Are you AWS Certified Azure certified, or Google certified and struggling to get your
first cloud architect or Solution Architect job, then this video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs.
And I'm the founder and CEO of go cloud architects and go cloud careers, and organization towards
building elite cloud computing and networking careers.
Personally, I've been working in tech for 25 years, and I've been helping others get
their first tech job or get promoted in tech for over two decades.
And my absolute favorite thing was when one of my students calls me and says, Guess what,
Mike, I just got cloud hired.
Today, we're going to talk about how you go from AWS Certified or Azure certified or Google
certified to Cloud Architect hired or Solution Architect hired.
Now, when we say this, I want you to understand first, I absolutely LOVE IT certifications,
I have a few myself, and I love them.
But here's the thing.
Certifications can help someone make up for gaps on their resume.
And they can help someone get an interview to be a cloud architect or a solutions architect.
But certifications will not get you hired, I'm gonna say this, again.
It's so important.
Certifications will not get you hired.
If you have one certification or a million certifications.
Certifications will not get you hard.
But certifications will get you that job interview.
And that job interview is a critical component to getting cloud hired, whether it's as a
solution architect or a cloud architect or anything else.
So we love certifications for that, the ability to help us get an interview, which is absolutely
critical.
Let's talk about why certifications aren't enough to get you that cloud architect job
or the solution architect job.
What are IT certifications, ITC certifications, or vendor certifications are really teaching
you how to work with vendors technology.
So when we look at the AWS Certified Solution, architect, associate or professional, or the
Azure expert, the Google professional cloud architect 90% of these exams are made up of
the name of a service, and how that service is configured.
And when we look at the certification and the training provided by certification providers,
it is the name of the service and how to configure it.
Here is an s3 bucket.
Here's how you configure it here is an easy to instance, here's how you configure it.
Here's an Azure virtual machine, here's how you configure it.
But I want you to understand this.
As cloud architects, we don't generally configure anything, we're systems designers.
So what we do is cloud architects, we meet with clients, we ask them about their business,
their business goals, their business pain points, their business challenges, what are
they trying to achieve?
Are they trying to increase their sales are they're trying to decrease their expenses?
Are they trying to improve collaboration and communication with on plays, in order to release
new products to market faster?
See, what we do as architects is we solve customer problems.
So what is our skill set, our skill set is very different than the name of a service
or how to configure it.
That's the problem with the AWS certifications, the Azure certifications are the Google certifications.
That's why they will never get you your cloud architect job or Solution Architect job, but
they will get you that interview.
And then if you've got the Cloud Architect skills, or the solution architect skills,
you're going to get hired, and you're gonna have a fantastic job.
And since I want everybody to get that cloud architect job, or Solution Architect job,
I'm going to tell you what's missing from certification training.
What do we do as architects, we solve customer problems with technology, that means system
design.
So what are we designing?
We're designing the solution to the customer's problems.
And in most cases, as a cloud architect or a solutions architect, we're going to be pulling
the technology from the network in the data center and moving it over to the cloud.
So what is this technology?
We're moving, we're moving networking and data center technology, which are not covered
in certifications, at least not to any level too great.
So for moving 10,000 virtual machines over to the cloud, we have to truly understand
virtualization, the performance of those virtual machines, etc.
The applications that were moving to the cloud, how would affect it?
What does moving to the cloud do to the workflow that the people are doing?
Should we recode applications to go to the cloud?
Should we lift and shift them to go to the cloud?
What's in the best interest of the company?
One cloud, two clouds, hybrid clouds, Hybrid Cloud Plus multi cloud?
That's what we're talking about as an architect.
So it's system design.
And none of that, from a technical perspective is covered in any type of certification, whether
it's the AWS Certified Solution Architect, professional, the Azure expert, or the Google
professional cloud architect.
It's just not there.
But that's the technical piece.
Now understand that a cloud architect is 50% Technical 50%, non technical 50% executive
leader, and again, none of that is actually taught in certification training.
So let's talk about that.
If our goal is digital transformation, we must be able to understand the customer's
business to create a solution for that business means if we don't have the business acumen
to understand what the customer is telling us in terms of top line revenue, or earnings
per share, or EBIT, etc, we can't even figure it out, we can't even make the recommendations
of whether it's good to stay in the data center versus the cloud, if we don't understand the
company's capital structure, their weighted average cost of capital, etc.
So, business acumen, absolutely critical for the cloud architect, if you want to be a cloud
architect, make sure you've got some business acumen training.
Now, as a cloud architect, after we interact with the client, and we learn about their
business, and we figure out an architecture that's going to improve it, we're going to
have to go back and present that architecture to the customer, which means you must have
really good presentation skills.
And you have to know the difference in presentation skills between presenting to the CEO, the
CFO, the CIO, versus the VP versus the engineer that you're going to interact with.
And as an architect, you're going to interact with a lot of them.
And you're going to be translating between what the engineers tell you, and what the
executives need to hear, or what the executives are telling you with something that the engineers
need to hear in order to help build your solution.
So you're going to be doing so much of it.
And that kind of business acumen is their presentation skills are critical, whether
you're presenting to customers, executive briefings, industry confident conferences,
as a cloud architecture, solution, architect presentations are going to be an almost an
everyday thing for you.
Now, as a cloud architect, you're going to be doing a lot of writing.
So your written communication skills need to be extraordinary, you need to know how
to write an executive summary, as well as an executive version of your of your architectures
for the executive team, that's going to have made the decision makers with the money, you're
going to have to produce something that's middle of the road.
That's for the management team that's managing engineers that sits between the engineers
and the executives.
And you're gonna have to how to write for engineers, and how what they need to communicate
like, so you're going to be doing a lot of writing as an architect.
And again, none of this is taught there.
But it's a learnable skill, it's a trainable skill.
Next leader, so as a cloud architect, you're going to be constantly leading teams, for
example, we might be doing a proof of concept and have to lead a team of 50 Cloud engineers,
and if we don't have leadership skills, we're not going to be able to do it, we're going
to have to be going into our own company, and asking for resources, please let me borrow
your best cloud infrastructure architect, your best cloud security architect, for the
next two months, please let me borrow your cloud, I am architect for the next two months.
So we're gonna have to do that, we're gonna have to have the leadership skills to go into
our companies to ask our company's executives to loan us people.
And we're gonna have to manage those people and make them desire to work, because remember,
they're not going to be working for us when they're doing proof of concepts of deployment,
why they work for someone else, they're on loan to us.
So we have to make people want to work, people, we can't discipline people that don't report
to us, which is a bigger challenge, which requires extremely good leadership skills.
Now, for us to even be able to get the right information.
As architects, we're going to have to ask the executives about their business, which
means we have to be relevant to them, we need to know which questions we can ask, and which
things we can say.
I've seen engineers try and talk about the tech to the CEO, and literally speaking, get
escorted out of the room in 60 seconds.
But if we talk to the executives as peers, we can listen to what they taught us as peers.
From there, we can craft the technology solutions.
So whether it's selling it back to the executives, or even in the listening the information,
we have to be relevant, and we need to know how to communicate to the CEO, the CIO, the
CTO, the CFO.
And we need to understand the different personality types of the executives, whether their functional
personality types are intuitive or analytical.
And we need to know how to craft our message for the different personality types, as well
as communicate with the different personality types, as well as listen and learn from the
communication types.
Because we all learn and have different personalities and that matters.
AWS certifications, Google certifications, or Azure certifications are wonderful certifications.
These certifications show your familiarity with the vendor services, these certifications
will help you get an interview.
These are great certifications, but no, they're not going to get you hired.
So get the necessary certifications to get your interview.
And then focus the rest of your time on developing your comp architect, technical competency,
your solution architect, technical competency, your cloud architect, business acumen skills,
your presentation skills, your writing skills, your leadership skills, your CX o relevancy,
your negotiation skills, etc. build on that and you will have the perfect cloud architect
career or Solution Architect career.
So learn the skills you need for your job, master them use certifications to help you
get that interview.
And that while the certifications get that in, get you that interview, all those other
great things you learned are going to get you cloud hired.
So go get that solution architect job of that cloud architect job, because now you're going
to be ready to be cloud hired.
This is Michael Gibbs.
I'm the founder and CEO of go cloud architects and go cloud careers, helping you build the
best cloud architect or Solution Architect career.
I look forward to seeing you in another video coming very soon.
Take care.
It was so nice having you join us for this video today.
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I look forward to seeing you and I look forward to assisting you in your technology career.
Thank you so much.
This is Michael Gibbs from go cloud