Are you looking to maximize your cloud architect, solution architect, or enterprise architect
career?
If so, this video's for you.
Hi.
My name is Michael Gibbs, and I'm the Founder and CEO of GoCloud Architects.
And we're an organization that's really dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing
and networking careers.
Personally, I've been working in technology for over 25 years and I've been helping others
get their first tech job or get promoted in tech for over two decades.
And my favorite thing in the world is when one of my students calls me and says, I just
got cloud hired.
Today, we're going to talk about nine tips to maximize your cloud architect, solution
architect, or enterprise architect career.
See, this is a very special career, the architect career, because when we're a cloud architect
or a solution architect or an enterprise architect, we're really about transforming an organization's
business through technology.
And if we can keep that in our minds, that our whole goal is digital transformation,
then when we talk about the things that are going to really maximize that cloud architect,
solution architect, or enterprise architect career, you're going to know why.
The nine things we're going to talk about are technical competency, certifications,
really building that brand, what your focus should be, the type of communications skills
that you need to have and how they can maximize your career.
We'll talk about your leadership skills and why it matters.
We'll talk about business acumen and why it matters.
Then we'll get into some really critical things such as emotional intelligence and executive
presence, and why they are so important to the cloud architect or the solution architect
to be able to fulfill their jobs and build a great cloud architect career.
Let's talk about technical competency.
First and foremost, technical competency, or the ability to do the job, is most important.
We may be the hybrid between a business executive and a cloud engineer, but we still need to
be competent.
So let's talk about what is technical competence?
Quite frankly, it's simply this, can you do the job?
I want you to listen really carefully.
I've interviewed 5,000 people in my life.
I've found very few that were actually technically competent.
And after 5,000 people, for me to say it's rare to find truly technical competent people,
I mean, it's rare.
So if you're truly technical competent, and we all can be truly technical competent, you
will to stand out above the crowd.
So what does this mean?
I can do 5,000 interviews and I can find 5,000 people that know a little of this, a little
of this, a little of this, a little of this, a little of this, and a little of this, but
they don't know anything well enough to truly do the job.
And unfortunately, it's very hard for me to hire someone like this.
And the reason it is, the person knows about so many things but if I need to put this person
in front of a customer to go do their $200 million architecture, they're not going to
have the content, they're not going to have the depth, because they know a lot about a
little things.
So if you really want to be great, become that specialist.
Become really competent, become an expert in your field.
Maybe it's cloud networking, maybe it's cloud security, maybe it's cloud big data, it doesn't
matter.
Find something you love and become great at it.
Focus all your time, your effort, your motivation on one thing, be the best in the world.
Be an expert, be a thought leader.
You'll get paid far more and you'll be in much higher demand.
So that's what we're going to say on technical competency.
Now certifications, same thing.
We got to be careful here.
So we love certifications at GoCloud careers.
I don't want you to think we don't.
I love certifications because they can help build your career, to a point.
See, certifications make you look much more credible on paper, which is great because
that's going to help you get an interview.
The better your interviews, the better jobs you can get, but certifications don't equal
competency.
You can interview 1,000 certified people and you know what you're going to find?
Potentially 1,000 people that don't know how to do the job, because certifications and
competency don't equate to the same thing.
But certifications tell the story.
They tell you, what is your career, what are you, and who are you.
So how do you use certifications to your advantage, because certifications will help you.
Get the most valuable ones in the chosen career that you have.
So I'm a cloud networking person, so I have the Cisco certified internet expert.
Why?
It's the biggest networking certification in the world.
And I keep the Google professional cloud architect.
Why?
I got a strong cloud one, I got the biggest networking one on paper, I'm a cloud network
architect.
Oh, by the way, I worked for Cisco for 10 years, I worked for the world's largest internet
service provider, the country's largest cable proprietor, and I designed systems for banks
all in their network.
So why?
Everything I have looks like an expert on one thing.
Why?
Because that's all I've done for 20 some years.
Designed network architectures for large and global enterprises.
I spent a lot of time there.
That's where my certifications are.
Now if I was certified in everything, Amazon Alexa, databases, coding, SysOps, which is
made maintenance, DevOps, which is automation of software release cycles and such.
Am I cloud network architect?
No.
Am I an architect?
Not really.
I'm a little bit of a maintenance person, a little bit of automation person, I'm a little
bit of a lot of things.
So we want to build your brand.
So get the right certifications.
And that means go associate, professional, expert.
Don't get multiple associates, get something that's going to focus on your brand and show
how you're great.
It'll make you stand out from the crowd.
You'll have an expert brand as opposed to a scattered brand.
So it's all about focus.
Now, the next part is actually going into the brand.
Your brand is everything.
Why is a Mercedes more expensive than a Honda?
I'll tell you what, I have both.
My Hondas last me longer, they have less maintenance, and they're smooth.
But the Mercedes I have has better seats which are more comfortable on my back.
But the point is, is why is the Mercedes more expensive than the Honda?
Just the brand.
Why is an Apple iPhone more expensive than its competition?
Because Apple has a brand, and the better your brand is, the more you can charge, the
more people are attracted to something.
So what is the best brand for the cloud architect, the enterprise architect brand or the solution
architect brand?
Someone that's positive, emotionally intelligent, reliable, ethical, responsive, and trustworthy.
What builds that brand?
Expertise.
What builds that brand?
Focus.
What weakens your brand?
Being all over the place, lack of focus, not having anybody be able to identify who you
are.
Look at some of these brands, they are so crystal clear.
Brands where the brand message is clear, have a much better value.
Build a brand for yourself.
Build that expert brand and you'll be paid more.
You can charge more for your services because the world likes people with a better brand.
So go build your brand.
Leverage social media, post innovative things that can make people think, that can influence
others.
Post educational content.
Go out there, and when you commit to something, do it.
If you say you're going to do something on a Wednesday, make sure it's done by Wednesday.
On time, on budget.
Always, always under promise and over deliver, and you'll have an amazing brand.
Communication skills.
Well, when it comes to building your career, I'm going to tell you that I believe communication
skills are the most important.
And you might ask, Mike, you just talked about technical competency first.
Now you're saying communication skills are the most important.
Well, let's look at it this way.
Good communication skills are critical for all customer facing roles, but let's talk
about your ability to be a cloud architect or a solution architect.
It involves your ability to go to that customer, Mr or Mrs. Customer, tell me about your business.
Tell me about your business goals.
Tell me about your challenges.
Tell me what your competitors doing.
What are you trying to achieve?
See, we're globally looking at this big holistic picture and we've got to ask the right questions
to get the right information.
If we have the right inputs or the right information, then we can craft the technology solution
that's going to improve that customer's business.
Whether it can be increase revenue, decrease costs, automate, whatever our solution is
going to be to assist that business.
But we can't generate the solution at all if we don't know the customer's problems or
pain points.
So we have to start at the customer.
We have to ask these questions.
That's the difference between a cloud architect and a cloud engineer.
The cloud architect is focused on that business transformation and the cloud engineer is focused
on building it.
Two incredibly great things, but that's why a cloud architect versus a cloud engineer
is a different position, because we have to focus on different things.
Now, for architects, it's impossible to get hired or be effective without good communication
skills.
But for the engineer, if they have good communication skills, it's going to help them too.
See, you can't know everything, no matter how hard you try.
And if you've got good communication skills, you'll build a big network and the big network
can support you.
If you've got good communication skills and you need training, you'll know how to ask
your manager for it.
If you've got good communication skills, even in the engineering, you can't deliver something
on time because something came up.
You can either get the resources from your company or you'll know how to communicate
to the customer.
When you want to ask for a promotion, good communication skills are there.
When you need a team, good communication skills are there.
So communication skills are probably the most critical element of your career.
Your communication skills are directly correlated to your salary.
Your communication skills are directly correlated to your ability to advance or get promoted
in the industry.
So focus on your communication skills, especially if you're an architect, and here's why.
As architects, our ability is to advise, that's our job.
How do we advise our customers to transform their businesses?
How do we convince the customer they need something.
How do we find out what they need?
And we can't do any of this without stellar communication skills.
So make sure you spend a lot of time working on your communication skills.
Your career will thank you.
Now, continuing with that trend, Let's talk about some other skills that matter, especially
for the cloud architect, solution architecture, the enterprise architect.
And that's leadership skills.
Let's face it, if you want to advance in your career period, you need leadership skills.
But let's examine the facts of the architect's job.
I'm going to tell you right now, you can't know anything.
And if you try, you'll effectively know nothing about a lot of things.
You can't know everything.
Take a physician for example, like a neurosurgeon.
They go to four years undergraduate.
They do a four year medical school.
They do a three year residency.
And many of them do a three to five year with a fellowship when they're done.
That's 17 years to entry level practice.
Now that neurosurgeon knows one thing, neurosurgery.
And they're well paid for it, extremely well paid because they're focused.
Now, they know neurosurgery.
Now, a buddy of mine's a neurosurgeon.
If I were to go to my buddy's house, [inaudible 00:10:43] I can practice medicine too.
But if I went to my buddy, the neurosurgeon's house and said, hey, I've got back pain.
The neurosurgeon's going to be like, go see your internist, go see an orthopedic surgeon,
go see a rheumatologist.
He or she is going to know that's not their skill.
And why are we saying this?
You need leadership skills to be a great cloud architect because you only know one thing
well.
We need to build a team.
When I'm building one, I might be a cloud networking person.
I'm going to bring a cloud security person with me, and a generic cloud person with me,
and a cloud big data person, with me and a cloud IAM person, et cetera, cetera, et cetera.
And I'm going to get the world's best and brightest minds together in a room and we're
going to design it together.
And then I'm going to write it up and present it back to the customer.
See, by doing it this way, I can have the world's best people design it and I can make
them want to help me if I've got good leadership skills.
And of course, when it's their time, I'll be helping them.
So leadership skills are so critical in these careers.
Especially careers like architectures, like these cloud architect or solution architect
jobs, where architecture, by nature, it's a team sport.
So keep this in mind, that leadership skills are so critical for your cloud architect,
solution architect career, or enterprise architect career.
The better your leadership skills are, the faster you'll get promoted.
The better you'll be paid.
Let's talk about what else matters.
Business acumen.
Now, when I started tech, I loved tech so I assumed everybody liked tech.
So I assumed businesses are going to buy tech because they loved it like me.
No.
Businesses don't like to tech.
Businesses don't like spending money on anything.
If a business could just sell and spend nothing, that would be perfect.
So why do businesses buy tech?
Businesses buy tech for transformation.
Can this new website increase sales?
Can this new application decrease the number of employees that I need?
Can I use this new application to make my employees do 22% more work?
Businesses buy technology for transformation.
So if you are an architect, your job is to transform that customer's business, which
means you've got to ask that customer about their business.
And you need to know enough about business to be able to help transform them.
You need to understand operational expenses versus capital expenses and be able to calculate
return on investment capital models based upon weighted average cost of capital, customer
purchase, et cetera.
So you really need to be able to understand that.
You need to understand sales.
You need to understand productivity.
You need to understand the type of expenses businesses have, the levers they have to improve
things because you're going to be creating technology solutions to improve that business.
So you've got to have business acumen.
You've got to be able to show the customer that the cost of the technology is more than
mitigated by the value to the business.
You've got to be able to quantify the value of your solution.
What does it do in terms of saving employee hours?
What does it do to increase sales?
You've got to know what it is and you've got to present it to the customer.
And that's why the customer buys the technology.
You show them that this $10 million that they're going to purchase on cloud services will give
them $30 million of business's value.
You're also going to have to show that business that, hey, if you spend $10 million here,
this return on investment is greater than if you spent that $10 million somewhere else.
Because money and capital is a finite resource.
So if we can generate $30 million of business value out of a 10 million expense on tech,
but the business can spend $10 million somewhere else and generate $100 million of business
value, the tech project's taking a second backseat.
So we have to show that the investment and the returns on the investment from the technology
are the right things.
Maybe my $2 million investment gives the customer $50 million in business value.
The customer wants it.
How do you design something for your customer?
From a business perspective, if it's better, faster, and cheaper, the customer will always
buy it.
If it's two out of the three, most of the times they'll want your solution.
If it's only one, if got to be much better, much faster, or much cheaper.
Now, we're going to talk about emotional intelligence.
Now this is something that is very special to me because let's face it, statistically
speaking, emotional intelligence is the best predictor of your long term career success.
So what is this emotional intelligence that matters so much?
It's the ability to control your emotions as well as other people's emotions.
Which means if you're very emotionally intelligent, you can walk into a room of cranky and unhappy
people, smile, say a few things, and get everybody back to work and being happy.
That's why businesses love emotionally and intelligent people.
And emotionally intelligent people earn far more than others in general, because they
can increase the productivity of the whole team.
They can make the work environment better for everyone and they're pleasant to be around.
So it'll substantially increase your salary, your promotability, and your career.
Now, statistically speaking on an average career, individuals with higher levels of
emotional intelligence earn $29,600 more than people with lower levels of emotional intelligence.
But in tech careers, that shift could be so much different because we have much higher
base salaries to begin with and much higher bonuses.
So that uplift in terms of salary from training emotional intelligence is very there.
So train your emotional intelligence, train the ability to control your emotions, train
your ability to control others' emotions.
It'll substantially increase your career, your job opportunities, and salary.
Let's talk about executive presence, and I'm going to demo it for you.
I'm sure you've met someone that walks into the room and you know they're the leader.
It involves how they stand, how they communicate, how take up space.
It could be called gravitas, the French call it je ne sais quois, we call it executive
presence, and it's really critical.
So I will demonstrate executive presence and lack thereof.
Hi, my name is Mike.
Today I'm going to talk about BGP, which is a path vector routing protocol.
That is a non executive present version of the presentation.
Now, I'm going to say the same thing.
Hi, my name is Mike Gibbs.
Today, we're going to talk about BGP.
BGP is a path vector routing protocol that's used for inter-domain routing.
Now you can see, I said the same words, or almost the same words, but the second time
I took up more space, I varied my vocal tone.
I made a point.
I paused, I made the next point.
So now, think about this.
If I was in front of the CEO of a trillion dollar company, hi, I want to talk about BGP,
that CEO is not going to take me seriously.
They're not going to assume I have enough in me to truly transform that business.
Now with the executive presence, I have much more influence because people trust me more,
and that'll increase my ability to sell.
It'll increase my trust.
It'll improve my effectiveness in my cloud architect career, my solution architect career,
or my enterprise architect career.
And quite frankly, it'll improve your ability in any career.
Cloud engineer, DevOps engineer, anything, executive presence is always going to help
you.
So what did we talk about today?
We talked about nine tips to maximize your cloud architect career, your solution architect
career, or your enterprise architect career.
We talked about building real technical competency, getting the right and focused certifications,
building the perfect cloud architect brand, focusing on one thing and becoming great at
it.
Becoming a master communicator, learning leadership skills, developing the business acumen to
truly help your customers, becoming emotionally intelligent and developing executive presence.
These are the skills for your career.
These skills can double or triple your salary and lead to extraordinary promotability.
So maximize your technology career.
Learn the technical competency piece, but all the other non-technical competency pieces,
that's going to build your best tech career.
This is Michael Gibbs, I'm the Founder and CEO of GoCloud Architects.
It's an honor to see you on video and I look forward to seeing another video very soon,
take care.
It was so nice having you join us for this video today.
Let me tell you about some free services we do for the cloud community.
Once per week, we actually have a free question and answer session live on YouTube, where
you can come and ask us any questions you want about building your career related to
cloud computing or networking.
And we'll answer them in real time for you because we want to get you to your goals.
Several more times per week, we have guests from industry.
Industry experts that I have known for decades that are movers and shakers that have changed
the world, that can give you information so you can build the best career.
I invite them periodically, they are on my show.
If there's a chance to do some free training on our channel, we'll do it live because we
want you all to have the best skills for the best career.
So please subscribe and hit the bell.
I look forward to seeing you and I look forward to assisting you in your technology career.
Thank you so much.
This is Michael Gibbs from GoCloud Architects.