Would you like to know the one thing that you can change in your professional
development plan that could make a big difference in your career and your salary?
Only one thing? Well, if so, this video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs and I'm the founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects,
and I've been working in technology and/or coaching and mentoring others for 25 years.
And in today's video, we're going to talk about prioritization.
Prioritization can make the difference between getting the job you want at the
salary you want versus not getting the job you want or at the salary you want and here's why.
How you spend your training time, not how much time you spend training, will be a determination
of whether you can meet your goals. See, a goal without a plan is just a dream. But if
you don't build the right plan, it will take you so much longer to get to your end goal.
So let's talk about what the employer desires because if you know what the employer actually
desires, then you know actually how to build your plan. The impetus for this video was we did a poll
on LinkedIn. We wanted to see how people were studying. See, we kind of knew this in our mind,
but we wanted to hear what people told us. And of the people that responded to this poll,
which were 357 people, we asked them where they were spending their time.
56% of them said, "We're spending our time working on a certification."
And 24%, "We're spending our time watching videos or reading tech books."
Good. We're very happy or studying, but that's actually basically 80% of the time
that's dedicated towards that component. Now what surprised us is only 9% of the time people are
spending on soft skills development and in terms of doing meaningful labs, only 11% of the time.
So that means 80% of the time is focused on basically certifications under tech. Why is
this concerning? Well, I will tell you. At least 50% of what employers are looking for are your
soft skills, your emotional intelligence. And if you're not spending any time on that, you are at a
huge disadvantage. Why are you at a disadvantage? Because candidates are scored from a zero to 100%.
If you're lacking in experience and that's okay,
we've got to bring up that other 50% of your soft skills, your empathy, your communication skills.
And when we ran this poll, people are spending only 9% of the time,
which probably accounts for 50% of their career. We suggest changing that. But the second side
of it is how are you developing competency? See employers care about competency. Not experience,
competency. They look for experience because it's a measure of competency, but if you could
hire someone with zero experience, that was competent, every employer would choose to do so.
Why? When you can hire someone that's an expert or really good, but they don't have experience.
You can hire someone that has no bad habits. They're not going to say, "This is the way
we did it over here." You can teach them exactly your way and not only can they develop knowledge,
but can be your way, they can be your ideal employee. You can groom them, you can mold them.
And many organizations therefore like people that are newer
and they often hire them as part of a new graduate program where they train them and develop them.
But you know what? You can develop expertise too, but you're not going to get there with
just certification training and spending 56% of your time on certification training,
we believe is a major mistake and we sell certification materials.
Certification materials are a great way to validate your knowledge on a provider's platform.
And your certifications will absolutely help you get an interview. Wonderful. But if you don't
have anything to back it up on that interview, it's over. And if you don't communicate well
on that interview, it's still over. So we're suggesting, spending roughly 50% of your time
focusing on your soft skills, your emotional intelligence, your ability to communicate.
And then we say spend 50% of your time developing competency
and break it down. Maybe 25% of that time is focused on certification training. And
maybe the rest of it is focused on learning the underlying technologies, learning virtualization,
learning containers, learning the way the network works, really learning it from a foundational
level. Whether that's watching some videos, taking a server and building
your own virtualization lab or building even your own Cloud, you've got to get competency.
So maybe reduce that certification time from 56% to 25% and develop competency development,
the rest of the 25% of the time and get good and get smart. And that way,
when you go on an interview and the manager has questions, you can dazzle them with knowledge.
See they're not going to ask you how to configure something. They don't care, but they do want to
know, can you meet with a customer and understand the customer requirements and design a solution?
You can't do that without competency and guess what? You can't do it without soft skills.
Because the key to designing a solution is to being able to ask the customer, what are your
business needs? What are your technical needs? What are your legal or regulatory needs? And then
you're going to take that and then all the things that the Cloud offers and then be able to design
a solution. And after you design a solution, then figure out how that solution fits into the Cloud.
Whether it's the AWS Cloud, the Azure Cloud, the GCP Cloud. See, it really doesn't matter.
What really matters is can you meet and design a solution for the organization's
business requirements? So you will never hear us say don't get certified. We love certifications.
Certifications show that you know how to use a vendor's platform, but we're saying
maybe limit your time to 25% on certifications. Spend 25% of your time to building competency
and the rest of the 50% of time developing or soft skills and emotional intelligence.
So when you go on that interview, when you're rated on a scale from zero to a hundred, and we
can get your soft skills and all those other good things up to 50%, and we can bring your competency
level to the 35 to 40%, you're scoring between an 85 to a 90 out of a hundred. And I'm telling you,
I've interviewed countless and countless and countless people. And it's near impossible to
find someone that scores that high. So bring up your weaknesses, focus on the things the employers
count, and you will have the job of your dreams and you know what? You'll get paid more to do it.
Okay. Let me tell you about some free things that we do to try and help
the Cloud architect community. We have a free AWS certified solution architect associate book. It's
everything you need to pass. The AWS certified solution architect associate
exam. It's completely free and the link is in the description below.
Every Monday at 9:00 AM Eastern we have a two hour webinar. We call it the how to get your
first Cloud architect job webinar. We tell you what employers desire. We tell you what to do.
We tell you how to be that perfect candidate, so you can get that job because we want to see
you get a great Cloud architect job, and we want to improve the Cloud architect community.
I will also tell you, we care about this community so much that every Monday at 2:00 PM, we have a
Zoom meeting where we answer any questions you might have regarding the AWS certified solution
architect exam. So if you're training for the AWS certified solution architect, and you're
curious about the difference between a network ACL on a security group, ask us, we'll tell you.
Whether you're our students, whether you're somebody else's students and
most of our students are other people's students,
but they have questions and clarifications and needs and we're just thrilled to have them. We
don't care about who they're coming from. We just care that we boost the Cloud architect community.
Everything we do is about bringing up the Cloud architect community and the Cloud architect
career. So thank you so much for watching this video. We look forward to seeing you in another
video and until then train hard, stay safe and focus your training because when your goals
and your plan is aligned, you'll definitely get to your dreams. Thank you so much.