Are you struggling to get your first technology job?
Does it seem like the entry-level jobs have just gone away? If so, this video's for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs, and I'm the founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects,
and we're an organization dedicated towards building high-performance cloud computing
and networking careers. And I've been helping people get their first tech job for over 20
years now, and I've been in tech now for over 25 years, and I've loved every last minute of it.
One thing that I've focused on for over two decades is helping people get their first tech
job, and this is an area that's near and dear to my heart. See, I didn't start out as a technology
professional like most techs. I was practicing internal medicine as a nurse practitioner and
fell in love with tech. So when I wanted to move to tech, I had no degrees in tech,
I had no experience in tech, and I wanted to get hired. So I had to develop a system for me.
Now, I'm going to tell you this. I've used the same system for 20
years and helped so many people get their first tech job or get promoted in tech.
I want to help you too. So we're going to do the following. I'm going to release five videos,
and each video is going to help you with one part of getting your first tech job. After
the five video series are done, I'm going to do a four-hour completely free live question and answer
session where we're going to do everything we can to help you get hired. But first, let's talk about
why it's so hard to get a job, why is it so hard to get that entry-level job. And then after that,
we'll tell you five steps, we'll introduce them, and then we'll give you five videos.
So why is it so hard to get a, what do you call it? A fresher role, or an entry-level
role in today's world? There's two things going on. From a macroeconomic perspective,
the economy is depressed. I mean, we're not in a massive recession, but the economy's not exactly
flying high. So many good people have been laid off if you're in the US or made redundant if
you're international. So what's going on is, we've got a lot of really experts that are
working in these companies, and a lot of people that are very qualified that are still on the
sidelines that are competing with new entries. That's a temporary problem, that will go away.
But from a microeconomic perspective, there's been some massive shifts in technology,
and these shifts have shifted towards expertise and experience and knowledge, and away from the
fresher role, or away from the entry-level role. Don't worry, we're going to teach
you what to do so that you can get any job you want. But just understand this.
I'm going to give you some examples so you understand.
The types of jobs than entry-level people used to do are as follows. In my data center, I needed
a server. Procurement would order a server, it would get here. My entry-level person, my fresher,
they'd open the box for the server, they'd carry it to the data center or wheel it there.
They'd rack it, screw it into the rack, they'd plug it in, they'd install an operating system.
This took a lot of time, and we had a tremendous number of employees doing this.
Cloud computing happened. Now look at today's world. How do I start a server?
A cloud engineer goes, click, click, click, in the management console, and it's all done. So now one
cloud engineer can effectively replace eight or 10 of these fresher roles, instantly with one person.
So because of that, there's not a need for a lot of these fresher roles because it's reduced it.
So I'm going to give you some more examples, and I'm going to show you, don't worry what to do,
because you can definitely get your job. That's not a problem. I just want you to know what to do,
but you have to understand the problem before you can understand the solution.
Now let's talk about the old world.
It used to be that I had a lot of entry-level people doing some maintenance things.
They'd patch my systems, they'd be looking at log files, they would do lots of things. New world,
automation, patch management done automatically. Event-driven systems can do most of this
automatically. So you can see that's further reducing the needs for the entry-level people.
Now let's talk about monitoring systems. This was a place where we used to use a
lot of entry-level people. Here's what we did. We had all these systems dumping SIS log files.
We had these network management protocols. We could see what's going on in our network,
and we didn't need super senior people. These were the operations people, much more junior.
We had lots of Linux admins writing scripts to pipe and grep through a file,
output it to somewhere else to try and correlate things when they happen. All these little things
we used a lot of people to do, to try and semi-automate with rudimentary scripts.
New world. The cloud has all these tools prebuilt. So again, less need for freshers. Don't worry,
there's a lot of new jobs that you can do that are going to pay you much more,
treat you better, but understand this is the challenge with fresher roles.
Now let's talk about operations. There used to be huge operations teams.
You know, you've got a company that's got 5,000 employees and they've got 30 people
sitting in a knot that are looking around what's going on. Linux people are configuring things,
Linux people, Windows people are configuring things. NetWare people are configuring things.
They're all looking for blips and bleeps. All this stuff. That's the old world.
The new world, you've got a sys ops person. They've got all these incredible tools. They're
basically doing what it used to take 10 people to do with one person. So these are disruptive
technologies. Why are organizations going to the cloud? It's not for better performance.
It's that they don't need the complex maintenance. They don't need the complex networking. They don't
need so many people. So this further is reducing the options for the cloud people, for the regular
people in favor of the cloud. So watch the market shift, and know exactly where to be.
Let's talk about some new challenges affecting people.
Let's talk about old software release phases. Lots of great software developers,
code checks, people auditing, manual intervention. So much work. New world,
DevOps tools that help automate, tools that make it faster, tools that make you need less people.
Automation, one more time. I'm going to give you the last automation thing,
because I want you to truly understand this. Programmers, this is not a field we typically
coach, although we know a lot about it and we can help you get your job in this world,
but it's not a word we love for the following reasons. Everybody in college is programming,
so there's a massive supply, much greater than demand. But let's look what's going on in the
software world. It used to be, and this is why these jobs were great, you had to write your code
from scratch. So you need lots of people, lots of code checks. I mean, this was a manual process.
Look at the new world. So much code is already there. It's already open source.
You can just find it. There's so many prebuilt modules, and there's tools to check your code.
DevOps has changed the world. Again, much less software people needed because you've
got better tools. So don't worry, we've explained the problem for you.
So here's the secret, and we're going to produce a video on every
one of the things. Don't apply for entry-level jobs. You don't need to.
Up-skill yourself, prepare for much more senior roles, and you will get them.
I've had more people straight out of college that have senior and principal positions within a year
out of school by being trained the right way. Settle for more. Don't settle for less.
If the entry-level jobs are not there anymore, change your tactics. So first prepare for more
senior roles, and we will produce a video on this for you. And it's coming out very soon.
Two, learn the exact right skills for your job.
So we're going to talk about some current jobs that exist. Some jobs with lots of potential,
lots of future, lots of salary. Prepare for them, but it's not just enough to prepare for them. You
must get the right skills. For example, I work with potential cloud architect people,
and they've taken certification courses, which teach them the name of a service and how to
configure it, which is completely irrelevant for the cloud architect that's a systems designer.
My cloud architects need to know the network, the data center, and how to design systems, how
to present systems, and how to communicate them to the customer. Learn the right skills.So one
prepare for more senior roles, two learn the right skills. And we'll produce you a video for this.
Three, optimize your certifications. I'm going to make this clear. Certifications
do not get you hired. I'm going to say this again. Certifications will not get you a job,
but certifications will get you an interview, and an interview is critical for the job, so we need
to get you the right certifications. The reason we need to get you the right certifications is,
you can't get hired if you can't get interviewed. So we need to give you the right certifications
that are going to look focused, that are going to make you look like an expert. Remember,
these fresher jobs are going away. There's so many less of them. So if you're going to look like an
expert, you can't have a billion and one associate certifications. You've got to have something
focused, and we're going to tell you about that and what it should look like for the various
careers that are most common and most frequent. We'll have the best career options for you.
Pick something you love, I don't care what it is. For me, it's networking. I love networking.
I don't care if it's security. Pick something you love and be great at it. I mean be so good
at it that it's impossible not to say, "I need you." Even if you're only 16 years old,
I don't care. I'd rather a 14 year old hacker that can break into the Pentagon than someone that's 60
years old that's been working in security for 40 years, and has no concept on how to do this.
Be so good that they can't not hire you, and I'll produce a video on how to do that.
And then the last component, make yourself everything the hiring manager wants,
and I'll produce a video on exactly what the hiring manager wants, because when you go to
the store to buy something, you buy what you want. You don't buy what somebody else wants.
So when it comes to getting your job, and you're a fresher and looking for an entry-level job
and you want to get something better, be exactly what the manager wants
and they'll hire you every time, and they'll pay you far more.
So here's what I'm going to say. Expect five more videos on how to get your first
entry-level tech job, or at least the next best thing, which is going to pay you more
and give you more opportunities. When that is done, I will hold a completely free four-hour
session where you can ask me any questions you want live. I've been helping people get their
first tech jobs for 20 years, and I'm going to do this as a courtesy for the community
because I care so much about everybody having a great tech career. When I left healthcare
and moved into tech, it was the best thing that happened for me, and I want you to do the same.
Now let's talk about some fun free things we do to help people
in the cloud computing community. Of course, this is we're going to reach out to anybody,
but if you're interested in cloud computing, let me tell you what we do. On Mondays and Fridays,
we have a completely free How To Get Your First Cloud Architect Job webinar where we
teach you everything you need to know, how to get hired, and what skills you need to know.
Now, every Wednesday we have a cloud computing career question and answer session,
completely free. Several times per week, we're going to be introducing free training for you.
We know it's so hard to get quality training. We've evaluated all the courses, at least in
cloud computing. We couldn't find any of them that we liked. We've been coaching people for
decades now, we know what you need to do, we note the skills that are required. And other than these
extremely expensive courses that are out there, some of which are very good, but they're $5-15,000
for a week or two. We wanted to give you access to something you can do, so I'm going to have a
lot of industry experts come on my channel in the next few weeks and explain these things to you
to make you great. And I will have a steady stream of free training on our YouTube channel
to make sure that you can go from entry-level to much more senior, and get your first job.
Thank you so much for watching this video. I look forward to seeing you on another video
in the next few days, where we're going to talk about the phases of getting your first tech.