Well, hi it's Forrest Brazeal.
And this is Dear Gurus where we answer your pressing questions
about your cloud career and our question
today is, what is the best way for me to find a cloud job.
And I'm going to start by answering
the question of what's the worst way to find a cloud job.
OK I've been hiring people for a number of years
across my decade plus in technology.
And I've also helped a lot of other people get placed
in their first tech job through the cloud guru challenge
and what I've seen a lot of people doing is playing a game
that I call resume roulette.
Here's the rules for resume roulette.
Number one you wait for random companies
to post public job listings.
Number two you spam out a bunch of applications
to all those companies.
Number three you sit and wait and you
hope that some random stranger is going
to give you a job interview.
And the number four.
If you don't strike it lucky which you probably won't.
Well you just go back to step 1.
And you start all over again until either you get hired
or you burn out.
Do people get hired by playing resumes roulette.
Sure it happens every day.
In fact, you can go on LinkedIn.
And you can see the inspiring stories
of people who send out 190 job applications
and they got three interviews.
And one job offer.
And when I see those stories.
I don't think, wow, that's great perseverance
although don't get me wrong.
It definitely is.
And I'm not trying to I say that it's not
what I mainly think is we are celebrating a broken process.
Why is it a broken process will let me tell you
how hiring typically works. When a company lists
a public job posting,
There's two things that happen:
Number one, you have 150 random people
who submit their resumes through that portal.
Some of those resumes are pretty good.
Some of them are probably not.
You'd have to look closely to make sure.
Number two there's three employees
inside that company who know someone
that would be a great fit for the role
and they refer them internally to the hiring manager
or the recruiter with a note saying,
Oh, used to work with her at company X she was great.
She would kill in this role. OK, if you
are a recruiter or especially a time strapped hiring manager,
Which of those resumes are you going
to move to the top of the pile?
In fact, that's why a lot of companies
actually offer bonuses referral bonuses
to their existing employees.
A lot of times the person who's best suited for this new job
is someone that you're existing employees
already know and trust.
And it turns out,
it's a lot more efficient to vet those people
than looking at those 150 random resumes
and doing phone screens with all those strangers.
Now I know there are some companies out there the Googles
of the world who can efficiently process thousands and thousands
of unsolicited resumes.
But remember the competition level is up there as well.
So you may just be waiting six months
to get a formal rejection instead
of waiting six months to be formally or informally ignored.
Right now I'm not saying all of this to discourage you OK.
Because the fact of the matter is
there is massive demand out there
for qualified cloud professionals.
You should not be stuck on the outside looking in
if you are qualified to hold a cloud engineering job.
OK companies should basically be coming to you
asking you to work for them.
Why is that not happening?
Well because you may not be playing the right game. instead
of playing resume roulette,
I'm going to suggest that you play a different game that I
call network bets.
This is a game with a lot of ways to win.
Your success compounds over time.
And there's only two rules.
Are you ready for it.
Here's the two rules to playing network bets.
Number one own your credibility.
Number to make good connections.
OK when it comes to owning your credibility.
I talked a lot about the foundational skills
you need to be qualified for a cloud engineering role
In my previous post about how many certifications
you should get.
So I won't reiterate all of that here.
But just remember, you need to have
some basic familiarity with code and a backend language
like Python.
You need to be pretty good at Linux and pretty good
at networking to understand how those things fit
into the cloud.
Then you need to have a foundational cloud
certification or two along with some hands
on projects that demonstrate your expertise in those areas.
If you don't have that, you're just
going to be demoralized coming out of these job interviews
and I don't want you to be demoralized.
I want you to skip ahead to the head, the line.
So go ahead and take the time to get good
at those foundational skills you can sign up
for a free membership at acloudguru.com
and will help you with all of those things.
Go ahead and get your feet under you
here before you move on any farther.
That's called owning your credibility
and you're not going to be able to be successful without it.
Now number two making connections.
Yes this is the part where we talk about networking
and no, I'm not talking about getting
your CCNA I'm talking about meeting
the right people to work with.
I've noticed that a lot of engineers
kind of tend to bristle at this idea
that they might have to go out and meet people.
And make connections in order to get
the job that they want in the career direction
that they want.
I think a lot of us tend to think you know my skills should
speak for themselves.
I should be able to go and get a job just
by passing a coding test demonstrating
that I can do the job.
I shouldn't have to go and meet people and make
connections I shouldn't have to glad hand or whatever.
And that's not what I'm saying.
I think what a lot of people miss
is that connections go two ways.
You are not whatever you may think
just some sort of interchangeable
the YAML generation unit right.
You're a person, you have unique quirks
likes, dislikes, personality things.
And you may find that not every job is the right fit for you.
Some jobs that are out there are going to be just bad for you.
They're going to be toxic for your happiness
and your personal productivity.
And there's plenty more, even though they're not
actively toxic that are just going
to be dead ends they're not going to set you up
for success in your career.
You're not going to be working on interesting things
you're going to get three months down the road,
you're going to say, well, I'm really
sorry that I took this job.
This is a dead end.
Now those outcomes are way more likely to happen.
Those bad outcomes.
If you're just flinging your resume into random companies
that you don't know anything about.
So this is another way you can lose by playing resume roulette
even if you think you've hit the lottery.
You know when what a job inside of one
of these companies you may soon discover
that, in fact, the job itself is not all
it was cracked up to be because you don't have the insight
to figure that out.
Networking is a superpower because it
lets you vet these companies at the same time,
they're vetting you.
It gives you awareness of who the good people to work
with are what the good teams that
are doing interesting things and you've
set yourself up much more probably
for a long term career success.
Networking making connections may sound more time intensive
than firing off 190 blind applications.
But it can actually be faster in the long run.
So long as you know what you're doing.
So here are my three cheat codes to network
your way to a cloud job that's actually
going to be good for you personally and of course,
for your long term career success.
Number one, you need to find a new niche if you're
brand new to cloud, you obviously
stand a disadvantage coming into the job market
in the area of experience.
You're not going to be able to compete
with people who've already been doing
something for five or 10 years.
In fact, a lot of the entry level credentials
that are available to you are not
that impressive to hiring managers
just because so many people go out and get those
you have an A plus cert great.
So to 100 million other people right.
That's not going to help you stand out.
What is going to help you stand out
is if you get pretty good at something
that not a lot of other people are good at yet.
And it turns out the cloud is a great place
to do this because a lot of the technologies
are so new anyway nobody can reasonably
ask for five years of experience in a technology that's only
existed for 18 months and yet.
That's where a lot of interest is in the cloud world.
And people want people who have those skills
and you can be that person.
Here's a really quick list of five different types
of services that are very hot in the cloud market
right now that you can get good at with a relatively
small investment of time: managed graph.
Q well a gateways like a to B as apps absolute
and its associated amplify library.
You're going to be looking at potentially CI/CD tools
like the ADL US code star suite that's
code build code deploy code commit you're going
to be looking at Manage Kubernetes services
like AKS EKS GKE all those are really
valuable places for you to spend your time.
You're going to potentially be looking at serverless workflow
services like AWS step functions
or Azure logic apps, and you can always
check out popular infrastructure as code tools like Terraform
like the AWS CDK any one of those five things I just listed
is extremely hot.
And if you can get good at that you're
going to find that you're going to meet interesting people
and you're going to raise your profile in the cloud community.
As long as you also do
The second thing, which is plugging into that community.
This is the second cheat code.
All right by plugging into the community,
I'm not talking about going out to some meet up
and handing out a bunch of business cards
and sort of trying to schmooze your way into a job.
That's why a lot of people get frustrated
by the idea of networking.
That's far from what I'm suggesting.
It turns out that a great way to get
plugged in to the tech community and cloud
or really any other arena is to find these cloud services
that you're good at.
And then let's say AWS app sync releases a new feature
that you're excited about.
Go ahead and blog about it.
Go ahead and write something up about the feature
why you're excited include some code snippets show
a little something that you built this doesn't really
take that long to do, then go ahead
and publish that on a popular blogging platform.
I like hash node I like too.
These are existing developer blogging platforms
with some pretty established network effects.
And then once you've written that, go ahead and tag
the creators, the people who actually built
the feature the people who work at AWS
the developer advocates they're going
to be overjoyed that someone is excited
and is helping them share the good news of this thing
that they've built and they're going to give you some of that
love back by raising your profile a little bit by sharing
your post you do this.
And over an incredibly short period of time,
you're going to find that you're getting
connected with other people in that community.
I suggest getting involved on Twitter.
It's been very helpful in my career.
And if you can stand it.
I think it'll be good for you as well.
You'll follow hashtags accounts lists
of people that are interested in these same things.
Figure out who the influencers are in this space
and turn on notifications when they tweet something.
So you can go engage in reply with them.
If you do this sincerely and you're there to learn
and you're there to give back to the community.
Well people remember people who are helpful
and who engage in that way.
And then when a job opportunity does open up
in that community, which will happen.
Remember we're talking about the cloud.
It's hot everybody's growing everybody's
looking for people who are good at this stuff.
Now you're ready to pull in number three
in my list of cheat codes, which is go ahead and just
ask for referrals.
OK, this sounds counterintuitive,
but be shocked at how easy it is.
If you've built some credibility in this space already again,
let's say it's managed graft gateways or whatever.
And a job pops up.
Reach out to that person.
Send them a direct message send them an email.
The person who's associated with that company
and say, hey, do you think you could refer me
for this job you know.
Or maybe even if they don't have a public job posting is there
something.
I don't know about that you could refer me for.
Remember these folks are incentivized to refer you
at this point, they're probably getting a bonus
if they can find someone from the community who
takes this job, and they're going
to be much more likely to refer you
and to get that bonus if they can trust you because of what
they've seen come out of you publicly with your writing
and your engagement with the community over time.
So it all kind of works together.
What I'm really trying to say here in all this
is that you can have agency in your job search process.
It's not about just sitting back being passive
and waiting for some job to come up that you will magically
fit into a little LEGO brick and a wall of LEGO bricks.
That's not how people work.
That's not how humans work.
In fact, the perfect job for you may not exist until you go out
and through your work with the community
and through the profile, you create for yourself.
You kind of create opportunities for yourself.
It's amazing to see it happen.
That's not going to happen if you continue to play
this game of resume roulette.
Remember a the odds are pretty low that you're going
to get hired by doing that.
And you run the risk of really discouraging yourself
and burning out on the cloud career
that you don't even have yet.
Number two even if you do get hired
the odds are pretty good that you're
going to get hired into a situation that's
less than optimal for you because you don't
know the people you don't understand what the team is
working on.
You don't have a lot of control or autonomy over the situation
that you're stepping into.
But if you played the game of network bets
you're going to find that not only is it
much more collaborative rather than competitive right.
Nobody's competing with you for a job when you're
the only person who can do the exact set of things that you do
and everybody knows it.
But also, you're going to find that it's a long term
game and these effects compound over time
as you meet more people as you get more involved
in the community.
You're going to find that you have
a whole path of opportunities opening up for you that you
never would have seen coming if you just
sat back passively and tried to apply blind.
Hey do you have a question about your career
that you'd like answered go ahead
and comment below with that.
And we'll see if we can work it into an upcoming
episode of Dear gurus while you're doing that don't
forget to like it subscribe.
And of course sign up for a free membership at acloudguru.com
and we've got lots of other ways to help
you grow in your cloud career.
Thanks very much.
We'll see you next time!