Would you like to know the one skill that can affect your cloud
architecture career more than any one thing? 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 dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers.
Personally, I've been working in tech for over 25 years, and I've been helping others
get their first tech job or get promoted in tech for two decades. And it's my favorite
thing when one of my students calls me and says, "Guess what Mike, I got cloud hired."
Now today, we're going to talk about the most critical cloud architect skill.
This one skill will affect your ability to design the right solution.
It will determine whether you get hired or not. It will affect the quality of
your architecture. It can easily add as six figures to your salary.
And pretty much, it'll determine your ability to be successful in your career as a cloud architect.
What is that one skill? It's not programming, it's not sys ups, it's not dev ups. It is your
communication skills. Your communication skills are your most important skill
as a cloud architect. And we'll talk about why. Let's begin with why communication skills are
so critical. First and foremost, without unbelievably good communication skills,
it will be impossible to design the right architecture for your clients. So when we
think about these cloud architect career skills, they've got to start with communication skills.
Here is the reason why. We are the ones that gather the customer requirements.
Meaning, we ask the customer about their business. The current state of the business,
the future desired state of the business. We ask the customer about their current technology,
what's working, what's not working. We ask about their future tech goals. We ask them
about things that they like, things that they're afraid of. We need all of this information.
If we don't have this information, if we don't know what their tech is like, if we don't know
what their business is like, if we don't know what their goals are, or their pain points,
we can't design an architecture. So our ability to do requirements gathering will determine our
architecture. And what determines our ability to get our requirements, are communications skills,
our ability to ask the right questions, and our ability to listen and actually get the
answers. See, it's not like somebody's going to hand us a paper that says, "Build this."
That's great in exam, but we go to the customer and we ask them
about their environment, their goals, their business goals, their business challenges.
And from that, we've got to craft the solution. And we can't do that without knowing what their
goals are. They used to say in programming, "Garbage in and garbage out," well in architecture
it's the same thing. The better your requirements are, the better requirements documentation is,
the better you design your solution. Because you're building exactly what your customer wants.
So that's why communication skills are so critical to even get your requirements in the first place.
Now let's talk about designing the best architecture. Okay, let's look
at architecture and the design. Architecture is a team sport. I'm going to say this again,
it is a team sport. You can't know half of the tech that's out there. And even if you could,
you still could never know it anywhere as well as an expert. For example, in my career, I spent
10,000 hours on just BGP. Just BGP. Now, I also spent another 10,000 hours on just IP multicast.
So basically speaking, I spent 10 years full time on just two routing protocols, that's it,
in networking. And networking's huge. Just a small, small subset. But I was an expert.
So now imagine this in your architecture. You've got these great requirements. You've
got some security. Ask the security architect. You've got a lot of IM requirements, ask the IM
architecting. Yes, I separated them from security. You've got some big database requirements,
ask the database architect. You've got a network requirements, ask the cloud network architect.
Build it together as a team. And what's going to determine the quality of the information you can
get from all these other people? You've got it, your communication skills. You're going to have
to ask the right questions to your architecture team. And guess what? When they give you answers,
you're going to have to listen to it and maybe translate that into a document that
you can present to your customers. So your communication skills will determine
the quality of the team that you can build around you, and also their willingness to
work for you based upon how you communicate and how emotionally intelligent you are.
But the point is, is just to even do it, just to even be able to get the help,
you've got to have good communication skills. Okay, so let's think about it. You needed these
communication skills to go to the customer. Now you needed these communication skills to design
your architecture, the bigger team. So, what's next? You've got this architecture, right? What
are you going to do? You're going to document it. You're going to draw a picture and you're going to
write up a document. Wait, that's communication skills too. That's a written communication.
And then, you're going to build a presentation, and you know what you're going to do? You're going
to go present that back to the customer. Your architecture, the one that you designed based
upon what the customer told you, what your team helped you build, which then written up, wrote-up,
which is more communication skills, which is now what you're presenting, communication skills.
Now, if the customer loves your design, you're going to convince the customer they need to adopt
it. And that means more communication skills. Communication skills on sales.
Communication skills on a plan to adopt it. It's all based on your communication skills. And if
you presented it to the customer and the customer said, "I like this and this, but this part could
be changed," guess what? Now you're going to go back to your team. You're going to ask your
team of experts to help you with the next part of the design. Then you're going to redocument it,
and you're going to re-present it back to the customer. And when the customer says, "I love it,"
you're going to convince the customer they need to purchase it and then adopt it.
So as you can see throughout this entire process, what made us be able to do this is our
communication skills. So in your cloud architect career development plan, the tech components are
great and they are really important, but don't neglect your communication skills. They are
equally as important as your technology skills, because they are your tool to being able to get
your job done. My name is Michael Gibbs. I'm the founder and CEO of GoCloud Architects,
an organization built to build high performance cloud computing careers. It's been nice to speak
to you today and I look forward to speaking to you in another video coming 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 go cloud architects.