Are you looking for ways to accelerate your technology career? If so, this video's 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 now, and I've been coaching
or mentoring others for more than two decades to either get their first tech job or get
promoted in tech, and today we're going to talk about accelerating your technology career.
When we talk about accelerating your technology career, there's really two pathways that you
can choose from, the technical path and the leadership path, and both of these are excellent
career choices and you won't go wrong with either, and to get there, it's a slightly
different plan, but there's a lot of commonalities in improving your tech career, which will
give you the ability to move into the leadership path at one way, but also still accelerate
your technical path at the same time, and that's what we're going to talk about, maximizing
your career, maximizing your technology career. So if you're a cloud architect, great, a solution
architect, great, a network architect, fantastic, or any other technology career, these same
skills are going to apply, so let's talk about how you accelerate your technology career.
Now at first, it seems like the technologist and the leaders, they're at opposite ends
of the world, but they are not. See, many of these skills that a really great architect
would have are the same skills that a really great executive would have, so we're going
to tell you what those skills are, how to get them, and give you your own development
plan for the technology side and the leadership side, now here we go.
So let's say you want to stay on the technical side, and we're going to start there first,
because we work with a majority of cloud architects and solution architects. Now, when you're
dealing with these roles, especially architecture roles, it's a combination of communication
skills as well as technical competency, but in the first five years of your career, it's
technical competency that's going to matter the most, and as you accelerate your career,
that's when the soft skills, emotional intelligence, business acumen, is going to make the difference
between career stagnation and rocket ship-like career acceleration.
So let's talk about what to do in the beginning of your technical career, meaning the first
few years. In the first few years of your technology career, this is where you have
a chance to build your foundation, where you're going to get known in the industry for some
level of expertise. So when it comes to accelerating your career, you need to be known for something.
You're going to need to have a really good brand, and you're going to need to have a
really good technical skillset from a competency perspective, and our recommendation generally
is to specialize in something.
You have two options in your tech career. You can be a jack of all trades and a master
of none, with very cursory topical knowledge of a lot of different things, or you can become
an expert on something. I can tell you from a long career, as well as the people that
I've coached for the last two-plus decades, when you become an expert at something, it's
like a rocket ship career acceleration, and when you become a generalist or a jack of
all trades, it's career stagnation, so we're going to recommend that you pick a specialty.
Now, what could this specialty be? It could be an industry specialty, or it could be a
vertical specialty, or a technology specialty, so let's talk about that. For example, let's
say you work in cloud computing. A specialty would be cloud networking or cloud security,
fantastic career opportunities, or it could be cloud computing for healthcare, industry
vertical, or cloud computing for finance, these types of solutions. In either case,
you've got good options, so you're going to want to pick one of these two things.
Now, when you pick either a technical specialty or an industry specialty, it has to be something
you love, it can't just be because, "Well, these people get paid the most," and here's
the reason why. To become an expert, it takes at least, minimum, 10,000 hours in just one
topic, and if you're going to spend 10,000 hours in something, say cloud networking,
you better love cloud networking, because you're going to have to become great at it,
so we recommend first picking something you love.
When you finally do, 80% of your training time should be becoming great at that one
technology you pick. You want to be known to be the best, you want to build a brand
as this capable, strong, competent expert in your field. Do this, and the world will
start coming to you. So initially, 80% of your training should go on the tech piece
and becoming especially competent, but you can become the best in tech, but if you can't
communicate it to someone, it's meaningless, so not only is it important at this point
to become great at tech, the other 20% of your time should be spent on the following.
Presentation skills training. You're going to design something as an architect, but you
have to present it back to the customer. Business writing. If you're a cloud architect, a solution
architect, or a tech professional in general, you're going to have to do a lot of writing
to communicate your designs and ideas to others, so you've got to be great at it, because you
could have the best design in your head, but if you can't present it and you can't write
it, you're never going to get it to come into action, because you're going to have to get
the buy-in from the decision-makers, so you're going to have to be able to communicate to
the decision-makers.
Now, 20% of your time should be spent on executive presence. What executive presence is is when
you walk in the room, people see you as a leader. Why is this important? As you move
up your technology career, you're going to be doing a lot more presentations, and you
want people to see you an expert. You're going to be taking customer meetings, and the customer
must believe you're an expert, so you're going to have to have that executive presence.
Now, when you're building your tech career, as you start to accelerate it and you get
known for your expertise, you're going to be put on really complicated projects, and
in many cases, these projects are going to be something that no one has ever done before.
I can tell you, I've spent half of my career doing things that no one's ever done before,
and the one thing that saved me is emotional intelligence.
See, when you're emotionally intelligent, you can control your emotions, as well as
manage the emotions in others, and when you're emotionally intelligent, you'll be able to
build a team of people that don't work for you, but you'll be able to build this team
and together design really incredible solutions. See, no one person is a single-man army or
a single-woman army, it takes a village to really do anything great, and the same thing
with architecture or your tech career. So if you're a cloud architect, a solution architect,
or a tech professional in general, these emotional intelligence skills are going to be necessary.
Now, as you're moving up the ranks, learning to teach is going to be important. Why? Because
if you're going to be an expert, you've got to mentor some people along the way, other
people will know your expertise this way, but also you're going to know things that
others don't, and you're going to want to design a solution and no one's going to understand
you if you can't teach, so teaching is going to be there. And finally, the last thing is
business acumen. When you interact with an executive, you must speak their language,
are they talking about capital expenses, operational expenses, just to name a few, so really that's
there.
So in the first five years of your career as a cloud architect or a solution architect,
80% of your time on tech, 20% of your time on leadership. Now, years five and on, this
changes. For the next couple of years, until say 10, you're going to really focus 50% of
your time on communication skills and presentation skills, executive presence, emotional intelligence,
those types of skills, soft skills, and 50% on tech. You're going to do that for the next
five years or so.
Now, once you've got 10 years' experience, now you're in these principal architect roles,
and you're a hybrid business executive / technology professional, and you're really doing great.
Now if you want to further escalate through the ranks this way, and it's totally possible
and I've done it, more towards those enterprise architect roles and these bigger roles that
are much more strategic, now your development plan needs to change again, now you're starting
to look like an executive.
Even though you're still on the technology side, you're looking like an executive, so
say after years 10 in the architecture world, 80% of your training and development time
should be working on these executive skills, your presentations, your business writing,
your executive presence, emotional intelligence, teaching, and business acumen. Because after
10 years as a cloud architect, solutions architect, or enterprise architect, you're really going
to be focusing on the leadership in these organizations, and you're going to be meeting
with leadership constantly. You're going to be working with business councils, for example,
you may build a council of C-level executives that advise you on the things that are necessary,
you may be constantly presenting at industry conferences.
You're going to be in one of these places where you're going to need to present, present,
present, document, document, document, lead teams of people and shape the industry, do
thought leadership papers, because at this point you're going to be recognized as a thought
leader, and what is a thought leader? A thought leader's someone that's very technically competent,
but can communicate it. So this is really your technical career development plan to
stay on the technical side, now what we're going to be talking about is the leadership
side.
If you want to accelerate your career from the technical side to the leadership side,
it's a different plan, so you have to build the proper tech career development plan to
get you from your current place to your future state, and if you want to move to the leadership
side, that's great, and by leadership, we're more referring to people leadership as opposed
to technical leadership like we previously discussed, so let's talk about what it takes
to become an expert people leader.
So if you're a leader in technology, you have to understand the technology. You can't manage
people, you can't manage projects, if you don't know what they are, so your technical
competency still matters. So prior to taking one of these roles, you really should have
some degree of technical competency to be able to understand the process, and it's critical
as a leader in a technical role that you maintain some degree of technical competency.
Now, when you're a leader, your time's going to change. You're going to be delivering a
tremendous number of presentations, and they could be both to your team, to your customers,
and at industry conferences, and you're going to be doing a lot of writing, lots of reports
to write, lots of employee reviews to write, lots of customer things to write, constant
writing.
Here's where your executive presence becomes absolutely critical on the leadership side.
When you present at a conference with thousands of people there, you've got to have that presence.
When you get in front of a group of executives, specifically C-level executives like the CEO,
CFO, CTO, COO, CIO, you're going to have to have that executive presence, and when you're
trying to lead your team, you're still going to need that executive presence, because they're
going to need to feel that you're there, that you're strong, and that you're capable, so
lots of time here. In fact, 80% of your time should be spent on these soft skills.
You really need, as a leader, to learn how to teach. There's two ways to lead [inaudible
00:10:47], there's lots of ways you can lead people, but you can pretty much just boss
them around, which is not what we recommend, or you can get them bought into the project,
bought into what you're doing as a team, and get them to want to do it on their own, and
that's going to come from your emotional intelligence, that's going to come from your teaching, you're
going to have to raise the abilities of your team.
A good leader doesn't just command people and expect to control them. A really great
leader brings up the capabilities of the employees, finds out where the employees on the team
want to be five years from now, and gets those employees to their goals. And in the process
of getting your employees to the goals, you're helping them in their careers, and they're
going to be so grateful, they're going to do such an exceptionally good job for you,
your career's going to accelerate. So I've often felt like when you're a leader, and
at least whenever I've worked as a leader, I try and raise my team, I try and bring everybody
up, and in the process of bringing them up, you bring up yourself, you bring up the team,
and you bring up the organizations.
And when you're a leader, you're going to really look at things from others' perspective,
like your employees and your customers, so empathy as a leader becomes such a critical
perspective, you've got to be able to see things from somebody else's perspective. And
whether this is a customer, important, if it's part of a negotiation, again it's important,
but sometimes your employees just don't perform as well as they need to, and because of that,
your empathy is going to be critical. In fact, it's one of the most critical soft skills,
and it's super critical related to your emotional intelligence.
Now, as this leader, the amount of contact you're going to have with executives is going
to rise dramatically, so your business acumen must shoot through the roof, because you're
constantly going to be doing ROI modeling, you're going to be working with customers,
and you're going to show customers that the cost of your solution is more than mitigated
by the value achieved by the organization, and furthermore you're going to have to teach
the organization that if they invest money here in your solution, that the money they
invest invested here will get a greater return on their investment than if they invested
their money on another investment, because organizations not only have finite resources,
they need to invest their financial resources in what matters most, so business acumen for
the leader becomes super important.
So where do you spend your time as a leader? 80% of your time on soft skills, presentation
skills, business acumen, executive presence, emotional intelligence, teaching. That's where
you spend 80% of your time, but you still, still, still need to spend 20% of your time
on maintaining technical competency, otherwise you'll never know what your customers want,
and you'll never be able to manage and lead your employees because you're not going to
know what they're doing, so that's kind of our flavor.
So now you know what you do for your tech career versus your leadership career, but
I want you to think about this. Realistically, what we're talking about is really shifting
the percentages of time you spend on your emotional intelligence training, soft skills
training, and your tech training. So the reason we're suggesting it this way as you move up
the ranks both technical and leadership, these become the most critical skills, so integrate
them early in your career, make them part of everything you do. If you're a cloud engineer,
it'll still help you, for a cloud architect, it'll be a major help to you, if you're a
solution architect, it'll be a major help. And by the way, if you ever say, "I want to
shift from the technical side to the leadership side," you'll be ready to go because [inaudible
00:13:58] all the skills.
Let me tell you some things we do at Go Cloud Architects for the cloud computing community.
Twice per week, we have a completely free How to Get Your First Cloud Architect Job
webinar, and on this webinar, we'll tell you everything you need to do so you can get your
first cloud architect job. And on every Tuesday, here's what we do, we have a cloud architect
challenge, we invite you to come join us, we have a big party. There's people will come
from all over the world, and what will happen is I will present a technical challenge to
them, and the people will come on this technical challenge and they will design a cloud architecture
to solve my technical challenge, just like you would in the real world. It's a chance
to find out if you're ready to get hired, and if not, by the end of this, you'll know
exactly what you need to do to build up your competency to get hired, and that's free on
every Tuesday.
Most Wednesdays, not all, we do a completely free cloud architect career question and answer
session, and we do this on YouTube Live. You bring us any cloud computing career questions
you may have, and we answer them for you real-time. Again, this is free, we do everything we can
to help you in your cloud computing career. If you've got any questions or things you'd
like to learn about in cloud computing, send us an email at askcloudmike@gmail.com, and
we'll try to make a video for you. We can't do every one, because we get large numbers
of requests, but we will do our best to try and make a video to answer any questions you
may have.
If you're working on AWS certifications, we have a completely free AWS Certified Solutions
Architect Associate e-book and course, the link is in the description below, and if you
are looking for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect professional certification, again,
we've got you covered with a free course, the link is in the description below. And
if you're working on AWS Advanced Networking certification, or networking knowledge, we
have a completely free AWS Advanced Networking course, the link is in the description below,
so it's all free to help you in your cloud computing career.
I want to thank you for the opportunity to connect with you multiple times per week with
YouTube, we absolutely love the cloud computing community, and we look forward to seeing you
in another video very soon. Take care.