Hi, it's Forrest Brazeal, and this is Dear Gurus, where we answer your pressing questions about your
cloud career. And our question today comes from a number of our learners here at ACG, and that is:
how many certifications do I need to get my first job in the cloud? Now the first thing I want to
get out on the table right off the bat is, to some extent, that's kind of the wrong question to
ask. There is no hiring manager on the face of the planet who's going to look at your resume and go,
"Oh, this person has three cloud certifications. They are a must hire!" You know, that's not going
to happen because, for the most part, hiring managers understand that you need more than
just certifications, just a piece of paper. If you're going to prove that you can actually do
the work of a cloud professional, you've got to show some experience of some sort. Frankly,
if a hiring manager didn't understand that, you probably wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
And yet we know that there is value to cloud certifications. I've got a number of those
certs myself. they've been quite helpful to me in my career as an engineer. Today we're going
to answer the question first of when cloud certs are valuable versus when they might not be. so
we're going to teach you to think correctly about the value of a cloud certification,
and then we're going to talk about realistically how many of those certs you need to get hired.
Let's start with some reasons that cloud certs do or do not provide value to your career. The
first reason is that cloud certs give you a broad base of foundational knowledge. Even
if you've been an engineer for quite some time working in the cloud, you may have
only touched a narrow subset of services, and you may find other engineers working with you
who are doing things that you don't understand. Cloud certs attempt to remove that imbalance by
giving you a broad base of knowledge across all the cloud's major topic areas so you can
feel confident that you haven't missed anything. that's valuable professionally, and it's valuable
in your job prep. in some sense, if you actually go through the training material and cover what's
laid out by that certification path. it almost doesn't matter whether or not you actually
take the certification exam. just covering the material gives you all the real value.
second reason cloud certs can help your career: even if hiring managers don't care so much about
the cert, recruiters sometimes filter on that, especially if you're missing a more traditional
credential like a computer science degree from a university or college. if you can bring in that
certification, that's a signal to the recruiter that, oh, this person's serious, they've got some
external validation of the fact that they can sit down and learn and that they know something
about the cloud. Even though that might not get you the job, it can get your foot in the door
for that big interview. Here is the third reason that cloud certs can be helpful for you. I know
I said before, hiring managers don't necessarily care about certs, but there is one particular area
where certs are worth way more than paper. In fact, they may be worth their weight in gold,
and I'm talking about the consulting industry. big consulting shops like Accenture or Deloitte
all the way down to smaller consultants and MSPs have a bottomless appetite for qualified
people with certifications, and there are several reasons for that. First, it's actually the case
that a lot of these consulting shops have what are called partnerships with the cloud providers like
AWS and Microsoft, and their partnership level increases and they get more benefits out of that
as they have more certified people that work for them. so they're always looking to bring
in people who have a cert count. in addition to that, of course, if you have a certification that
simply communicates expertise to the consultant's clients. If I'm hiring a consultant, I'd like to
know that there's some external validation that they can actually do the job. Finally, if I got
certified, I may be able to do certain jobs as a consultant that I couldn't do otherwise. When
I was in consulting, I used to do many what are called well-architected reviews for AWS. that's
where you sit down with a client, and you look at their architecture and determine if it's built
correctly according to AWS best practices. It turns out that you can't officially perform a war
or Well Architected Review on AWS's behalf unless you have an AWS certified solutions architect
professional credential. Many reasons why consulting shops absolutely love to hire people
with certifications, and you can be that person if you bring those certs in the door. Okay, you
get it. Certs aren't magic, but they do provide some value for you. The big question now is how
many of these certs do you need to actually go out and get a job in the cloud. Here's what I'm going
to recommend that you do. There's no single right answer to this question, but I've seen this work
many times throughout my career and other people I've worked with and mentored. the first thing
I'm going to recommend that you do is go out and get a foundational technical cloud certification.
so I'm not talking here about something like the AWS certified cloud practitioner or the
azure 900. those are great certs, but they're really designed more for non-technical people,
and they don't communicate the expertise that you would need to get hired into a cloud job.
so I'm talking about something like the AWS certified solutions architect associates or the
certified developer associates or on the azure side something like the az103. Once you've got
that foundational technical certification, at this point, I would say for you to set your cert prep
aside for the moment and focus on pulling in some of the hands-on expertise that hiring managers are
also going to want to see. And the best way to do that is with portfolio projects. if you don't have
existing experience professionally in the cloud, there are several key topic areas that you're
going to want to know that will come up in these interviews. First, you need to be able to code a
little bit so look for something like python. it's a fantastic backend programming language that's
used by cloud teams the world over. A Cloud Guru has lots of great courses to help you get up to
speed on that. you're also going to want to know a little bit about Linux and a little bit about
networking. Okay, so on the Linux side, you want to be thinking about how the Linux file
system works. How do I use the basic commands like your Greps and your SEDs and your aux? maybe know
a little bit about containerization. and then on the networking side, you're going to want to know
essentially how the internet is put together, so you want to know the basic protocols like IP and
TCP. you want to know the layers of the networking stack. you'll want to know a little bit about DNS,
what happens when you send a request out of your browser, and you know it goes to google and comes
back. you'll want to be sufficiently familiar with that. Then you'll want to do some projects that
actually put that into practice for you as well as pulling in some cloud services on top. once you
have done those basic cloud projects and you've got a series of stories that you can tell in an
interview at this point, I would say go ahead and start applying for jobs. while you're doing that,
it's okay to go ahead and pursue a more advanced certification like a professional cert or one of
the specialty certifications like a security or a networking cert. Still, you don't have to have
that completed. I wouldn't say to actually go out and interview. it's okay for the hiring manager
to see that you're still learning, and you don't know everything. yet you're not going to cover
everything, and you may say, well wouldn't it help me even more if I were to go get three,
four or five certifications and have them under my belt before I start applying. and I'm going to say
no. Past a certain point, more certs will feel like diminishing returns. So, on the one hand,
if you don't have any certifications, it kind of feels like, "how do I know that this person knows
anything?" But if all you're doing is getting certifications, you're not bolstering those with
projects. At that point, it can feel like you know how do I know this person can actually do
anything. maybe they're just doing academic work all the time. so you've got to have a sweet spot.
you've got to have a balance in the middle, and that's where a couple of these foundational cloud
certs plus the hands-on projects are going to help you. If you're looking for some projects to do,
we do something every month here at A Cloud Guru called the #cloudguruchallenge.
you can find that on social media with the hashtag, and you can sign up for free
at acloudguru.com to participate. these are challenges specifically designed to give you
good stories to tell in a job interview. you'll be doing things like event-driven programming.
you'll be working with DevOps technology, CICD, Git. you'll be building on serverless and other
cloud services, and you'll be able to take those into a job interview, and they're guaranteed to
give you something you can talk to your hiring manager about. okay, and that brings us to the
end of this episode of dear gurus. make sure to like and subscribe to our youtube channel,
and don't forget to sign up at acloudguru.com to participate in those challenges and study many
of the free courses we have available on code on Linux on networking, and on cloud. finally,
comment below, and maybe your question will be featured in the next episode of dear gurus.