Would you like to learn how to pick the best certifications for your technology career,
the certifications that'll help you get hired, the certifications that will help you get paid more,
and the certifications with the more rapid career progression? If so,
stay tuned. This video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs, and I'm the founder and CEO of GoCloud Architects,
and we're an organization dedicated towards building high-performance cloud computing
careers. I've been working in technology for over 25 years now and helped others
find their first tech job or get promoted in tech for over two decades. Let me tell you,
it's one of the most fun things in my life and I absolutely love it.
Today, we're going to talk about how we pick IT certifications. People ask us because our
methodologies are very different than others, so we're going to explain how we pick things.
We have this methodology and we've used it for over two decades, and it's completely based upon
the following. What helps our clients get hired the fastest? What helps our clients get the
highest salary? And we even include training class and we'll share the ROI modeling of
how we get to them later. And what helps our clients have the fastest career progression?
When it comes to certifications, we are not about which one is better than the other. We don't care.
We are only about what makes our clients get the best jobs at the highest pay with the fastest
career progression. Employment focused only. We're not focused on the merits or the technical merits
of any certification. That's just not what we do. We're career focused at GoCloud Architects.
So, our process and this methodology is based on tenants, economic factors, specifically supply and
demand curves, and we'll talk more about that, and salary and career progression. So let's
first talk about what affects price? Because what affects price is exactly what affects your salary.
So for those of you guys that didn't enjoy studying economics in college or graduate school,
we'll summarize it here and it's okay. Economics and finance are a big component of everything
we do because we're basically doing management consulting on someone's career, so we've got to
look at market factors. Let's first look at the major market factor which is supply and demand.
If you remember from your economics courses there's this thing called
a supply and demand curve. What that really means is the greater the supply,
the lower the value. The greater the demand, the higher the price. So, what we're trying
to do is maximize where we are on the supply and demand curve, where basically what we want
is a skill that's in extreme demand for which there's low supply, because that raises value.
So let's talk about this in everyday life. Recently there's been a huge shortage of
GPUs or graphics processing units. Why has there been a big shortage of graphics processing units?
For the most part, people are mining Ethereum, which is a cryptocurrency that's mined doing GPUs.
And basically, these GPUs do a bunch of math calculations and the person gets paid basically
a transaction fee for every time a calculation is placed of a trade on the Blockchain. There's other
things there but that's overly simplified. So people bought GPUs. Now, a $300 GPU a
year ago is $2500 if you can even find it. Why? Because the supply is low and the demand is high.
Well, this works with everything. Value or price that people are willing to pay, which by the way,
is the same thing as your salary, is based upon perception, just perception, and supply and
demand. For example, why is gold worth a lot? Why? It's just a metal? Why is gold worth more
than aluminum versus copper? Why? People value it more. That's it. Perception, value it more. So,
when we're dealing with certifications, we're going to be looking at the ones
that are perceived better. Again, not necessarily better or worse, perceived better, higher value.
Let's look at another example, Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency is very fascinating to me as
is Blockchain applications. Why is Bitcoin as expensive as it is? Because people believe
it's valued that way. Same thing with the housing market. If people believe there's
a shortage of houses, the price goes up. When there's a surplus of houses,
the price goes down. So remember those market force. There's those supply and demand curves.
That's how we pick them and that will determine how much you're paid in your career. So you
want to be in the place where you've got less supply and most demand. That's the best career.
So what generally affects supply? Market forces. So, for example, there's an article that says,
"By the way, this is the best certification." You know it's going to happen? Everybody's going to
go after that certification, as they should. A year later, unless it's a disruptive technology
and we'll talk about that more, there's going to be a surplus of this certification. Now
that there's a surplus, salaries went down a lot. They dropped dramatically. Why do they
drop dramatically? Because there's no longer a shortage of supply. So we have to look at that.
But what else can be there? We have to look at disruptive technologies. For example,
cloud computing. There is a massive shortage of qualified people, lots of certified people,
massive shortage of qualified people and a demand that skyrockets. So cloud computing professionals
are paid a lot. Now you would think that I would say, everybody's going to flock there and a year
later there'll be no jobs. Well, cloud computing is disruptive. It's such a change to the way we
do things, taking things from the network and the data center to this virtualized network and
data center with lots of agility and lots of cost benefits to do it, and auto scaling and
lots of benefits that there will be a huge need for cloud computing professionals in the future
based upon our assessment of supply and demand curves and what we see going on with the industry.
So you've got to be able to look at what's going on. So you've got to look at market factors,
and when you look at market factors and you look at what people are willing to pay, that's kind of
how we get to our conclusions. So we'll show a lot more of how we do it and why we do it.
So it's also a perception. This concept of perception is going to be based upon
what do the purchasers read? What do the hiring managers read? What are they being
told from the bill leaders in the industry because that's what they're going to want.
We're all influenced by what we read. So we're going to go through some things in CIO magazine,
which we'll talk about how we actually use this. But it's all based upon the hiring manager,
or the hiring manager's manager, or the hiring manager's manager or effectively the CIO. And
why are we so concerned about what the CIO reads? I'll tell you right now. At the head
of your organization, you've got a CEO that's responsible for the organizational strategy,
and directly beneath the CEO you've got a chief information officer that says, "Mr. or Mrs. CEO,
I'm going to use information technology in order to help you achieve your business success,"
who then has a VP of IT, a director of IT and a hiring manager, and then the employees.
So the CIO sets the whole strategy for the tech.
So what is the CIO reading? That's what you need to be concerned about because that's
what's going to be hired in the organization and that's what's going to be paid more.
We looked at CIO magazine and that's how we determined the best certifications that we
pick. What are the top 15 and 2021? The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional,
the Certified Cloud Security Professional, the Certified Data Privacy Solutions Engineer,
the Certified Data Professional, the Certified Ethical Hacker, the Certified
Information Security Manager, the Certified Information Systems Security Professionals,
the CCNA, the CCNP, the Microsoft Certified Systems Architect, the Microsoft Certified
Solutions Associate, the Oracle Certified MySQL Database Administrator, the Project Management
Professional and the Salesforce Certified Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer.
These are the ones who are most in demand. How do I know they're the most in demand?
They're published in two places, CIO magazine, and the CIO sets the strategy,
so as soon as the CIO sees it, this is what they want most of all. But also
Robert Half. Robert Half has an incredibly large technology recruiting staff for them,
and they publish the same data. So these are the people in charge of the hiring,
and they're telling you what they want, so that's how we make these recommendations.
Note, many certifications are not there. In the top 15 you don't see AWS certified Solutions
Architect Associate. You don't see AWS SysOps and you don't see AWS DevOps, and that's why they're
not on a recommendation unless we're dealing with SysOps or DevOps professionals. And then in which
case it builds a case to help them get hired. But we pick those that are deployed by the managers.
Now we also look at certifications, and that's how we pick things. So we're going to look at another
chart. And when we look at this chart, what we see from our experiences, the salaries are a bit low
from what they actually are in our experience getting people hired. But at the same time,
they still show this huge delta between certain certifications. I had a dialogue with someone and
they're wondering why I like the CIS's pay or the CEH so much. When they said the CompTia Security+
could be a great security certification. And I said, guess what? You're right. It can. I'm not
here to dispute the merits of which certification is better than others. I personally don't care.
Here's what I do care. The average salary of a CompTia Security+, and we feel this is the high
end of the estimate, is $93,987. And the average salary of the CISSP or Certified Information
System Security Professional is $140,501. That's about $50,000 difference between the two.
So when we're dealing with our clients, we say, "Okay, $50,000 a year. 30 years,
that's $1.5 million benefit to your career by doing one certification over another."
Now, granted, it's not the certification. Now the certification may help the person get an
interview for a better paying job, and it will. We see it every day.
And the certification may, in the process, teach some people some more things,
or at least skills that are felt more valuable, but it's the perception. So the perception of
a CISSP for $143,000 versus the perception of CompTIA Security+ for a $93,000, big difference.
So is it worth it? So then people are saying, "Mike, these exams are expensive." And I say,
"Yes." I say, "It's too expensive not to do them." And they say, "What do you mean?
I say, "You take a CISSP exam. That's $2,000 by the time you're done preparing and training
for it. And it raises your salary $50,000 a year over another certification that's
probably equally good but less valuable in the industry." And I say, "You got a 2400%
return on investment in your first year, and it will add about a million-and-a-half
dollars on average to your salary statistically speaking over the next 30 years for $2,000.
Is it worth it?" It is for me. If I can invest $2,000 and get a million dollars back,
I'm going to do it. I don't know anybody else that wouldn't. So we feel that some of these
certifications on this list are actually very cheap compared to the return on investment,
which is huge. So again, we're not doing this on the merit of which is better.
We're doing this on what helps our students or people get the best jobs at the highest price.
Since the leadership is reading CIO magazine, and they're talking to companies like Robert
Half to do the hiring, that's what you need. You want to be exactly what the consumer wants. I
like to say this. When you go to the store to buy shoes, do you buy shoes that someone else wants,
or do you buy shoes what you want? You buy what you want based upon your experience,
your perception, market forces, what's comfortable. You buy what you want and
players buy what they want, so be what they want. And again, it's hard to find the perfect employee.
So when we go back to the supply and demand curve, perfect employees demand, huge. Perfect employee
supply, super low. Perfect employee price, high, high, high, so supply and demand in everything.
Now the last part of our system is what does the market tell us? See,
we have over 150 recruiters in our network, and we constantly ask, "What do you want?"
I've asked hiring managers for 20 years, thousands of them, "What do you want in a candidate?" So we
typically know what the hiring managers like, because we asked them constantly through our
recruiters and our hiring manager network. That's how we make recommendations based upon
what others tell us that are in the position to do the hiring. Nope, we don't ask people
that are not hiring. We asked the people doing the hiring because they're the ones that say,
"Yes, you're hired. And yes, this is what I want to purchase." That's our system.
Now getting hired is related to your technical collectability, your soft skills, your emotional
intelligence, your presentation skills, your attitude and your interview skills. Certification
really isn't part of the hiring decision, but certification will get you an interview, and
the better your certifications, at least the ones that are deemed as higher value
financially speaking, the greater the chances you are of getting an interview and the greater
the chances are of you getting an interview for a higher paying job. That's why we use them.
Certifications are merely a tool in our other list of tools to help our clients find the best
jobs at the highest price with the fastest career progression. But getting hired is
related to much more. Certifications is probably only 10 to 15% of the process.
Thank you so much for watching this video where we talked about how and why we choose certifications
to help you get the best career. Let me tell you some things that we do to assist the cloud
architect and solution architect community. Every Monday and every Thursday we have they completely
free how to get your first cloud architect job webinar. Come to this webinar. We will tell you
everything you need to know to get hired. We will tell you what hiring managers want. We will tell
you what needs to be on your resume. We will teach you how to get the valid experience to be hired
and more and more and more and more. And during that presentation we will spend an
hour answering any questions you may have about your cloud computing career live on a Zoom call.
Now every Tuesday we have a fun cloud architect experience party. It's really a great time.
People from all over the world come and join us on a Zoom call. They interview me and I
give them a complicated technology situation. It's based on an architecture from my career,
and the people that are joining these calls, there's typically 30 to 100 to every call.
They ask me questions. I give answers. Then the team as a group designs an
architecture and presents it back to me just like a real cloud architect would.
It's lots of fun. It's completely free. This cloud architect experience is every Tuesday. Please join
us. You'll have a great time. At the end of this webinar, you'll both have learned a lot. You'll
know if you're ready to get hired. And if not, you're going to know exactly what you need to,
to get hired, to fill in those gaps. Completely free, so come join us.
Not all Wednesdays, but most Wednesdays, especially when we can, we have that
completely free cloud architect career question and answer session. You come
on this YouTube live stream and you can ask us any questions about your career
and we'll give you guidance completely free based upon our years of experience.
So we do that completely free because we love the cloud computing community.
Now if you're working on certifications, guess what? We've got you covered there.
If you're working on the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate, the AWS Certified Solution
Professional, or the AWS Advanced Networking, guess what? We have completely free certification
materials for you, eBooks courses, all of them. The link for the AWS Certified Solution
Architect Associate eBook, any course below, the link to the AWS Certified Solution Architect
Professional course is below. And the link to the AWS Advanced Networking Course is below.
If you don't know subnetting, we recently did a four hour subnetting workshop where we work
the problem through. I'll leave the link again for that in the description below.
Thank you so much for watching this video. It is such an honor and a privilege to communicate
with you on our YouTube videos, on LinkedIn and our other media channels. We love this
cloud computing community. I've been part of the architect community for over 25 years now,
and I've loved every last minute of it. Whether it's a network architect, a cloud architect
or secured architect, I've worked in all these roles and they're wonderful, and then marrying
them together creates beautiful careers. So thank you for the opportunity to be part of your life.
I don't take that honor and privilege lightly. We work very hard to give you the best training
and outcomes we can. Thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you very soon.