Are you looking to build an amazing cloud computing career?
Do you want to know how to get the advice and the guidance to be as
successful as possible in the shortest time as possible? 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 we're an organization dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers.
I've been working in technology for over 25 years and I've been coaching and mentoring others to get
their first tech job or get promoted in tech for more than two decades, and it's something
I really love. But today, we're going to talk about asking for advice, spotting bad advice,
and how to avoid the truly, truly, truly dangerous advice, which we see all day. So we want to make
this as a public service announcement to teach you how to get the best advice.
Every day, I see a post on LinkedIn, Facebook, or another site, and the post is quite simply,
"I want to move to the cloud, which certification should I get?" And the person answering this
question is seriously well intentioned. They want to work hard and build themselves a career. And we
love that. This is terrific. And you know what? We love the power of the internet and the community
to advise people to bring people together. This is great. Here's the problem. When someone says, "I'd
like to move to the cloud, and what certifications should I get?" this person instantly gets 50 to
100 of everybody's favorite certification. And here's why this is challenging. Typically, it's
a gut response. "What should I do?" and someone says, "Get a developer one. Get a maintenance one.
Get an operations one. Get an architecture one. Get a security one. Get a network one."
Why all this variation? If the person says, "I want to move to the cloud," the response is going
to be, "Here's what I do on the cloud. Here's what I do on the cloud. Here's what I do in the cloud.
Here's what I do on the cloud." And guess what? Every job that existed before in the network and
the data center, for the most part, exists in the cloud too. It's not like these jobs went away.
They just got moved. So there are a lot of IT jobs. So the question that needs to be asked is,
I want to be a cloud architect, What should I do?" Or, "I want to be a SysOps professional,
what should I do?" Now, hat's part of the problem. See, it's really important to be laser-focused on
what you want. For example, one of my closest friends is a mechanic and he is the absolute
best at fixing things. He's a genius at it. I have more respect for him and his mechanical
abilities than I can even describe. I wish I could use my hands to build things, but I can't.
Now, if I'm sick, I'm going to go to the doctor to take care of me, not my one of my best friends
that's a great mechanic. Why? The doctor's trained in medicine. He knows how to fix me.
The mechanic knows how to pretty much fix my car or fix anything around my house, because he's a
mechanical genius. He can even design things, but it's a different skill set, and there's an
employer, I'm going to hire the skill set that I need. So why are we bringing this back to
the discussion? If someone says, "I want to be a cloud architect," and they get a million responses
that are totally not related to the cloud, it's problematic. Why is it so problematic? The average
salary of a cloud architect is approximately $600 per day, or $12,000 per month. So when
you want to build your career, you want to build it as fast as possible. If it costs you a year of
bouncing around with not knowing where to begin, that's $155,000 on average of wasted income.
Now, that's expensive. So the opportunity cost of not working is expensive.
So how do you ask these questions? If you want to use the [inaudible 00:03:37], be specific.
"I would like to be a cloud infrastructure architect that focuses on the network.
I've been working in networking for this period of time. I have this background in the cloud,
but I really want to do this. How could you guide me?" Now, hopefully, you'll get better responses.
But not necessarily. So here's how you're going to go look and evaluate the responses to make
sure that they're actually good. You're going to have to look at what the people tell you and
are they credible? So you've got to first know the job. See, if a cloud engineer is advising
you on a cloud architect role, that's a problem because they're different jobs. A cloud engineer
is a system builder, a cloud architect as a systems designer. Very different in
their roles. Very different in their knowledge base. Both equally important, just different.
A cloud SysOps person is the maintenance person of the system. They have a very different skillset,
so much so that a cloud architect may never end their career touch the management
console of CLI or code anything. Now, a cloud engineer is going to be working with the CLI,
the management console's APIs, every day, and they might be doing some coding and scripting
too. A SysOps person by comparison is going to be using be Terraform and CloudFormation,
And they're going to be working with this stuff constantly and scripting and coding,
all different skill sets for all different jobs. All valuable, all great, but different.
And if you train for the wrong one, it's going to be very hard to actually get hired for the
one that you desire. So if it takes a year to get somewhere because there's focus or lack
of distraction, this is bad advice because this is about $155,000 cost to the person.
So that's why we are so focused on asking the right questions and being laser-focused on her
advice. Now, let's tell you how you actually look at the advice that's given, weed out the
information that's not relevant to your career and pick the best advice so you can be maximally
successful. So when you get responses from people to your questions, I want you to look carefully
at the responses. First and foremost, do they actually work in the job you want? If the answer
is no, ignore it. They don't know how to get there or they'd be there themselves, or they're working
their way to get there, but it's just not reliable trustworthy information so completely ignore it.
Next, look for someone that has five to 10 years experience in that role. It takes on average of
10,000 hours to be an expert, which is 40 hours a week for five years. So, before that, someone
doesn't have that level of expertise. So you'll want someone that's got that level of seniority.
And what you should be looking for in a title is senior, principal, or distinguished,
if you're dealing with, say, an architect. Or you should be looking for a manager or a senior
manager or a director or a VP that would be doing the hiring. Why? Either the people have been there
or these are the people doing the hiring. In either case, what they want is to purchase someone
with the right skills to hire them so they know exactly what to do because that's all they do.
Now, whenever you're dealing with statistics, you've got to throw away the anomalies.
So, basically, if you've got 10 managers saying one thing and 10 distinguished or principal
architect saying the same thing, and you've got two statistical outliers that are saying
completely different things, initially, throw out the statistical outliers, generate a hypothesis,
and test it and see if it works. If it works, you know you're definitely in the right way.
Ask more people based upon the hypothesis generated by analyzing the results from people.
That's how you get good advice. Make sure the person is credible, make sure they're in the
position, make sure they're knowledgeable to be able to advise you, and this is just super
important. And, again, we're doing this because we want you to have your best career. We understand
that there are so many well-intentioned people and we love that. We just want to make sure that
someone's well intentions does not hurt you. See, the reality is this, if you go for your interview
and you're building a resume when you've got a laser-focused resume, an architecture that's
got architecture stuff, or an operations person that's got all operations things,
this together creates a beautiful holistic package. But when you've got a little of this,
a little of this, and a little of this, it shows lack of focus, which makes hiring managers take
this person less seriously, which typically lowers their salary and lowers their opportunity.
So plan for exactly what you want. Fight hard. Go achieve it. Build the career of your dreams.
This is Michael Gibbs from Go Cloud Architects telling you how to avoid dangerous advice. Let
me tell you about some things that we do to boost your cloud computing career. On every Monday and
every Thursday, we have a completely free "How To Get Your First Cloud Architect Job." And on this
webinar, we do the following. We basically tell you what the hiring manager desires.
We tell you how to get real experience. We tell you things that you can do to bypass HR
to be directly seen by the hiring manager so you can get hired. We do this completely free
on Mondays and Thursdays. Then we have an hour question and answer session,
and during this session, you can ask any questions and we'll answer them
in real time to help you in your cloud computing career. Again, completely free.
Every Tuesday, we have a lot of fun. We invite people from all over the globe to join our Cloud
Architect Career Challenge. And we give you the chance to be a cloud architect for the day.
And what you'll do is you'll interview me and ask for business, legal, and technical requirements of
a solution and I will give you these informations and you will get to design the cloud architecture
on the fly with the rest of the people in the group, and, of course, I'll mentor you, coach you,
or guide you. And by the end of this, you're going to know if you're job ready or what you need to do
to get job ready. So we do this completely free. It's on every Tuesday. Now, on most Wednesdays,
not all, but whenever we can, we have a completely free YouTube live question and answer session
and basically you can bring us any questions you have about your career and we will answer
them real time, because we want to do everything we can to assist the cloud architect community.
Now, if you're working on certifications, guess what? We've got a lot of them and they're all free
and I'll leave them all in the link below. We have a completely free AWS Certified Solution
Architect Associate ebook and course. The link is in the description below, completely free.
We have a completely free AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional Course,
architecture based then engineering based. And I'll leave the link for that below.
Again, completely free. And we have a completely free AWS Advanced Networking
Certification Program completely free. I'll leave the link in the description below.
I want to thank you so much for the opportunity to spend this time with you while we're watching
this video. I don't take being a mentor or a part of this cloud architect community very lightly.
I've been working in this industry for 25 years in tech and I love it. There's nothing better
in the entire world and I just want to share my knowledge and experiences to help you have
the best career. I look forward to seeing you in another video very soon. Take care.