab to test a learner's
skills through the Google Cloud Skills Boost
learning platform that I mentioned.
So we did some analysis and we've
commissioned some additional research around the value
and impact of skill badges, and they really are a helpful tool.
We found that 90% of skill badge earners
found that they helped them in preparing for Google Cloud
certifications.
So again, we really recommend earning
that skill badge to help prepare you for the certification
and help building up some of that real-world experience
with Google Workspace.
So the certification exam does assess the different topics
that you're seeing here on this slide.
And it's a great way to really validate
your ability, your team's ability,
and help them gain their confidence
and stay current with the latest Google Cloud Workspace
technologies.
So have a look at those topics.
And to give you a sense of what to expect on exam day,
the certification exam is two hours in length.
It is a multiple choice and multiple select format.
There are no prerequisites.
However, we do recommend that the candidate for the exam
have around three years of industry experience
and at least one year of working with Google Workspace.
And some additional benefits to highlight for those of you who
earn your certification, this will
unlock a digital badge for you and a Google Cloud certified
digital certificate that you can proudly
display on your social profiles, like LinkedIn, or your resume.
And you will also earn some exciting Google Cloud
certified professional merchandise
that you can proudly wear at customer meetings,
at company events, or at Google Cloud events.
And also, you will gain access to our Google Cloud
certified community, our Google Cloud certified directory.
This is a good place for individuals
who are looking to explore other career options,
and you can network with other certified individuals
over there as well.
So without further ado, I am so excited to hear
from our partner, Jason Butler.
So he's going to talk more about the Google Cloud Workspace
Administrator job role and the impact
that the certification has had on his career
and his organization.
And we're so happy to have you, Jason Butler,
our Senior Google Workspace Deployment
Engineer from our Google Cloud Premier Partner, SADA.
So, Jason, would love for you to just jump in and tell
us a bit more about your role, your job experience
working with Google Workspace and some of those projects.
JASON BUTLER: Yeah.
Thanks, Mara, for having me here today.
So excited to be part of Next 2022.
So my role and experience at SADA
as a deployment engineer is, I am responsible for moving
companies or other organizations from the on-premise situation
or to the Google Workspace from either Microsoft
or whatever other cloud service they're using into Google.
I've been doing this for over eight years now,
so I've been excited to see how Google Workspace has grown
over the years and how it continues
to evolve and change and become an industry leader in the cloud
services.
MARA SOSS: Amazing.
Thank you, Jason.
Great background.
And I know we're all super happy to have you and your eight
years of experience on this session.
So I mean, making that next step and the motivation
to really dedicate and focus to prepare for a certification
exam, could you talk about what drove
you to do that and that decision and how it arose?
JASON BUTLER: Yeah.
So Google's, like you said, always evolving, always
changing.
So it's important to know that you're up to date
on what Google Workspace is offering these days.
So as a deployment engineer or Workspace admin engineer,
you need to be ready and understand everything
that Google has available to help make sure that you have
the most secure environment possible
just because everybody these days is worried about security.
And the Workspace admin exam does focus a lot
on security-specific questions, so they test you
in specific scenarios of what actions would you
take if something was breached, something along those lines.
So the admin exam definitely helps
you make sure you fully grasp and understand the Workspace
environment as best as you can.
MARA SOSS: Yeah.
I think absolutely and a great way to boost your confidence
but also show that you have an industry-validated
certification and proudly display that on your resume.
So maybe now you can just touch a bit more
on the overall benefits that you've
seen since becoming certified.
And how has that impacted your career at SADA?
JASON BUTLER: Yeah.
The admin exam has been very influential in my career.
I've started working as a support engineer
all those years ago.
And over those times, I've taken this exam,
every iteration Google has had available while I've been here.
So Google Workspace has been around for a while,
so I've been in all of those exams.
They've helped me progress from support to deployment engineer
to sales engineering and now into my current role
as a senior deployment engineer and POD lead at SADA.
So definitely, if I did not have this exam,
I wouldn't think I've progressed as quickly as I
have over these past years.
So this exam has definitely been very helpful in my career path.
MARA SOSS: Oh, amazing.
Congratulations on your great success.
And that path is certainly, I'm sure, inspiring our audience.
So I think now the great question also
around preparing, tips, tricks, what
are your thoughts on that when it comes
to preparing for the exam?
JASON BUTLER: Yeah.
My first tip is definitely take that practice exam
early and often because that will show you
a start, a good baseline of where your knowledge gaps are
and where you need to focus your studying going forward.
It's also always helpful to have access to the Admin Console
and make sure you understand all of those settings.
Google has great help articles on every setting in the Admin
Console available to everyone.
And then also take advantage of the support forums
that are available for the workplace exam
just because it does help you connect with other users that
are in your same situation studying for the exam,
maybe needing help on a specific question
that they couldn't get answered.
So it just creates that community
where everybody can connect and progress and pass
this exam together.
Yeah.
Those are just some quick tips that I've
come across in my many iterations of taking this exam.
So I just wanted to thank you, Mara, for having me here today.
And hopefully, those will help everybody in the future.
MARA SOSS: Absolutely.
Great tips and insights.
Thank you so much, Jason, for joining us.
JASON BUTLER: Thank you.
MARA SOSS: So to wrap things up, I'm
going to review a couple additional resources
to consider on the rest of your journey here
with us at Next 2022.
And before we jump into that, though, I
did want to remind everybody that we
do have a session coming up on November 15 in which we will
take a closer look at the Google Workspace Administrator
Certification exam.
So that's highly recommended, especially for those of you
who are already committed to preparing
and well onto that certification prep path.
We hope to see you there.
Also, throughout Next, make sure to check out
the #GoogleClout challenges.
Those are over in the Dev Zone.
Definitely challenge yourself and check that out.
And then also I wanted to touch back
on the Google Cloud Skills Boost on-demand learning platform.
If you haven't heard of it before
or you're not already using it, we
do have a 30-day trial available to new users.
And then also, if you already are a Google Cloud Skills Boost
user, we also have an annual subscription
available that we announced during the Next keynote, which
we hope you can take advantage of.
For $299 a year, you can unlock some pretty substantial
benefits, especially for our developers.
There are certification benefits.
There's some Google Cloud credits available to you
as well as an annual subscriber.
So please consider that and you can head over
to that URL to get started.
So that does conclude our session.
We thank you so much for joining us here at Next 2022,
and we will see you in the cloud.
[MUSIC PLAYING]