Are you curious why we provide free AWS certification training? If so 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 well over 25 years now and coaching or mentoring others
to get their first tech job or get promoted in tech for over two decades. And today we're
going to talk about why we do free AWS certification training. And it all started about a year
and a half ago with me trying to help a friend's child get a fantastic cloud computing career.
See, what has happened in the last two decades of my life, I have been helping people get
their first tech job or get promoted in tech. And it's something I have loved, loved, loved
doing. And a friend of mine had said to me, "Could you please help my son? He's in college
studying computers, and I want him to get out of school and be like some of the other
people I met that you've mentored, fresh out of school, big careers by the time they're
22."
And I said, "You know what? I've met your son. He's an incredibly good person and I
want to work with them. I'll work with them." I said, "But I'm kind of busy right now."
I said, "So here's what I'm going to do. We're going to make sure he gets the three top selling
AWS certification training courses, and I will spend two to four hours with him every
Friday, and I will personally coach him and make sure make he knows everything." My friend
was happy. This young person was happy. And I was happy because I felt like I could help
him.
Now within two days something very strange happened. This nice, good, strong young person
calls me and he says, "Mike," he says, "I don't understand these videos." He said, "Look,
I've set up an EC2 instance, although I don't know what it is. And I've set up an S3 bucket
and I have no idea what it is, but I know how to configure this stuff. But what is it?"
And at this point I was bewildered. I was saying, "You can't possibly be in a position
where you've taken training and you don't know what it is. Are you being lazy or being
tired? What's going on here?" So I said, "Let me see the videos."
And I watched these videos. And mind you, these were from the three top selling training
programs. And I watched them and I went, "What is this?" The training was very simply, "Here's
the name of the service and here's how to configure it." And if that wasn't bad enough,
it was PowerPoint slides with voiceover. And I was thinking, "Who could watch this?" And
even if you could possibly survive watching this, PowerPoint slides with audio, all you
know is the name of the service and how to configure it. And I said, "This is a problem,
because when you're done this, how are you going to get hired?" I said, "Let me test
my theory a little more."
I've been in the career coaching world for decades now. So I interviewed a thousand AWS
certified professionals. And after interviewing a thousand of them, I was sorry to say that
not a single one was hireable unless they had extensive networking or data center backgrounds,
but not a single one was hireable even with multiple AWS certifications, even at the level
of the certified solution architect professional. All of them knew very well the name of an
AWS service and how to configure it, really, really well, but no one knew what it meant.
See, here's the challenge. As a cloud architect or a solutions architect, you're a systems
designer. You're designing systems based upon a customer's goals, the customer's business
strategy, find their strategy, going to find the technology solution to make the business
more profitable. That's what cloud architects do, solution architects, and enterprise architects.
Now, this solution architect associate and professional training is teaching them the
name of the service and how to configure it, nothing related to architecture work. As an
architect, you need to be able to migrate systems coming from the data center to the
cloud. You can't migrate things that you don't understand. It's just not possible. If you
don't understand servers and virtualizations and containers and firewalls and load balancers
and VPN devices and networking, how are you going to take all that stuff and design it
in the cloud? You have to know what it is first.
So I saw that and I said, "Okay, let me do what I can." So this nice, young person and
I, I said to him, "Here's what we're going to do." I said, "We're going to write a book
on passing the AWS certified solutions architect professional exam." I said, "We're going to
take this book. We're going to strip out 10 or 15 pages, and we're going to make a really
comprehensive certified solution architect associate ebook, and we'll give that away
for free." And we did.
And as soon as we gave that away, within weeks, 25,000 people downloaded this book and we
were getting emails every day thanking us for the difference it made in their career,
thanking us for explaining cloud computing and what it was, thanking us because they've
got their first cloud architect job and they were so excited. And we were thrilled. We
were stoked.
I said to this person, I said, "We already have got people hired and we didn't even start
our training yet, just based on a free ebook we gave away." And I said, "Let's do better
than that." I said, "Let's do the following." I said, "Let's first build our training program.
We're going to take students in. We'll call it the Cloud Architect Career Development
Program, and we'll base it on my 20 some years of helping people get their first tech jobs."
And I said, "We're going to do this, and we're going to teach everything architects need
to know, the business acumen, the communication skills, the executive presence, the emotional
intelligence, the network, the data center, and how to design systems." And he said, "Yes,
that's great. Let's do it."
So we built that. But that still wasn't enough. There's lots of people in the developing world
that just can't afford our training. And that's okay. So we decided to produce free certification
training. We released a completely free AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Course,
and I'll leave the link in the description below. And then we did a completely free Architecture
Based AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional Course. Again, I'll leave the link for that
below. And we recently released a completely free AWS Advanced Networking Course. The link
is in the description below.
And when we did this, we did them differently. We focused our training on the architectural
design principles of what are the systems, how do they work, and why do you use them?
So we know everybody already knows out how to configure the systems, because they've
already these courses, but applying these things and knowing what it means. So we produced
this content. So if you see us post a lot of free AWS certification materials, it's
because we've seen gaps in the industries and we want to help the cloud architect community
or the solutions architect community.
So if you see our training and you enjoy our free training, please share it with someone
else. We want to do everything we can to spread the mission of cloud computing and free AWS
certification training. Thank you so much for watching this video. It's been nice to
have you here today.
Let me tell you about some more things we do completely for free for the cloud computing
community. Every Monday and every Thursday, we have a completely free How to Get Your
First Cloud Architect Job Webinar. And on these webinars, we will tell you everything
you need to do to start your cloud architect career or your first solution architect career
step by step. And we'll spend an hour answering any questions you may have on your cloud computing
career. Every Monday, every Thursday, and it's completely free.
Now, every Tuesday, if you want something really fun, we have a cloud architect challenge.
And if you want to know if you're ready to get hired, and if you want to know if you're
ready to be a cloud architect or a solution architect, come and join this challenge. You
will have a lot of fun. Here's what's going to go on in this challenge. Just like a cloud
architect, you will meet with an executive as business, legal, technical, regulatory
requirements. You'll then meet with the technical team and you'll ask business, legal requirements,
the technology systems, what the systems are like in the network and the data center, and
all this stuff. You're going to move to the cloud. You're going to get it from both ends.
And then you're going to design these systems just like you would as a cloud architect.
So there'll be a chance to practice a day in the life of the cloud architect. And it
is completely free. You'll get to know exactly what it's like being a cloud architecture
solution architect. The link for this free training is in the description below.
Every Wednesday or at least most Wednesdays, we try to do a completely free YouTube Live.
We call it Cloud Architect Career Question and Answer Session. You can bring us any questions
you have on your cloud computing career, and we will answer them in real time. It's completely
free. See, at GoCloud Architects, we want to do everything we can to help you in your
cloud computing career, whether you're one of our paid students in our Cloud Architect
Career Development Program, or you're someone that's coming to our YouTube channel for free
content, as well as our free white papers. Anything we can do to help you in your cloud
computing career, it's our mission.
I want to thank you so much for watching this video, participating in our YouTube channel
and our free training. It's an honor and a privilege to be with you guys. And we don't
take that lightly and we're so thankful to have you here. Take care and have a wonderful
day. Look forward to seeing you in a video very soon.