Cloud Career Training (Student Success Story | Cloud Career Tips)

[Music] welcome everyone i am so excited to be here with romanic ivan tamba today a brand new cloud architect and we're going to talk about his story and what a wonderful wonderful fine young man he is an inspiration to us all but before we talk about that i want to let you know some really exciting news the team at architects is so concerned about your ability to get your first cloud architect job that we want to give you any type and as much of cloud computing career training as we can and my team has been working really hard 40 of us have gotten together to put together the next aws certified solution architect professional ebook and if you've never worked in tech before it's the great place to start and it will take you all the way through beginner of your journey through your cloud practitioner certified solution architect associate and professional all in a single book and guess what it's completely free my team has built it for you the cloud architect community the cloud computing community because we want you to know how to get your first cloud architect job so this is going to be free cloud architect training from the go cloud careers organization for you my team has done it you're going to meet all the 40 people they're going to announce their names coming up soon they're all amazing cloud architects you know cloud architect job training includes writing it includes presenting it includes designing includes everything so we're going to show you how to write in this book and it's going to be written like a cloud architect in that executive summary format so you learn how to write as well for a cloud architect because that's a critical cloud architect job skill today you know we're going to have a very special discussion you know people know me because i make videos on how to get your first cloud architect job and i love it and the reason i'm so passionate about this is i didn't study tech i studied medicine in fact i worked in internal medicine for a while loved it i like tech more and when i woke up one day and i wanted to be a network engineer i went and did what everybody did i went and got a whole bunch of certifications i got an mcsc c certification a ccna certification a ccnp certification a ccda certification a ccnp certification and then i went apply for jobs and the employers were like yeah so who cares and that was with three professional certifications and i did something that was very different i asked 50 recruiters from all over the country what is the perfect network engineer that you desire they told me and i became that and i was hired instantly and not only was i hired instantly i went from practicing medicine to be the lead architect of my team at the world's largest internet service provider in six months and the reason i'm saying this is any of you that want to be cloud architects enterprise architects solutions architects network architects cloud engineers go do it you can do it i've done it others and we're going to introduce you to yvonne in a minute you know people call me every day and they say mike can i be a cloud architect and i say tell me about yourself and they want to tell me that they've been programming for 10 years and all this other tech and all this tech and they say does that make me a good cloud architect and i say i have three questions for you how hard are you willing to work and they say what i say how hard are you willing to work the next thing that i say is are you willing to change your thinking because you've come from engineering you've got to be focused on one thing but an architecture has got to be a big picture are you willing to take more business approach and more leadership approach learn to write learn to present learn to do roi modeling and those kind of things and if they say i don't want to do that that's not tech i say well that's what we architects do so you know when in something like that you know it's up to you anybody that wants to become an architect can become an art cloud architect and that's why i brought yvonne tamba here evon is what i consider the world's best success story he is a hard-working motivated exceptionally good person he's so hard working that he graduated high school at 15 years old back in cameroon and then he spent three years or so trying to figure out how to get to the us and he worked hard for that and that's not easy i have a tremendous amount of friends that have come here my family as immigrants and i know how hard it is to come here legally and he did it then he got to the u.s and of course you come to the u.s you're not rich so he went to community college for a couple years he worked serving food which is a hard job i did it when i was college in addition to being a paramedic while i was in college he then commuted 90 minutes back and forth to school each day and then took my 500 hour cloud architect career development program and within four months is now working for aws and it's not like aws just hired him from an entry-level job they hired him as a solution architect and they liked him so much just so much that when they hired him they said we'd like you to start now but we understand you're graduating in a few months and we'll wait for you so this is why i want to meet yvonne romano romanek ivan tamba 24 years old never worked in tech before and one of the best cloud competing companies in the world is willing to wait five months for him now that's not the technical knowledge he he's got technical knowledge but it's because of his attitude his energy his enthusiasm his integrity his passion his business knowledge his business acumen that's why that's why he's so good that's why they waited five months for him because they're lucky to get someone to be caliber they're lucky you can go and search thousands of people but to find one yvonne is really hard and i want you all to know that all of you can do exactly what ivan did if you desire you can be cloud architect an enterprise architect or any kind of architect you want or any career you want romanic did it i did it i worked three jobs when i went to college i worked 80 hours a week when i went to college full time you know what it wasn't fun but i did it i've got students doing it all the time full-time jobs you name it they're doing it and yvonne is one of those amazing amazing people so yvonne would you can you introduce yourself oh yeah well thank you very much for this wonderful presentation i mean first uh it's an honor for me to be here today to share this platform with you i remember like during the summer when i was uh watching all your videos to prepare for the different exam and then now here today is sharing this platform with you it's very pleasure and also hi to everybody who's watching right now so uh my name is ivan tamba um i live in atlanta and you sit in united states uh to give a little bit back uh to give a little bit of like detail about my background i was born in cameroon it's a beautiful country in south africa in central africa uh i was on the fifth on the fourth of a family of five um i graduated from high school just like my say uh the age of 15 uh in 2012. i spent three years back home and then at 18 i was able to get to the united states uh i started a community college but after my first semester i lost my sponsor and i was out of college for for one semester but i got a chance to meet some amazing people in my in my church and a very amazing couple who decided to support me and that's how with the support of community and those people especially and with my input because i was also working on the site to get some money i was able to go back to school in summer 2016 at that community college where i spent two years after that i transferred to georgia and georgia tech uh to push in my uh my education uh uh college education in computer engineering uh while georgia tech i was mostly focused on hardware right hardware programming uh uh microcontroller and other stuff i've never i mean i was aware about the cloud but i was never interested about it until july 2020 when someone introduced me uh to the cloud at the time aws was giving those free uh eight hours training for cloud practitioner and the person told me to go take this hour you know uh that i would learn about cloud computing so i decided to take the training and i was very i mean i was amazed by by all the other trainers especially the job title because some of them were like i'm a solution architect i was for aws for 15 years and i was like wow it's recent architect what is that for me it sounded so so fun right so uh so special and they seem so smart i was like i wish one day i can become a solution architect you know because and but for me i i didn't see it as something that i could achieve because they were talking about having the 12-year career 15 years i worked there for 12 years and then i moved to aws i was like wow wow yeah that's too much for me so but in january of this year i decided to learn more about cloud computing and since i was since i already did a little bit about aws during the summer summer 2020 i took on january the 5th my first cloud of certification was microsoft azure azure fundamental i took it on my on my birthday it was like a gift to myself and and i got it and during the summer i was like i'm going to go more deep into the cloud so during the summer summer 2020 2021 this year i took the microsoft uh the first sorry the aws associate and professional exam and that's when i i came across a bookcat architect through watching through youtube and i started watching all mike's video and how how he was i mean what told me about mike was the fact that he was very knowledgeable about the technology but also the simplicity you know that he has i mean and i was like wow i wish i could you know i can i can have the same thing to be able to explain stuff so so simple that's how after getting certified i decided to join the google architect uh program to deepen my knowledge of cloud computing and i i started a program i think it was a little bit early early september and through the program i learned a lot about social skills and motion intelligence about how to present also a lot about networking data center but some stuff that i didn't have a chance to learn on all those certifications and with my hard work and the understanding content of this program i was able to land a job at aws as a solution architect that's a little bit about me yvonne you said a couple of things there that are pretty interesting we did provide the training that i hope was excellent um but you did the work and you know when people say if i if i come and do the class will i get hired and i say that's on you and i say i provide the training i try to motivate you i provide a family of 500 people that work together and interact in so many ways of the best people i i know i said but i can't make you do the work i can't make you show up in class i said my students that do they get hired all the time you know yvonne tamman's the perfect example three people actually got hired in that same way but the point is is it's just he did the work and that's really the case but he mentioned a couple of things a family sponsored him to go to school so you don't just sponsor anybody you sponsor someone that you know someone that you look at and say wow this person's got something in them they're good they have a heart of heart they've got integrity and if we just give this person a chance they'll go far places and look what they did they gave him a chance but he did the work they helped give him the guidance they helped give him support but he still did the work he took advantage of it so yvonne was somebody special just for that family to even consider helping him think about that so you know how we treat others how we live our lives affects everything but something else don't be afraid to ask for help seriously don't be afraid to ask for help you'd be surprised if you just ask people will say yes you'd be amazed how many people help you if you just ask so if you have to ask someone for help get some help you'd be surprised i'd be surprised what i've asked people for lots of things lots of people have asked me for thoughts of things and i do what i can you can't always help but you try so you know those two characteristics are really really important it's the integrity now you mentioned you know you're already aws certified solution architect professional but you know did that teach you architecture or was that more of you know the vendors the name of the vendor's equipment and what it does and how to use it but you know you need to step back and look at something else to really think about how to design it um that that's that's a that's a good question mike um i mean when i took the certification and i think it was mostly about uh about the services and uh anyway after even after i was a professionally certified uh association architect i couldn't myself really understand how to design architecture from endpoint two from and control net or endpoint right so and i thought i was to zoom in because i think what is what the training on certification does is that you you zoom in you only know about the services you know you only know about the different surgeries you know about aws per se right but you don't know about the technology itself so uh joining your program joining the global architect program uh that program allowed me to zoom out and to really have the big picture right for example how to connect different services and how for example um talking about bgp the only thing that i learned about bgp in the training for certification was that when you use a direct connection then you need bgp but i never knew that bgp is just like gps right but it's a dynamic writing protocol that's something they don't teach you that or in other certifications and that's something that you told me or the program taught me uh uh so so that's the difference between getting certified and really having the knowledge about about the job and you know for me it was the same thing i became the ccnp and i was okay i've got really strong and it was to get to the ccnp i mean that's a substantial certification so the ccna is 2 000 pages of reading we'll compare that to the certified solution architect professional is 500. the ccnp is about 5000 pages of reading in addition to those 2 000 pages so that's a lot uh but you know the it wasn't enough for the employers and the reason it wasn't enough for the employers it was vendor-specific now i love the cisco training i love the aws certified solution architect professional training and the azure expert training and the google professional cloud architect training it's really great for the cloud engineer because it teaches them exactly what the services and how to build it but yvonne's a system designer he's an architect he's my peer i'm a systems designer and i need to know what those services are but i need to know what all that other stuff is that's the missing piece for me is you know what is the stuff in the network in the data center because that's all the stuff we're moving to the cloud and with if you don't know what the stuff is in the network in the data center how do you move it and that's for me the challenge so you know there's differences between implementation engineers there's an architecture and actual engineering and maintenance as well because these are all great careers and you know when yvonne's here avon chose architecture i chose architecture too i love it but you could be a there's a difference between a cloud architect versus a cloud engineer both great jobs there's other positions in cloud computing like devops which is another great job not if you're an architect but it's another wonderful career so you've got options to do anything you really desire but you just have to want to do it so tell me what what you know i've seen you present recently and i was kind of impressed in fact i've seen you present in front of 90 people most of which had multiple master's degrees and 20 years of professional experience and they were all impressed too so talk about that talk about learning to present talk about learning how to speak with gravitas and power that means so much i mean before i joined the program i think i've never pretty much had a chance to i think i've done some presentation but uh most of them were kind of related to engineering because i'm a computer engineering guy before an administration architect but uh so it was mostly it was very technical per se it was very very technical but i think through a program i learned how to be more executive you know uh and i remember how you you teach us you know you have to be more executive you need to take this to fill in the space right you need to present like the room belongs to you like you're just you're the head of the of the ceremony so i think that's something that i've learned through the program and also how to speak and post because every time you speak uh you you take a pause that allow you to recollect your thought and before saying something else that way you don't run over your own world and that allow you to uh kind of uh have a i mean have uh i mean really pretty put in put in there everything that you want you want you want to see it right to the audience so that's something that i learned through the program how to have the executive presence and also how to the different type of presentation right because association association architect i'm gonna have to present on both from from the executive or the uh an engineer because i i'm the middle man between both like the engineer and and the business people so i need to adjust my presentation skill depending on my audience so that's something that also i've learned through the program i'm really thankful thankful that you you told me that because that's something that i wasn't aware and that's something that you don't learn when you take all the certification right it's only about services why the program is about being a social architect which is a big difference yeah and i i think that's really highlighting the difference between engineering and architecture and they're both really great so what architecture is for most people because they don't know i mean the reason people don't know is we used to have a very clear definition and then what happened is all these vendors came up with certifications called architect for engineering work so we architects really start out at the ceo just like a management consulting you've got to go walk into that ceo and ask them about their business and you can't ask somebody about their business if you don't speak business now you also if you're going to advise that ceo on their business with the technology on their business you have to seem like a ceo because you're their peer because if you don't know a lot how do you advise the ceo of a trillion dollar company or 100 billion dollar company for example how to improve their business so you've got to have that executive presence which he's talking about and that's what happens you know when you make a point and pause i'll give you all an example because this training it's so important to learn that executive presence bgp is a path factor routing protocol that's used to exchange inner domain routing or bgp is a path vector routing protocol that's used for inner domain routing it's the same content the second one has something called executive presence and when i walk into the room of the ceo with executive presence and of course i'm wearing a suit and of course i've got everything you know tidied up and straightened up i've got things i'm handing out i'm one of them same way yvonne is now he's young so he had to work harder see if he was 40 it would be like oh yeah he's got lots of experience he's got some gray hairs he must know in life but he's not so he has to be twice as good so for him the ability to walk in command that room have that power that gravitage in a sequel whichever you want to call um if it's french they'd call it genesequa but i know we've got a lot of french-speaking people in our audience but that's what we're really talking about it's having that power it's having that oomph and he also mentioned relevancy he used the different term but he meant relevancy and here's the reason if i get in front of the ceo that's concerned about increasing shareholder value increasing revenues increasing productivity decreasing expenses increasing profitability etc etc new routes to revenue business continuity planning that's what they're concerned about and if i start talking about ospf lsas or the weight of a bgp of a route coming in on via bgp they're going to look at me like i have four heads but likewise if i talk about weighted average cost of capital to the engineering team that's building it they might not be interested so as architects we need to be really agile because that's our world now if we were engineers our focus is hands-on technical somebody gives us as engineers load this mic and we're like okay now as engineers we're the smart people that have to figure out how to make it work because just because somebody gave you a picture that says build this doesn't mean it's going to work you have to figure out and those engineers are really deep technical so without getting into any specifics i would never ask you to do that it wouldn't be right when you interviewed for these positions was it very technical or very businessy just answer it that way um the interview wasn't uh i think i would say it's 75 business and mostly business and social skills like behavioral and 25 percent will be of technical uh because even on the phone interview because it's like usually aws are three uh the the interview is like three it's like three round if you're going to say you have the skill assessment test the phone interview and then you have the the final one which is it could be virtual or you could be on side and because even in the phone interview is if you have some technical questions or you also have two or three or three three to four behavioral questions and the final one the loop is for interview and three of them are only behavioral and one is technical so it's really focused on your on your your social skills like that executive that communication because um one of the things that i remember is even in an interview uh one person told me that you don't have you don't you don't have to answer all those technical questions right it's just to see your technical breath right but uh but what was more important is to see how you act how you sell yourself the brain and one thing that you you just say about uh you have to go when you're talking about the fact that you have to go in with a suit when you present to executive in the when you apply for job at aws federation architecture they have this culture that they're going to tell you that you know what you you you can come to interview dress casually like we don't mind how you dress the most important is watch your it's what you you have for us right uh but when i went there i was like no i'm not gonna dress casual right because as a social architect if i go see a ceo i have to dress i have to because when i go there to see a ceo i am growing as an adobe station architect so i have the brain on the face of aws so i dress up i mean i overdress and then they were all surprised i was like wow you have a suit let me hold on hold on let me go grab my suit as well they were also pride to see me in the soup right and that and that's important about it is that you have to sell yourself and to save yourself very high and you have to have a beautiful brand and that's very important if you want to get a job as a social architect even inside the job like to sit to be set apart from other social architects or from other candidates so what yvonne just said there is so critical everybody is going to say just be casual but i want you to really think about it and i'm going gonna give you the statistics if yvonne shows up in a suit first it shows he has one secondly he shows he knows how to wear one and he's comfortable in it three it shows that he went way above and beyond to really stand out and four is the statistics here's the statistics everyone these statistics are from harvard not me when you communicate communication as a whole 55 of all the messaging and communication is what you look like when you say something now 38 of the communication is what you sound like when you say something and 7 is the actual words so that means 93 of communication is non-verbal and if 55 of it is what you look like and you put on a good suit you just boosted the percentage so now think about this on an interview for some reason people think the interview is all about how techy i am it's not about 50 of the interviews related to tech skills maybe a little less but let's say 50 because we're going to we like our tech stuff the other 50 is the rest your emotional intelligence your gravitas your likability do they look like you're willing to go above and beyond now everybody look at yvonne right now does he look like he's lazy like he needs a nap no he's excited to be here just look at his smile look at the server right next to him he's got a server next to him he has access to my server he's building his own clouds on his servers because at go cloud architect we make all our students build clouds so we make them build data centers and he's got that over there right now so you can see the charm you can see the charisma you can see the communication skills and even though he's 24 when he communicates notice his hands move he takes up space he makes a pause he feels like he's got the experience of 35. so you know it's that so you know i think it's reasonable to say as part of getting hard as a solution architect you're going to have to give a presentation somewhere in most cases you have to give a presentation don't talk about the contents because you want to keep it fair but you get how to give a presentation right oh yeah uh i i think uh usually the setup the setup for for the raw is you have to give a presentation but i didn't give a presentation but that was because i have a blog and that's something that uh you inspire me to do right when i joined the program i mean i wasn't i wasn't very confident about my writing when i joined the program it was like you you have to write your bodies out and run your bodies about to say so i have a blog and in my blog i have uh some posts about architecture where i took some or what we did in class and then i represented in in my in my blog as a course about designing a complex networking architecture and based on my understanding from microphone interview i didn't have to do a presentation on the final load because when they look at my blog and everything listed there they knew that having middle presentation was useless because my presentation my uh uh architectural design skills was already listed on my blog that's why they went on something else i think you have to do presentation but it might defer how strong you come in and how strong you look so they might try and see where are your weakness right that they won't focus more on on your stream and they're going to focus on your weakness to see how they can build a very strong something like that that's why you didn't have to do a presentation yeah so that's the other secret factor that i like to tell people about most people they work on their tech their tech i'm going to get 15 million x aws certified but that's just the tech and not only is it just the tech if it could be if it's the wrong tech it makes your career look unfocused they were looking for the big picture so i've interviewed for five companies in my life and i'm going to tell you except for two of them i was interviewed on the spot now these were companies that would do 15 or 20 interviews there was something about me they liked because i studied interviews forever that they hired me but the same thing with yvonne you know if you look at the job description that you applied for years of experience doing this years of experience doing this 20 years as a software engineer 20 years as a network engineer 20 years as a security engineer 14 olympic gold medals they were willing to look past it because he's yvonne that's special it's those intangible qualities he wrote a blog he built the cloud architect brand he talked about design in his log it showed the world he's out there he showed the world he's capable you know if you put something on git for a software engineer that's great for an architect that's not good but we architects design that's our world we design we solve organizations business problems with design so if you know design then you're posting things on design or collaborating with somebody else to do it with you you're showing you can do the job he proved to the world he's an architect by doing it it's the same reason my students build clouds architects don't configure anything we just design we don't configure anything the last time i configured anything was the last that was the day i became an architect before that i was an engineer i was on the command line constantly i became an architect and it's like okay my my command line got replaced with an american express so i could take clients out and entertain them for lunches and dinners and speak in 5 000 person conferences and that's what you do as architects you presented big global conferences you talk to ceos you design things you present you do rfis rfps rfqs we still have to have the tech though so the key is just you hate to balance it i love that you did that blog i encourage all my students to build a blog i encourage all my students to do this i also tell my students and it's all free advice for all of you have nothing on your social media profiles that pertains to money politics or religion and here's the reason why every one of us is so similar yvonne campbell who was born in cameroon and me who was born in philadelphia are genetically 99.9 identical you heard me 99.9 our dna is identical and we grew up thousands of miles apart and when we focus on that look at the amazing things we can do now everybody loves us we've got seven billion people that could hire us the second he were to post something on politics that's gonna divide the pie in fifty percent he's lost fifty percent of those seven billion people for potential hiring now if yvonne posted something negative about a political group even not his own you know what me the hiring manager now says this person can't get along with 50 of the population that's different from him which again makes them unhorrible so you know don't post about political things in your social media page if you have them just remove them if you're talking about money unless you're in the finance industry money divides people too don't even bother with it and you know religion's a very private thing for people it's a wonderful thing if people have if not it's not our world to judge but you know if we don't talk about that there's nothing left to divide us we're now 99.9 the same which means we've got access to all those 7 billion people and those 7 billion jobs so i'd say try to work as hard as possible to you know focus on on that part of it as opposed to any kind of political thing or anything that could be divisive keep it to yourself i'm not saying don't have an opinion it's just you know we're architects we're here to shape people's businesses you know how do you shape people's businesses you're positive you look at the future you look for how you can solve problems so you know there's a thought of that so you know because we're all over the place here um it's it's it's uh and that's and for architects that let me tell you something else about an architect strength and then we'll get back to yvonne our strength is our ability to reach out to the yvonnes of the world so here's the thing i've been an architect now for 25 years i know i you'll i'll i won't run into that many yvonnes because he's really special but i know a lot of good architects and over time you know what ivan will happen yvonne's business skills are going to get better and better because i know even and as his business skills get better you know he's the chief technology officer someday soon sooner rather than later i already see it for yvonne i saw it the first day he came into my class the first day he entered my class he was wearing a red sweater it had georgia tech on it and he was smiling and he's waving hi it's michael it's my first class i'm so happy to be here i saw that and it blew me away so he's your cto 10 years from now easy or maybe less so you know i see all that coming so the business piece becomes really important as your career goes up if you wanted to go up don't get more certifications increase your business accounting your leadership skills your presentation skills so talk about how learning those impacted you and how much of a difference do you feel it made on your ability to get hired or not um i think learning the the business skill and all the social skills i think that did play a very significant impact on me getting higher even even on me as in growing as a as um as a as a person you know because i was before thinking before that i was very technical you know i have the ability to i was very focused in the tech but not so much in the in the business side and we all know that um regardless of how many technical people you have in your company at the end of the day what bring mother some money is the business side of it right because you can build something but if you don't have the ability to sell the product that you're building nobody's going to buy it so so i understand that also when i joined the program that's the ability to that ability to sell something right an ability to design a solution and be able to sell it and so uh me focusing on on that uh there's a book that uh praveen i think praveen wanted posted about emotional intelligence the ability to to tune into all the people emotion and to manage that and i remember uh one day uh my sister came by and she was like she was like in the zoom call right and there was one guy they were having a meeting but the guy was able to manage all the people in motion it was a group of developers but he was able to he wasn't very technical he was always putting small jobs to make people feel good and everybody felt i mean it felt good around him and i understand i quickly understood that if i want to make to go very high in in time of results you know i have to uh still work on my technical but be more focused on those social skills the ability to uh be the center of a group to bring people together just like you did while you create this amazing community where you have people from different backgrounds you have people from the network from database people from security even people from even people without background right people just never have a degree right you create a community that environment where everybody coming from different part of the world and from different background feel valuable respected and welcome right and that's something that you already showed me that that's the way to do it right that's the way if you want to be able to become successful not not only as a social architect but also as a human being right so learning those were very important to me and i think that's a play a very huge impact in me getting this job and probably going to have a huge impact in my career you know i had a couple goals when i built this company um one of them was to be able to create a program that would normally cost 50 times more but charge a price that anybody could afford but give something that was worth 50 times more and then with the number of students that are getting hired i know we did it two was i was espresso brand architect in my career and the reason is you know i started my career i was one of the most technical people out there i was one of the world's leaders and i multicast and bgp for years i traveled the world lecturing at every major conference so and i and i realized in my career there was a position open for a director of systems engineers and i said to my manager i'd like to apply for this position my manager says i'm sorry michael and i said why he said you don't understand 20 of the organization's revenue is because of you in your architecture or your engineering work and he said if you lose that and become a manager we lose 20 of the revenue we're out of business and he said so because you've been too good of an engineer i can't make you rise you can't be promoted and i said wait i've worked so hard i put in 17 hours a day seven days a week building this company and doing the best i can and because i've done so well i can't get promoted my manager said yes i said are you sure you're telling me my success is keeping me from becoming successful and he said yes i then called a friend of mine who was an executive coach and she said i told you not to focus only on the tech you're going to pigeonhole yourself so she said here's what i recommend you do she said leave that company tomorrow join a new company instead of dressing like the average systems engineer wear a suit every day finish that darn mba yours learn all these things and she said mike you know the 150 000 engineer that'll be a 300 000 architect in a year you know what it was all that business leadership and that was the change for me and i wanted you to know that and you know why i became more successful because i built teams of the best and brightest people in the world and built a network the expression your network is your net worth and i wanted to create an environment for you guys and that's why i used to interview everybody in the beginning and make sure that we had people that would really fit in and i had people from all over the world from every part in all corners of the world i wanted to put in the best and the brightest so you guys could build your own network and i could teach you how to share and leverage that network so when one of my amazing students evo daika who's over in europe is doing something and you're over in the u.s for example and my wonderful student leo's in brazil and an another student of mine is in nigeria you're all working together at the same time and you're never lost so that way you don't have to focus on learning every piece of tech thing you can focus on the leadership skills the soft skills the emotional intelligence and all those amazing things that's why i was trying to do it so i'm glad you noticed that because that was one of my goals no no you you did it i think that the community is is fantastic i've learned so much from from the community especially i think have been coming into the into the program without uh that much experience you know our i'm still in college right but having the the i think i'll even see the blessing you know to be around people who have like 15 to 20 years of experience in database in security in networking and then when we come down to design that uh that that solution they're gonna start talking about okay this is how the security could have to be right this is why this this is why we use this this is why we don't use this right it's it's completely different from what you learn certification because sometimes they're only going to tell you when to use it maybe you know why you want you don't have to use this in this case like the particularity of its services regarding to the use case right so that's something i was able to learn from the community but also also ability to have all those people cheering up for you right i remember the first time the first time i came in i came here and i have to present i have to do that executive presentation after designing architecture i wasn't able i mean i wasn't able to do great right but people were like no you you're doing good right keep keep going keep going you know you're doing great you'll come you will come you started you started very good keep learning and and that's something that kind of motivated me as well and and i'll see that not only with myself but also all uh every every other people right when they come in they're not really good and then they start learning and learning and learning and they have the support of entire community i think it's it makes you feel stronger and you feel like you're really on your journey and you have people a long time with you and you know i love that and you've been a big part of this community and i don't talk about a lot of the work we do unless we're with you know our friends like i do a lot of work with the war funding group and samoa shang but you know yvonne's even now tutoring people in cameroon because you know at go cloud architects we do a lot of work in developing nations india africa and places with amazing amazing people and you know 48 of my students are now volunteering in cameroon so you know i'm sure my students will volunteer somewhere else at some point in the future but right now he's part in there and he's out there and he's making an impact so the more that stuff he does the more people will know him the bigger his reputation will go in tech i got to tell you your certifications will get you so far like a job interview but your name and your reputation is everything the reason i told you ivan tamba is your future cto is one his integrity is exceptional his attitude is exceptional he already speaks in an executive way and he's only 24 and by the time he's 26 i can't even imagine because i've trained somebody like i've trained people like yvonne in the past i've had a couple of successful super young prodigies like that then and i know where they go but chill is the network that he builds he doesn't even realize it he just treats everybody so well he's he's still in school he commutes three hours a day to school he's still doing whatever he needs to do to support himself and now he's even will help in cameroon students you know pass their cloud practitioner test using some of our materials and doing some on-site tutoring so that integrity that name it it works for you so the advice i'm going to give him now which is the same for you always use integrity in everything you do no matter what the commission is don't design something that's not good for your customer make it work and you won't the world come to you forever but also here's an important thing to know executives you attack an executive pa pay for the tech techies viewer tech is different as a techie i just happen to have right now you know uh a 48 port switch right next to me you know it just happens to be there why is it there because there's a 64 course server sitting next to me and a 24 curve server sitting next to me and a raid array that's sitting next to me because it's the fun afternoon project that i'm going to work on but businesses don't think that way yvonne why does the business buy technology um why is business by technology uh i think business by technology uh because they see the uh the importance a bit of the impact that it can have right in several uh or in terms of in terms of growth um one of the example that i can i can easily take is i work as a as a server in a restaurant right and when i started uh we didn't have that more technology regarding the credit card payment uh also regarding the different tablet that we're using and over the town we have some very amazing border of wine and champagne that we're selling right but uh some of us as a server one didn't have the the ability to really upsell the product to really describe the product to create create that attraction so the customer will have the willing to buy that 500 bottle of wine right so what the management day what the the company did or the owner did is that they went ahead and they bought this small ipad tablet where you have all the wine that we have listed on there and in those and listed with description so that if as a server you don't know how maybe to describe that specific borrowed one which is like 200 that can upsell not only for for the owner but also for you because the more the higher sale you have the better your tips right you can just bring the tablet to the customer the customer will take a look and we read through the manual to see the quality of the wine where where the grapes come from uh the region how it is uh how it is cultivated so everything about the wine and then the customer would be more uh willing to buy that to spend that money on double one and that's technology and that's how you can increase your profit by leveraging a technology so i think they know you have a it's amazing how you can use it uh and also how you can impact that or the impact that you can have on on your on your business ivan that's exactly what i wanted you to do i didn't know how you were going to do it businesses buy technology to solve a business problem so let's look at this because you know when people say i just want to shave money off i mean say that's not an architect so what an architect does is they quantify the problem so the first thing you do is you take the restaurant you figure out how many people come into that restaurant how many people buy wine then you quantify if we could sell that 500 bottle of wine to three percent more people what does that equate to in terms of bottles of wine per year and then let's say you find out that that uh that that equates to an additional thousand dollars or thousand bottles of wine that year but let's assume that the thousand dollars of bottles of wine only 50 percent is profit so of the thousand dollars of wine we have 250 profit from that wine so we would take a thousand dollars times 250 per bottle of wine and we'd find out that that would generate fifty 250 dollars of business value now because we know that that generates two hundred fifty thousand dollars of business value if the technology cost three hundred thousand dollars is probably not a good investment for the business in fact technology cost twenty thousand dollars it's an extreme opportunity for the business they spend twenty thousand dollars they get back 250. that's a 12x return in one year that's an incredible return on investment capital so the reason i'm saying this and the reason i wanted to walk you through the whole thought process is that's what we architects do we have to figure out what is the opportunity then we have to think about what problem we're trying to solve then we have to solve the problem and we have to prove to the customer that the solution is less expensive than the than the problem and that's what we do so mind you we as innovators we start with the business and then we design the endpoint and then we work our way back the technology is how perfect allen hell is to solve a problem and where engineers and architects are different engineers like the tech so much look i just told you the tech that was right next to my house there's lots of engineers doing me but we like the tech and we want the tech so you know people are like how do you get somebody to move to the cloud i'm like is it the right move for them they're like cloud's great for everything i said i don't know i didn't run the business al analysis i said i love the cloud it probably is but let's look at the customer let's look at their business let's look at their traffic patterns let's look at where their data is let's look at the technology investment they have their network data coming in and coming out and they're like huh because but that's where we do the business piece from and that will ultimately determine our end state what are we trying to do what are we trying to achieve so god i wish i was 24 years old in a year your world right now that's just so exciting for you so i know there's going to be a lot of people that want to ask you a lot of questions and i want to give them a chance to do that so let's do this if you guys have some questions ask some questions for a minute i'm sure it'll make ivan think about some few things too but we love having you all here so let's ask some questions and let avon do anything we can to help you because i want others to know yvonne did it you can do it too yvonne is fantastic and exceptional but all of us can be exceptional if we want to so ask some questions from alan howell hi yvonne from cameroon cm2 southwest i really love that line in the photo too have some questions if you have some in the chat box we'd love to hear from you at some point we'll ask you where you're from but not just yet because we don't want to lose the questions in the chat box i have a feeling we're all from all over the world and i love that rachel hal how do you get in touch with yvonne from cameroon i would well i would think linkedin is a great place to start but avion um why don't you yeah i think you can yeah you can uh connect with me through linkedin uh if you just type ivan tomba in the linkedin search box i think you you will find my name on it and then just uh just uh send me a message from there and then i will be able to connect with you there you go well i mean instantly people are reaching out from youtube i love that he's already in honor integrity caring about the world you see why i brought ivan on i have people that get tired every day but i don't bring them on um because you know it's what we do oh uh i think uh the best way to reach my blog no i don't have the name here because it's event club but it isn't the platform is hashnow i think if you reach out to me on linkedin i can provide you the link to my blog because my name is not it's not fully listed in my blog because i i leverage a platform so i'll tell you what post your blog on linkedin and i will share it to the world so more people can see it since i have a pretty big following and i want more people to know how great you are thank you for by the way president jim who other than training what kind of book do you read in order to improve leadership and communication skills okay well i'll tell you what i like and then yvonne and yvonne things that he has as well i like any of the work from goldman on emotional intelligence malcolm gladwell actually usually has some very good content that's out there personally on leadership i i i would listen to anything john chambers has to say he's one of the best technology executives and leaders i've ever met in my entire life i had the pleasure of working for for him in his organization for 10 years everything he ever said or predicted always seemed to come true so i would learn a lot about leadership i would follow john chambers i actually uh subscribed to the i've watched and still agree with some of the things even though a lot of people don't from the ge jack welch management strategy days many of us management people were trained there i would also recommend reading some books from seals on leadership seals typically have a great level of teamwork but they also understand something called situational leadership which is basically right now let's say i'm designing an architecture the global big picture that's me but i'm going to have a big data person let's say it's my friend praveen and if it goes to big data it's like praveen you're in charge now until the big data is over and when praveen's done with big data and i need a security person i know this guy jim jim i need your security piece and i'll just aggregate it together so in the military world they're really good at that so i like some of the work from the seals truthfully when it comes to emotional intelligence you know the work of goldman is great there's another book emotional intelligence 2.0 that's quite good but emotional intelligence is about controlling your emotions as well as somebody else's emotions see the first part is managing your own emotions first so you know there's some things that we use we use some cognitive behavior therapy but then i have extraordinary training in that for my medical world we use certain types of breathing we use certain types of meditation exercises and we use the work from goldman and we use the work from others so you know anything on emotional intelligence is really great uh there's a book on why business people speak like idiots a highly highly good thing on on simple communication especially good for technology professionals that feel they need to string a thousand and one buzz words um i would say those are some good things uh we read constantly but those are some good leadership books that we like how about you evan um yeah that's a that's a good question about how to improve the communication skill uh one thing that i did i didn't particularly read a specific book on leadership communication skill per se but what i did uh actually i just as you say earlier talking about goldman i watched a lot of video of goldman and youtube because i was very interested by by the by the person so i watched a lot of this video on youtube and uh i mean you can find a lot of stuff on youtube about communication skills but well i think what uh i did that have a significant impact on me learning was practice and what i would use in my phone i have this uh this thing i put it i put my phone right there and i kind of interview myself and i watch the video i interview myself and every time i interview and as i was watching how i sound like do i sound executive enough do i sound more technical or ask myself myself a question for example why aws like why did you choose to work for aws that's the type of question that i'll ask myself so you have to practice how to practice a lot and then by recording myself i can watch and see all the imperfections and how to tune them regarding or according to to my audience right so that's something that i i did then and also watching a lot of video on youtube angelic from from goldman i watched a lot of from from another video from him i love that yvonne you know i actually have videotapes for my days at cisco where an executive coach was recording me and then going over things so i totally totally remember these things like yesterday so excellent excellent great advice for everybody out there you've got cell phones you've got something record yourself you know engineering interviews are telling me about this tech tell them about this deck architecture interviews are present so uh kind of one of those things chris you want to bring in the next question did our champion how do we get in touch to learn more about the go cloud architects program theater we'd love to speak with you um we're going to give you a couple ways to reach out to us first we're going to do something nobody would do on youtube we're gonna put our phone number down and our phone number is plus one nine seven three eight nine six four eight eight nine chris will pop it up on a banner and we'll also chris from my team will pop it in the youtube chat window chris will also pop a link to the course if you're interested and he will even pop a 20 off coupon into the link and he will be posting that inside of the chat window and if i'm correct chris if you could take care of those things i want to make sure we do that but did didier we'd love to speak with you um give us a call you can find us online you can connect to us on linkedin you can connect to us on uh yeah i would say linkedin you can leave us questions and comments on youtube as well or you can email us at elitetechcareersgmail.com and chris we'll pop that in the chat box below and we would love love love to speak with you and you can call us on whatsapp as well if you're from another country we use that number as whatsapp as well as a regular phone chris let's get to the next question i looked like i saw some popping in which i always love you're muted crease yeah i've got new assignments so okay i gotta get this stuff out oh sorry about that chris anyway i so here's the thing chris is like mr amazing he's my chief operating officer and i'm asking him to run a show post comments in there and then bring uh and then bring new things on here and sometimes i don't realize all the magic that goes on behind the scenes all right all right a lot there's way too many hats to run and none of this will work and nothing would work well without chris so chris thank you for everything okay here we go that is a great question from pierre de salt who's over there in canada what did a typical day while you were preparing look like meaning before you were hired okay well that's uh that's a deep question so i'm gonna start a little bit back uh from from the summer when i was when i was preparing for the switching architect associate i mean when i was yeah i wanted to decision architect associate and professional exam uh usually uh during the summer i worked like 35 to 40 hours four weeks like seven seven shift and the day that i wasn't i i wasn't working i was 39 uh nine hours so usually in the morning i would take wake up i would wake up like like a 7 am sometimes 6 but i started to study at 8 00 i would study for two hours take like a 20 minute break then study again for two hours then take like a 30 minute break and then one hour that would take me five hours uh before uh before like 3 p.m and then in the evening dressed at around seven of eight and now sorry for another three to four hours depending depending on the day but that was like nine uh eight to nine hours but the day that i had to walk because i usually walk on on the afternoon like at 4 pm i will only do 5 hours i was doing prior to the professional exam the certification the professional aws certification exam i took the entire week off and then i think i studied for like 50 hours because i was studying eight hours every day and i was only starting and i was every day and the last thing i studied like the day before the examination like nine hours so that's the way i was studying but i was taking two hours 20 minute break two hours 20 minute break and when i started i put my phone all away like i even removed my instagram and stuff like that to be very focused uh when i was preparing for the interview i the recruiter sent me the different type of material that i have to study or to be prepared for the interview so what i did i went and did some research and i came up creating that 25 pages for technical interview and i think of three pages for the behavioral and for the 25 pages for the technical interview uh i was i did i think i i i memorized everything i think i memorized everything uh but what the way i was studying was pretty much the same but it was very different here because it was during class time and at the same time i have to attend the brokered architect program uh but it was pretty much the same thing right when i was commuting for example i was going to school when i was commuting i didn't have a chance to watch uh the video because my classes last like three hours i didn't have to change because it was on monday and friday and those at the beginning that's like september october the the class was a morning and friday so what i was what i did the three hours that i was commuting i used those to go over the video the the different video that mike did post on the on the on the google architect website and then i have my notebook somewhere here i have a small notebook where i was i was taking design in the architecture it was good because while i was in class i couldn't post like zoom zoom call you can post if you understand something but when i commute i have the chance to pose if i don't understand something and maybe do some google search to really have a deeper understanding of what my other uh uh other um student is talking about and that way i was considered moving on and that's how i was pretty much learning um even during the summer i remember when i was i think i told you that mike i when i found you i was preparing for the professional exam and i was always listening to your video i'll have you on my headset when i when i was riding my bike to work and then as i was listening to all the video that you have about how to prepare for the for the uh uh for um uh for the job uh interview that's how i listen to all those videos so i was constantly like emerging myself into into into the the technology and into the field yeah you know yvonne i'm gonna or pierre i'm gonna take yvonne's what he told you and tell you what i did since i did something similar so i had been a really hardcore engineer i mean hardcore engineer and when i was told hey by the way um learn all this businessy stuff and it'll change your life i took every leadership course finished my mba i was working in new york city and my mba program was two miles away from the delaware border way past the philadelphia airport it was about 120 miles away 130 miles away i'd leave my house in princeton new jersey or six o'clock in the morning i would drive to my office in new york city to be say there at 8 30 in the morning i'd work i'd leave around five then i would drive for four hours to get to delaware and then i would drive two hours home so that basically gave me upwards of six hours of drive time every day so in my mba program i went through every business and leadership book you could find all on audiotape well those days there were tapes and cds but you know so i'd have a stack of cds i'd literally go through a book a day and that's really how i got my professional development and it made all the difference in the world for me so i love that creativity so they say necessitivity is the mother of all invention look at that adaptability the only time he had to study was in between his other study was you know driving but he did it so you know i've had a lot of jobs in my life i've had a lot of careers in my life i had an injury a couple years ago where the doctors told me i would never walk again and that all i had to look forward to was extreme pain and would i like a morphine pump now or later and i said no morphine pump i'm going to be going to physical therapy and i don't care how hard it marks and i'll do whatever i need to get better you know i'm not perfect i still struggle every day to get through the day physically but you know what i can do it and now i've got thousands of people all around the world getting jobs so the point is there's people that make excuses why they can't be successful and there's people that look for reasons if you think can you do it the answer is yes you can if you think you don't have enough time you do look at what ivan did he had it and i promise you that schedule is busier than 99 of the populations but he still did it i did it i literally went to school seven to three and i worked 3 30 to 11 monday through friday and tuesday on thursdays i also worked 11 to 7 which made me late for school those two days and i worked the 16 hour day on saturday and sunday managed to get a 4-0 in school while working full-time so any of us can do it now by the time i got done school was i miserable yes did i write all my papers in the back of an ambulance after depositing my patients at the hospital um and not the whole time yes was it fun not one bit but the point is you know i built my career so excellent chris you want to bring in the next question um how i come across the opportunity um what i did i did some i did some some research on on different uh aws job uh because that that was my that was kind of like i mean it wasn't my target at the beginning they became a target when uh i felt that i was technical uh my technical competency was kind of a very very high i i would say so i just searched through and then i found a job on the aws job portal and then i went ahead and then i did apply but what happened i think i did apply for i think was like maybe october the 17th of the 18th but nothing was moving at two or three days i didn't have i never received anything from any recruiter saying that i was moving to the next step so then what i did i went on linkedin and i talked i emailed i think i probably sent a message to like 15 in the build recruiter i said like you know what i'm ivan tama i'm harley i'm highly energetic highly motivated i've i've i've spent the last year of my life learning about cloud computing i spent more than 20 hours per day learning about cloud computing uh i really like technology and data in data center this is my blog i wrote a blog i put a link to my blog can you please take a look at my at my at my work and then i would like to connect because i did apply to this job and nothing's moving i think i send that to 15 reporter but one recruiter did reply and then but she was like a like a senior recruiter type of position and she was like yeah i uh you find interesting but i'm not a recruiter adapt to your type of position what i'm gonna do send me the job id and then i'm gonna i'm gonna pass it down to that or to the person while managing that that position and that's how i think i sent her the link on it was on a sunday two days later i was moving to the skill assessment uh assessment test yeah so he created the opportunity so you know as an architect you need sales skills and we trained him heavily in sales skills we also told him what managers want and a lot of those things were in there but he took it upon himself to go find it nothing is given to us you got to go find it that's you know that's really the thing and you know that's why i said earlier all you have to do is ask you'd be surprised how many people say yes you ask a hundred people even if 99 say no yeah if one says yes you won so i mean the key is you know i learned everything about our careers in life revolves around ourselves and if we don't think we're in cells we're just lying to ourselves let's say we're working in a company and we're now a cloud architect but we're not tied to sales and your manager says here i need you to go build this and you're going to say or design this you're going to say design this and then he says yeah and if he says and you look at this thing and see there might be 50 million dollars of big data in it and 30 million dollars in networking in it and 20 million dollars of web apps in it and the only thing you know is cloud networking which could be fine you're gonna have to go design this and what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to sell the management to let you borrow the people to do it so no matter what you will always be selling and if you work for a company and you want to design an architecture you're going to have to sell the manager to buy it because otherwise they're not going to buy it businesses don't buy tech they buy solutions to their problems so no matter where you're at you're going to be selling so i love how you did it you wrote the blog i'm going to give you a little more advice for the people that are out there and listening because there's two ways that you can make a post where you can reach out to someone and the psychology of these two is really critical and one really saddens me when i see it and one really excites me the first example of what not to do is say please help me i've been rejected by this person this person this person and i really need a job please help me please share this with your network the reason i don't want you to do this is if you can look into the work of robert caldenia and persuasion people only like things that other people want so the second you say i need help i need help nobody wants me is showing the potential employer not to hire you and i we all want to do that if we're all struggling we want to paint it that way by comparison i'll give you the exact opposite when we first launched this company everybody knew me for networking i could start a ccie class tomorrow and have 50 000 people in it because you know i've been teaching networking people i helped coach sometimes people the engineers at cisco when i did se training there i did see training in another company so i've been teaching people forever in tech when we did a cloud boot camp we didn't have a lot we didn't fill it up on our first time so i started looking for other people that i thought could use the opportunity and i saw that day i saw a marine published on linkedin if anybody is looking for a good hardworking person that wants to help you in your business please consider me i've just left the marine corps i've been working in tech in the marine corps and i want to work for you i looked at this post and i said this is it i actually saw this post i liked it i commented on it and i sent this person a connection request and i called this nice young marine and i said you know what you just left i'm running a boot camp as it turns out i got a couple of empty slots come free he comes to the booth for the weekend and in the end of the week we had a two-day interview session he does the interview session now i was teaching cloud architecture work he wanted to be more hands-on tech within two weeks he was a cloud engineer the point was his post i want to go out there and help you which is the same post that you made yvonne so when anybody wants to reach out to people what's in it for them not what's in it for you kind of keeps that out there evan what we're going to say i think what i also want to say is that uh i mean when you when you email a recruiter or when you send them a message to a recruiter know that a recruiter job is to bring more people in and the more people they're going to bring in the more successful they are so you want to let them know to show them that you have you're going to have had a value that you hundred percent sure that by taking your resume and moving forward you're going to be in right and that's something that i i i i wrote in my message and i was like i am the i'm the host that you can bet on and you're 100 sure you you will win that's why i put it in when i was reaching out to each those recruiters so i was putting a strong message that i am the candidate that you need i'm the person that you want for this job so take me but not begging as you say but pretty much ali allying all my uh all my knowledge through posting the link to my blog so they can have a look at all my work and and judge me based on that exactly yeah and that's the key and i know we've got a lot of questions but he showed it what was in it for them he reached out look you can see i've done this you can see my capabilities he provided proof he provided evidence he had a blog just bring in the next one but yes i love that that's why you're successful you'll continue to do that throughout your career and that will continue to make you successful ms lamin jammin do you feel like having a computer engineering degree was an advantage to you in the process how did it help you if at all um that's a interesting question uh i think uh having computer engineering my degree and i'm gonna have a degree in me uh kind of background of knowledge i think it did help right uh maybe because some different type of projects that i did work on or maybe also can also uh type of um i can say you know when you work on some different type of project you kind of uh uh your way of thinking right kind of change right because it depends how how can be the project uh so that's something that i kind of get from uh that computer engineering a background that that i have like a different type of product i work on and how i was able to think outside of the box right that's something i was able to translate into a solution i could take a job because when you have a project sometimes the project is from from scratch you have to build a project right you have to think outside the box that's something i have to translate but the thing is you can think after the box not only from computer engineering background but even from the sales background right because when you have to sell something sometimes you have to be think outside the box you have to come with something different from what other people are proposing right the same thing when creating a project where the market is already competitive you want to bring your own project in the market but you want to have the product be competitive that's something that i've learned in the computer engineering and you can learn it from anywhere else right so your background here i want you really it doesn't really matter let's see because i'm not going to implement anything from the computer engineering that i have moving on right but what i did could help me right better figure it out or better thinking outside the box to solve solutions or to bring solution to all those customers and that's something that you can get from any any field and one more thing from islam and jammin i want to make this clear right now yvonne does not have a bs in computer engineering he has an associate degree so he will have a bs in computer engineering and iuws was willing to hire him now he asked them to wait so he can finish his degree so it's not like your degree really mattered because he hasn't finished one yet and i want you to know that he's just that good so we can always say i have the wrong gray i did the wrong this but the point is it doesn't matter he hasn't finished the degree it was his characteristics that were so great chris you want to bring in the next one blue chair what was the most easy part of your journey that's that's uh that's that's one of my main that's a very interesting question i'm so happy he's here then thank you for everything you've done for yvonne uh the most easy part of the journey um i think the most easy part of the journey was to uh believe in myself believe that i have the ability to do it because really go out there and do it is very different from believing that you can do it i think that was the most the most easily easy part believing that i have the ability that i have the capability to get a job at aws that i have the ability to become a station architect just like a new station architect that a year a year ago i watched them teaching me on the cloud practitioner free aws boot camp right i think that was it was the most uh easy part of the journey believing in myself excellent excellent excellent violin thank you so much bloat dj what websites do you recommend for building your personal blog um uh i right now i'm using uh i'm on two different platform um i have some posts on hash node which is my main uh the main website that i'm using hashnote and the other one is tealfield i mean i was approached i think a month ago by some people from tealfeed i think they found some of my work on hashnote and they asked me to bring those until fit so they want me to start posting until free so you can find me on two different platform hash node until field but um i'm saying like the platform doesn't really matter right because what matter is the substance that you have in your in your blog right because why not in my resume i have my uh on top i have my linkedin i have the link to my linkedin account and the link to my to my blog so it doesn't really matter the platform is is irrelevant what is more important here is the substance that you have in that blog as long as you put the link on your resume and the recruiter can click on that and go into your resume and into your blog and see what you've done i think that's a that's it yeah i'm going to add one thing to that russ dj when you put a blog out and you put a link to that blog make it the best thing you've ever done in your life because here's the thing you're going to be pointing employers to this blog saying this is me and this is what i can do for you so if you're like me and you make spelling errors hire an editor or find a friend that can know the difference between a comma and a semicolon and where and where or your and yours so whatever the case is make it good make your graphics good remember you're using this to say i'm an architect this is you this is your brand so make it really beautiful great question ross chris bring in the next one how do you nurture your creative mind as a cloud solutions architect i think we can both give you give me an answer for that yvonne why don't you go first and then i'll do it um how do you know to create your mind as a creative applied architectural architect i think the first thing uh and that's something that i do um in everything i try to implement in my life i always find what are the ways what are the different problems right for example i'll take one example um right now on my senior design project uh it's about building uh uh a vested tracker so early like in 2002 as a professional camera circum player will die in the field while playing soccer right and early this uh last summer chris and erickson a soccer player from europe almost died in soccer field so when uh in september when they asked me at georgia tech what idea can you propose for this exam project i was like how come we have all the soccer players dying or almost die in a circle field and we have all this technology and we're still not able to um to uh to remedy something like that so my my idea is simply to build a vested tracker right that can measure so-called players speed heartbeat and hermit a very low distance right the iot device is connected to aws in real time and through aws we do some analysis and there's a dashboard where the coach or the medical staff can have and monitor the soccer player in real time so that's an idea that i have for sure there's already some product like that in the market but i wanted to bring something uh different from a different perspective so that's as a social architect you always have to find when what is what is the problem right what is the problem and what solution can i bring to solve that problem that that's how i always look at look at life you don't look at life looking at solutions we look a lot like kind of problems and how you can bring solutions to those problems exactly now let's think about that so periodically in medicine we see a dilated hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and it is almost impossible for us to find it and we typically see it in a young 18 year old athlete in college whether it's a basketball player a young soccer player football whatever you call it and if somebody could find that that would be really really amazing so that's a really neat project you find a couple of cardiologists to work through that and you could have a billion dollar solution so if you need some cardiologist you know or medical advice just let me know i might know some medical people because i i think you've got something really there so mess lamb and gentleman for me it's a matter of settling down and taking a step back i was a martial artist my whole life but i don't practice martial arts anymore i can do yoga after the injury so i practice yoga or meditate i take a deep speck back i'm relaxed then what i do is i i basically take a white board and i start literally circling the problems so i can see all the stuff and all and then i'm not i won't say another problems i take another step back do a little more meditation i start thinking about what are the levers i have into each problem and then from there i try and think to conclusion okay if i do this what is that's impact on this this this this and this and then i pop it in and put whatever decisions i need and i do that for every variable until i'm done and then typically then i walk through the logic again and then proof of concept test it so that's how i do it because there's all these weird factors that are in there and if you're focused in or really staring at it you can't see it so i have to come on and off and on and on because as soon as you see the problem for more than 10 minutes or 20 minutes and zoom in on something because you got to work on the out the details on one thing you've lost your focus in the big picture so it's better if you can always be the leader and have a bunch of people to help you with it but if you can't that's what the process is come in come out come in come out take a break take a lot of breaks okay so chris has got a lot of stuff let me let chris pop in some of the things he wants to do z struggling and second guessing yourself with learning material right now i'm so sorry to hear that um i haven't been doing the coursework lately and i've been focusing on the csa associate course is that a bad idea z absolutely here is the thing you know even if somebody's a certified solution architect professional let's say they are and honestly if i wanted to i could get anybody to pass that exam in two weeks with now zero knowledge i could put into the exact practice test or exact copies of the exam everybody knows it and that's how people get 10x aws certified in a year the problem is the job of the architect is to go start with that client and ask the client about their business and then figure out what are the solutions and those solutions are going to be technology solutions network solutions data center solutions not ews solutions or not google solutions are not azure solutions they're going to be data center solutions data center technologies and then what you need to do is map those data center technologies to the appropriate technologies equivalent technologies on the cloud so if you come back to the class and you do the architecture work with us you'll be learning the make picture things you know what is dust storage and how does the storage work how does this database work when do you use a nosql database when you use apache cassandra versus mongodb when do you go serverless when do you not go serverless those are the architectural decisions how do you set up your routing and none of that's covered in there so please come to class let's focus on the things you need and if it takes you three months six months nine months nobody's rushing you you finish when you're cloud hired to give you up to a year take your time interact do some labs with your fellow students i bet you if you just posted right now an channel in the career development group and said i need a little help i bet you would get 50 people that would love to respond to you within five minutes i see it every day so that's what i would do so focus on the course and when you know the tech and then uh okay so chris if you want to bring in some of the next content that's come in just add something mike to that uh to uh to see uh i was in a view of uh i have i was interviewed by six different people at aws right for getting a job and only two of those people had uh the professional exam some of them only have the cloud practitioner exam certification so it's just and i was amazed i thought all of them will have the working as aws because all of them was regional architect working at aws but only two of them one of them was even a manager but only only one of them only two of them about have the professional certification so that's just to show how important knowing about the technology the importance knowing about the technologies is compared to uh all the certification especially the the the services one and you know what well while yvonne had a chance to speak i actually went through the comments many of our fellow students reached out to z already and you haven't even done anything with our slack channel um our slack channel and our 500 people actually have more activity than some of the other chat channels that have 30 000 people that people talk about we get more activity and our messages get done faster so please don't worry about the certification worry about learning two months three months six months nine months ten months i don't care just come to class and be successful nobody's rushing you the students already reached out to you here and i bet you go check your slack matches when you come back lots of my students are there and i know some of my students that are leaders that actually help run the family like evo doikey and others probably send you a message in two minutes so z we love you come back noel mike's program does a great job of getting us to understand how the cloud works without worrying about certifications i think focus on the course and you'll be more comfortable in thank you noelle yes there you go you've already got a response from another student i couldn't see the responses because i was trying to talk to you but right there that fast um you've already got responses oh well like mike and yvonne mentioned i think sometimes when we focus too much on the certifications we get too zoned in and learning on the jargon and that makes you feel overwhelmed yes exactly noel robert we're thrilled to have you here thank you thank you robin do i need a technical or cs background to get a job as an architect absolutely not i used to practice medicine and uh and yvonne is still in school the reason i'm staying is still in school is not because i want to make light of what is education i know how educated he is i speak to yvonne every day he hasn't finished school and he has more knowledge and some phds i know but the really issue is i want you to know that he hasn't finished yet to know that you could do it because on paper he doesn't have it yet he just did it so you can do it um that's the reason and a couple months from now you could be hired just like yvonne that's true you don't you don't really need that uh technical or cs background you know it's just about really learning about about the technology so when you go to the interview uh if you have ability uh if your technical competence is very high then you can uh you you will get a job because one of the things that uh one recruiter told me it was that i have more than enough technical skills for the position that's that's why one of them told me so you don't need to you don't need a technical background or cs background to get a job as an architect in fact i would tell you that i would think the best backgrounds to become an architect are business finance economics and potentially psychology and the reason psychology is if you truly understand how people think you you're in a good position for management positions i would say the best preparation is not a computer science degree it's all it's something on the business side because the technology what we learn in school is typically how to code or things like that we don't we're so far away from coding it might as be it might as well be a different career i've never coded a thing in my life in my 25-year architecture career but i do presentations every day i do roi modeling every day i look at supply and demand curves every day i look for workflow and process redesign every day i read financial statements every day i look at balance sheets every day those are the skills that we need so you don't have to get them an mba program you can learn them on your own but don't worry about it there's nothing holding you back chris bring in the next one roll panicker as long as you keep moving you are goodsy raul is another one of my amazing students thank you for reaching out to z um z will be wildly successful please everybody go out there for z royal panacorp my question to yvonne is what type of cloud architect prepared you for networking security database or infrastructure did you pick a type and did you focus on a type um that's a that's a very good question of how uh i've nev right now i haven't picked a type because i'm just going to be like a solution architect but i'm i'm um i'm go i'm sorry i'm going to uh i'm going to focus more into security that's uh that's a area that i'm very interested in and then not something that i'm going to really be focused on again but right now i'm just situational architect i don't have it i don't have a a type to say you can figure out where you want to be miss lam and jamin do you plan on getting more certifications in the future like a specialty why or why not uh getting more certification uh probably um i don't think so maybe i don't know yet but i'm planning on getting an mba because i want to more focus on on the business side because i've noticed that uh companies are run by business people and even people on their own company they have this business knowledge and and my uh my goal is not only to be a social academic entire life but is to have my own uh consulting company uh as a cloud consulting company so i think having an mba will help me along for a lot will help me uh to accomplish that so maybe normal certification but mostly uh uh getting an nda smart smart smart decision so this is why yvonne is gonna be there i will ask him his search in a minute i like typically a professional in the cloud and a professional industry or maybe two professionals on the cloud and nothing else here's the thing once you reach that point you can get 50 more certifications and it won't make your salary budget dollar your technology only gets you so far your intelligence quotient only gets you so far what gets you above that the difference between 150 000 architect and a half a million dollar architect is leadership skills business skills emotional intelligence communication skills not an eleventh certification i could walk it into the ceo's office of a bank and say i've got 20 certifications and they'll say might get out of my office or i can walk into the ceo of banks and say i can help you earn an additional 20 billion dollars this year the way i can do this is i can make your algorithmic trading system have lower latencies and you'll be able to process a trade in nanosecond faster than your competitors and with the volume of trades that you place that could be an additional 20 billion dollars a year a year and it'll only cost a million dollars for the solution that's what i need to do that's how my career grows it doesn't grow because of another certification it's irrelevant at that point but yvonne what certifications do you have i have uh i have the microsoft azure a 900 microsoft azure fundamental i have the aws associate solution architect i have the aws professional switching architect i have a scrum master certification i have an ibm data analysis certification and i have a i also did a tnt uh training academy uh yeah so that's a i think i have like five five or six certifications but no more though my eyes mostly focus on on business acumen so an mba and then yeah and which one certification got you hired out of five which one was the one that got you the interview i think it's probably the professional because they were they were all kind of amazed to see that even before graduating from school i already have a professional like like i say i went to all the different uh linkedin profile other people interview me and only two of them out of six are professional exam doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that they can't take it but it's not easy it's not like an easy example right so i think that's something that really they were kind of like um amazed when when they saw that yeah it does it's the big ones and the other ones are just like little flies know exactly if you have too many of them like he he's fine now he's young but if you have too many of them it will lower your salary because they'll make you look unfocused you become the certification junkie not the architect chris you want to bring in the next one i oh well i've got i know a lot of ios uh some students i o some friends io so io so wonderful to have you here um good to have you yvonne what were the challenges in your initial first month on the job so io um he hasn't started yet he interviewed with aws aws made him an offer and they hired him they wanted to hire him today and he said but i haven't finished school yet could you wait for me and they liked him so much they said yes so when is your first month my first mom is uh john i will start doing the sixth but yeah just like you say uh uh normally i was supposed to because my first offer later said that i have to start uh uh december 27th so this this uh this december but i told him that i that i needed to to get my degree so the global high manager allowed me to get my degree so that's how they were able to push my starting day to june the 6th there you go and what i'm showing is there's no reason he hasn't finished yet and they're they're waiting for him five six months who waits six months for somebody it's because he's yvonne chris bring in the next one miss lam and jam and actually this is a great question what did you learn in yourself your journey about self-discipline what are the highlighting moments of fruits from your self-discipline that shaped you to be a better leader did you blog help your discipline that's a lot of um uh uh my journey about a discipline so uh what i found is very interesting is that um for this job or maybe for anything that you want to accomplish in life i think the most important thing is that the two most important that you need i would say uh dedication and discipline uh because i think being genuinely born with some high level of iq that's something that uh we get right we don't really go out and learn about how to get an iq right but the dedication and discipline is something that we can incorporate in our daily life and to to reach greatness so discipline was it's a very important factor and that did play is to play a big role in in and in me or playing big role in me getting the job or even me in my entire journey um one of the things that i always found is that if you're really disciplined if you know what you want and if you know a different type of sacrifice and step that you have to take to go up or to go where you want to go you will you will get there right some people around you might not understand the different choices that you make right maybe the different sacrifice that you make because i remember uh sometimes people complaining to that okay you als you're only working right you don't have time to enjoy life or you don't do this you don't take vacation like i never taken any vacation some people were taking i was like no i still have to work but now i'm going to take some right and then they're going to be paid because when you work for a restaurant if you take a a month a week of vacation you walk on the clock so you you don't get paid you don't get any money you only go out and spend more money but now if you work as for example adobe station architect you take vacation and you're still being paid so there's a different type of sacrifices that i decided to to make and that's current discipline right one of the thing about discipline that i found out is um or did i did implement was um the way i would the way i was studying right that two hours of studying 20 minutes of breakthrough i was 13 minutes of break right that also did play a big role in me getting there because i was able to really be focused for two hours taking time to relax and then going again so uh discipline is very very important factor if you want to start to succeed that's what i think i mean it worked for me and also a a dedication because that what will set you apart from other people um maybe not on a short one but for sure in the long run you're gonna have a big impact i think that's great it really is dedication and its discipline and i will tell you i've trained more people that i can count i can't i i haven't lost count i always ask people how hard are you willing to work and here's the reason it's not the smartest person it's not the 4-0 student it's not the person that comes from the richest family i mean it could be but it's the person that works the hardest it's the person that wakes up and focuses when they get to the office they focus on the one thing they do their training they focus like a laser on one thing it's not like you know if i go to the store you know i go and buy the one thing people that go shopping they walk in they look around they look around they look around and by the time they leave it's been two hours and they haven't found what they wanted and if that's your idea of fun that's it but like i don't have a lot of time so when i need something it's like okay if i have to go to that store and i can be in and out in three minutes i save 57 minutes for that hour that i can actually work so the discipline the discipline the discipline um ms lam and gentlemen it takes me three hours every morning to be able to walk i have a neurological condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy i can't use my foot in the morning i have to literally work on every joint and it feels like fire and a bed of nails and i do that for an hour just to be able to get down the stairs then i've got another set of physical therapy and that i do and then i sit in a room that's 130 degrees and i stretch for an hour just to be able to be on a nine o'clock call so discipline is the secret for all of it and never trying to find an excuse making not looking for anything well do i not have this do i have this just you know jim like no matter what my life depends on it i'm going to do anything i need you to win that's the secret that's what yvonne did chris you want to bring in the next one y r r m 4 x go cloud architects you're telling me no programming knowledge when i look at architect roles every once once terraform and powershell bash i'm telling you in 25 years i've never written a script i'm telling you that my students that work for ibm those are working for bearingpoint those are working for accenture none of them are coding i don't care at all what's in any of these job descriptions because that's not what architects do i actually posted a video chris has the link for this video because these job descriptions were so ridiculous and so bogus gartner who evaluates everything in technology literally started asking cios why do you want the cloud architect and they said things like people that can lead the cultural change for cloud adoption and develop uncoordinated cloud strategy find talent with the necessary skills yrr m4x you may never configure or touch the management console or your command line in your entire architecture career i haven't in 20 some years of architecture and guess what my working architects haven't touched a management console once in six months or a cli we architects go to the ceo we go to the customer and we ask about their business we spend a tremendous amount of time trying to figure out their business then we come up with an end state which includes technology and workflow redesigns and that's what we do and then we figure out the tech across multiple clouds data centers and other things i don't code i don't configure according to cio magazine cios don't want their architects doing that that is what engineers do and if you start looking at these positions those that want all the coding and configuring they have an architect title but that's not architects and they don't pay architect salaries either they pay engineering salaries so you've got the choice you can be the kind of architect like me that functions at the ceo level more of the enterprise side of the cloud architect where you could try and be that technical architect which is an engineer and you've got a choice for either but realize that if you try and get a bigger engineering bigger architect job and you tell people that you can code and you can script and you know terraform they're going to look at you as not an architect because they're going to say you know how to build it i don't need a builder i need a problem solver i need someone that can look at the big picture i can look at someone that can do an roi someone that can evaluate the cost of the problem i need a management consultant and you know what when i do management consulting and i do architecture it's the same and management or strategy consulting we asked the customer what is your business goal what are your pain points what are your challenges are you trying to achieve what are your competitors doing what problems you're trying to solve from there i look at all the business opportunities we have from a business perspective pricing pieces more sales improved productivity and the technologies that can change that and then i come up with a technology solution whatever it's going to be and then i have to sell that back to the customer present it and as soon as it's done there's a team of cloud engineers that are going to go build it and if it's infrastructures code they're going to hand it to a team of devops engineers which is another type of engineering so no i'm an architect i'm designing the solution if i'm a pilot i fly the plane i don't hand out the drinks at the same time the flight attendant keeps the people safe the pilot flies the plane i worked in i worked in before i would practice medicine i was a nurse when i was a nurse i took care of the patients when i when i practiced medicine i went in i evaluated the patient i made a diagnosis rose some orders and the nurse carried out the orders why because i can't be looking at one patient and treating another patient at the same time you can't be in two places at once and if you focus on both things you'll be a bad architect not a bad engineer so if you want to be an architect focus on architecture things if you like the cloud engineering work on cloud engineering work is really amazing work do the cloud engineering things but no matter what you've got to build your brand your brand determines the jobs you get if your brand is all tech that's great go do tech work that's engineering if your brand is hybrid business tech now you're not here an architect my people go on these interviews they're not tech interviews how they're they're not at all they're mostly behavioral they're a little technical did you have any was anything super technical no and and just to to pull up to what you you're just saying uh because in the job description as listed on on the on the on aws website it was mentioned that uh a qualification requirement for the candidate to have some knowledge of maybe they have like c c plus plus or python or java so i thought they were going to be some programming as some as some uh some um maybe on the final round so i went ahead and and i brought this big book about how to crack the program the coding interview and when i was preparing for the final loop the the recruiter same other different material that i have to to work on and now i was like i don't see coding step like calling interviewing when when is a coding interview she was like there's no coding in it we don't have coding for for architectural and i was very amazed because in the job description if you only go even now on the website it is listed some knowledge or some knowledge of c c java maybe plus plus python stuff like that so i think it really depends they have a cloud architect and a cloud engineer that's a very tough a different uh role of position they're very different and then we're going to bring in a different kind of question and i just want to say this a low performance company gets 3000 applications for a single job a good company that everyone has to go to gets more than five thousand so hr will put up a list of things to look like roadblocks to keep other people from applying but that doesn't mean you shouldn't apply it means master architect skills be really good at your job be so good at your job and if they ask you about your capabilities to do somebody else's job just say you know i've not had the opportunity to learn that technology yet but i'm highly motivated highly energetic and highly enthusiastic and if it was critical for you to be part of your team i would go above and beyond to learn it but i need to be honest with you it's not my expertise but you know what i'm an expert on this this and this and then point them to those things but be an expert on it be able to wow them with depth show them you're good we don't need a jack of all trains and a master none that can't do anything we need somebody that can do the job so just be good at what you do nobody expects you to know everything because you can't know everything chris you want to bring in the next thing and while we're having fun if you're here and having fun type hashtag cloudhire and please while you're at it hit the like get some algorithm keep the algorithms happy everything we all do is algorithm wise these days let's have some data science fun please hashtag cloud hired hit the like button forward subscribe that kind of thing mesh the cloud architect thank you yvonne for sharing your story it's inspiring me please may you speak about the aws interview process as a whole and specifically luke okay so mesh and mesh is an amazing amazing cloud architect and a wonderful person yvonne may have some limitations into what he can describe so we'll work within the constraints of the non-disclosure agreements and what's appropriate for yvonne not because he doesn't want to but please understand there are things that are appropriate and things that are not and we want to make sure they get to keep that job okay yeah so uh thank you matt for the question like just like might say uh aws make you sign a non-social agreement before the interview so you actually don't disclose what was in an interview right so you don't have other candidates or something like that um but i can only give you the highlight of the surface about the about about the interview so the interview is like you have three different uh three different uh steps uh the first one is the the skill assessment test on the skill assessment test the century does scale it could be an hour to an hour and 30 minutes it's just to see how uh your technical uh knowledge which is not very technical and also i mean the technical and the behavior right how you behave in the type of real life scenario right working for aws for example how you can incorporate all the affordation principle into your your tax into your daily tax that's something that they want to see i also want to see uh how uh your technical expertise right by asking you some questions related to cloud computing right uh the second round is a fun interview the phone interview mine lasted uh 45 minutes it could last more like up to 90 minutes depending on on candidate uh and also the fun interview also have some questions regarding the fortitude principle like the behavioral principle to see how technical competent you are also have behavior all right i'll see how you behave and also how you can handle some uh real life scenario situation and the last part is the phone is uh the loop uh the loop could be either in person or it could be virtual uh it just depends on what i decide uh but the loop journey is like for interview it was four for me but it could be four it could be up up to seven depending on the position because for senior position for example seven but mine was only four and in the low um it was one technical and three behavioral for example or something that i can say but i cannot really give you much more detail about uh what was in there because i have the that limitation but mostly behavioral yeah and because i'm not bound by the same limitations mesh i can say that you need to know those leadership principles there are 16 of them but there's 14 of them that are really actionable by you or anyone else and i made a video on those 14 leadership principles chris from my team can pop it into the chat box so you can see it mesh but you've got to know that and uh just keep that chris if you want to bring in the next one ifoma thank you yvonne for sharing your success story randy do students get recordings of the classes so randy i guess i'll explain what we do in three ways we have three components to our training we have a live training session that we do twice per week on zoom and it's live you ask questions we all architect we all do presentations it's really great time but we do that together live via zoom now for people that are not there we record it and we post it to our portal so people can watch it ending time just like yvonne did so of course students get copies of it so we have a live lecture component to our course now we also have a video lecture component to our course we have hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of videos in that program things for you to do career plans to build self-development plans to do presentations to build architecture lessons to do designs to do and you do them on your own you watch those videos on your own and then you turn in the assignments via slack and we give you feedback on them because we've got to make sure we train you it's one thing to learn but we need to know you're learning correctly and that's how we look and we check because we're checking your homework on on slack and we're also seeing you in class now there's also a lab component that's part of our program where you vpn into our data centers and you build you work with server virtualization containers firewalls vpn concentrators the lamp stack for example active directory and you'll even build your own cloud all of our students build our own their own clouds look these aren't really technical jobs but you've got to be so technically strong that they can't question you don't know anything so build those strong technical fundamentals so you can prove you have the experience and then we focus the career on the stuff that gets you hired and paid more which is the leadership piece so that's why we do that so those are the three components in our program and we don't care where you come from meaning if you've never worked in tech before in your life i'll get you hired it typically takes us about eight months to take someone from never working in tech to fully hired and for people in tech it's typically about four months three months or so for networking and data center professionals four to five months for software engineers that kind of thing but you know it doesn't matter as long as the person works hard as you can see you can do it with no background and you can do it with heavy background happens all the time hope i answered that question chris you want to bring in the next one you know hello yvonne congrats how long have you taken the course with go cloud architects and how has the course impacted joe oh hi mono how how are pronunciation thank you for the question um i started the goku architect uh program um in early september just after getting the professional certification i and then i think i i started my first uh the skill assessment test with aws in it was october the 30th so i would take three three to four month because i was still learning why i was going into a different step of the of the interview process so yeah tweet three to four months um the impact i mean wow the impact that the program has on on uh that the program has on me is it's amazing i mean it's very significant if i want to say something like that because i knew everything about the aws thermal services through the all the different certification but i didn't know how to connect the dot right that's something that was that was missing um even on top of how to how to design a security like out how to secure vpc in the cloud i was i wouldn't be able to do that even though i was i was professionally certified so that's something that i learned through the program another thing for um was uh talking about networking right you don't learn about networking when you take all the certification so i learned about networking in into the program but the most important what i think is social skills and most intelligent how to present because every time i was like can you present about this can you present this architecture okay present this to a ceo present this to cto present this to to cfo right so that way you you know your audience and you know how to tailor your your your presentation or your speech right regard according to your audience and that's what i learned through the program right also that emotion diligence how to learn how to tune into your audience right and that's something was important because mine was always saying when you go to an interview you have to find a different kind of i would say point where you can tune into your interviewer so you can connect with the interviewer right and me going i was like uh me going into the interview i was like i have to be able to make them to make each interviewer laugh at least two times because if i can make them laugh at this two times it means i've been able to create a connection between us so that's something i've learned to the program you have to create that that click to connect with the interviewer because once you do that the chance of getting higher drama uh increases exponentially at a time because some people go to interview they'll be very shy right they'll just answer the question and they won't be just answer your question and then they'll just sit down just wait right they will be very shy they will be like very in the box right kind of scared but you go there as this is your show right it is your show and you're the one running the show right the interviewer just ask your question it's my show i'm running the show and i can bring it i can drive the show i can drive that car the way i want it the way i think about it the way i want my show to be to to be driving so that's something i learned through the program how to drive into in the interview how to make it your show so yeah and you know this is mike and you know we put about 25 000 of soft skills into our training program we just charge a day's pay for the cloud architect the reason we do it as follows when it's your first tech job and you've got somebody with three years experience but they're not your favorite but they've got three years experience and somebody that's never done it before that speaks well that presents themselves well that has business acumen emotional intelligence leadership um executive presence now look where they're at see what happens is it's 50 your technical abilities and it's the other 50 of those other things now as it also turns out you know you know when we start looking at certifications and salary you know good certification typically speaking can add about ten thousand dollars to someone's salary to a point soft skills training on average raises someone's salary by 35 percent so for an average cloud architect that's an additional fifty thousand dollars just on soft skills training and when you start thinking about the impact of emotional intelligence in regular jobs not these executive high paying positions but in regular jobs people with more emotional intelligence aren't about thirty thousand dollars more than others so you combine those two things together you're dealing with about eighty thousand dollars a year benefit now that's why we train them because we're looking for the career thing but we're looking for that higher ability because when you look at yvonne you just want to hire him because he makes you feel capable when you talk to him you know he knows when he presents himself he doesn't act like he doesn't know i feel him and i feel trustworthy and i also feel like he knows what he knows and he knows what he doesn't know and if i give him this project and he doesn't know he's going to do what ivan would do he's going to he's going to be thankful and say mike going to take a little longer because i want to build a team and i'm going to say thank you when i leave that room he's going to politely raise heck he's going to be calling everybody he knows and he's going to build the team and by the time it comes back to me it's going to be extraordinary because he knows his limitations you know what i would do that same thing i know my limitations too but that's the reason why we businesses feel confident in him so that's what you need to project and that takes you from having no experience and being down here where somebody else is here to being on top and winning they're waiting five months for him they want to hire him now he hasn't finished school yet and they're waiting five months for him that's the reason chris bring in the next one i want you all getting cloud hired so i just want you to understand the secrets behind the scenes vnhg question for yvonne and mike what are the benefits of having a flexible or rigid five-year plan as a solution architect i think mike can start with that one okay so you know the nhg here's my general position in life i build a plan for everything i also build the backup plan for everything and then i realize that no back no plan ever survives contact with the enemy so i adapt i improvise and overcome so the nhg what i would say is build yourself your five-year plan and put good reasonable deadlines on there started out with real reasonable goals and measurable steps along the way now when you approach it and you try and execute on the plan you may find out that the thing that you thought was going to take three months took you three days when take three days celebrate the victory and run towards your goal or in the next goal and move your timeline up or what you might find is by comparison it's nowhere close to as quick as you thought it would be and it takes you twice as long so here's where you got to dig deep here's where it's just when your mind and your heart here's where you just gotta keep fighting until you bite through that barrier where you push that rock away and then you celebrate that victory for a couple days and then straight back to following that plan but along the way that plan may change for example we always analyze the market i've been telling people for years only learn multi-cloud and we've taught multi-cloud i've told all my students never learn a vendor learn the cloud we'll get you certified in one but you're going to learn how to do it on anybody and i meant that but i told people for certifications for first job it's got to be aws or azure and the reason i said that was google was only ten percent of the market or five less than ten percent of the market so if you need managers to hire you do you want fifty percent or 10 with all these aws outages for example now these google certifications may become a little more valuable because more people are going to realize that that single cloud which we've told them about for years is reckless and a single point of failure now you know their cloud and maybe they start using google and i think they will so now that google might be a good thing to study better than it would have been i've changed my recommendations why because the market demographics changed the data changed and as soon as the data change as soon as your customer's requirements change you have to change so for example if right now they want technical architects you got to focus on being a little more technical if they want more leadership architects like me which they usually do focus on that so you've got a plan but you've got an adapter plan along the way so keep it keep it flexible so um so that that was a very uh interesting way to play the mic um i just want to add something uh to vs the nsg of a few years ago or maybe like years ago i i read a book about from from harper the the title is a letter to a young brother and in in the book he's constantly uh talking back and forth with a young with a young boy who has who doesn't know what he wants to do with his life right and he'll hopefully gonna give him some advice how he can be successful and in the book he say you have to be an active architect of your of your life right you have to be an active active architect of your life and being an architect is that you have to need it you need a plan right because under that thing you have to design that that plan right so having a five-year plan either rigid or flexible it's a good thing right but you need to have a plan that's the first thing because if you don't have a plan then you then you will just be like you just follow the wing right whatever blows just gonna go there but having a point you can after a year or two after a month or two you can assess how am i doing am i moving forward am i am i not moving forward what did i do wrong what how how can i better this but i didn't do right the last time because just to take an example uh regarding me during the summer my goal of the summer was to have the professional the associate and professional adobe certification i took the professional associate on july the the second and i started studying for the uh professional on july the the fifth and my goal was to get a professional before the starting of our classes and we started school on it was august 22nd so i took it august the 20th and i remember that my goal was that like close to the professional exam i wasn't i didn't feel ready that's why i took an entire week off from from from my job so that i can get that exam because i was like i have to get this before the beginning of classes right because that was my plan it was a summer plan to get those both certification so if if i wouldn't have those if i didn't have that that summer plan like having those i've not been okay maybe i don't i can take a letter or maybe i can take it during the break christmas right and maybe i wouldn't be here today maybe because maybe the the wanting me so bad or maybe my my resume was brought forward because of that specific professional certification i'm not saying that's the only thing that maybe that they play a big role on it so having a very rigid plan of five years ten years is very important not only for that role even for your life wisdom from yvonne i mean it wisdom um you wouldn't know he's not 35. and you know it's funny one time in my career i was i was yvonne yvonne and i are very very like communicated in the same way we both you know worked really hard for something you should have seen me go through school i just uh i see i see a lot of the same things i forget where i was headed with this but you know the wisdom that i remember i was at a dinner one time and my manager who was 45 says i'm still the youngest guy here right and i was 34 and i was ready to say something on my mat my coach friend kicked me don't tell anybody so yeah you see that kind of wisdom in a 24 year old by 34 he's a cto bring in the next question gene thank you congratulations on your accomplishment wonderful thank you even yvonne thank you for your wife's word very calm present speech an approach that matters a lot eva i have to say you surprised me in a pleasant way every single day of the week um as do many of my students but you do in so many ways thank you for your kind words and yes yvonne's wise words are absolutely amazing chris you want to bring in the next one jane ferdinand yvonne you mentioned understanding the technology as being important did that include networking and linux if so how did you go about preparing yourself on that um okay thank you john for that question i think understanding technology i just might say is is is very important although uh during the interview for example uh it's not very it's not that much technical it's more on a behavior but showing that you have a technical competency play a big role because it can easily set you apart from other candidates on how i learned about networking and linux for example and how prepared i was to the program because before that i was mostly focused on interview services to the console right or terraform for example uh i haven't yeah i have my server so i i bought a server on by uh to my recommendation to have a server if you can have your server and your own cloud on it right do your own lab on it so that you can post that on your on your blog right so that you you know about the technology you're passionate about it that completely that sets you apart from other candidates so on this server i have a vmware exercise i provide an install on it and i have some virtual machine some linux virtual machine i don't have windows virtual machine on it i only have linux because it was free right but you can have some linux from windows on it as well that's how i was able to very get acquainted with linux and learn more learn more about linux because the program have a lot of lab you can either perform the lab by ssh into my server and do the those or you can buy your own server and do it from from from my bedroom like like i like i did and that's that's how i learned about the networking also through the to the program with different different courses and having a server i got to tell you i've had them throughout my career i mean i actually have 10 24 core servers in my house some of which are in openstack cloud some are vmware esxi servers that doesn't even include any of the things that i need to use to operate this business so yes having a server in your house is something you'll use you want to study some networking you install ev eng on it then you get to do some networking build a cloud build an active directory server build a bunch of linux things get used to everything because then you can say you know what it is because it's one thing to be able to click a button and install a mysql database then it's another thing to set up the server to build the server install the operating system set the memory set the storage install the patches disable unnecessary services enable it and then you understand what goes into the data center actually yeah if you can hit the like button that would be really great miz on ripon do you have to be aws certified to be hired no in fact i have friends that have very senior architecture positions at every cloud provider and they have no cloud certifications whatsoever now they usually do have a strong strong networking background and some have an enterprise architecture background but no you don't need to be certified to get hired you need to be capable to get hired the reason we use certifications and everything we do mizon is we use certifications to help somebody get a job interview no hiring manager cares if you're certified or not certified but if you have a certification that makes the hiring manager think you might know and we use those a specific set of certifications to get you the interview with the hiring manager and then after that it's more about can you do that job so the certification is do you know the name of the service and how to configure it but we architects never configure anything in fact we're all system design which is totally unrelated to the certification now cloud engineers do what's in the certification so let's kind of keep that in mind so when it really comes about as this build your skills learn systems architecture learn the network in the data center learn how to give extraordinarily good presentations learn how to do some roi modeling focus on your leadership skills your soft skills get some really great tech recruiters we use tech recruiters in our program we use tech recruiters to get past hr because if we can put you in front of directly in front of the hiring manager they can choose to hire you and by doing that by using tech recruiters we can bypass some of these things so hope i answered your question there chris you want to bring in the next one the nhg i've applied multiple times for aws and haven't heard anything from them it's very discouraging vnhg yvonne did not apply yvonne reached out to recruiters vnhg we choose we tell our students not to apply for jobs directly when they have no experience and here's the reason the recruiters will the hr recruiters will instantly kick it out they won't apply let anybody through that has no experience for the most part but if we can find the actual recruiters and we can plead a case to the actual recruiters the recruiters and i'll explain to the recruiting process we'll send you directly to the hiring manager and once you're in front of the hiring manager you can prove that you're the right person for the job so here's the process vnhg i call let's say i'm a hiring manager and i've done this i've just interviewed 40 people that hr sent me hr wants 20 years experience and a million and one skills so now these people they know python they know sysops they know devops they know terraform they know scripting but they don't know architecture but so now these people come up to me and i interview them i'm saying not an architect not an architect not an architect not an architect now i've just wasted 40 hours that i don't have so what do i do the hiring manager of the nhg i call my favorite recruiters and i typically call it excel in new york city and i typically call steve our krillian or christina mariano and i say christina i need a cloud architect really bad i need a really good presenter a highly emotionally intelligent one with strong technical skills that also knows networking but most importantly i'm concerned that they present christina says mike i'll get back to you christina then looks through her rolodex and stack of resumes and she calls somebody like yvonne and she calls somebody else and then she says mike i've got two really great people i've got ivan tamba he's awesome he's went through some amazing training he works hard he's dedicated you need to meet this guy he's special he lacks experience but mike you need to meet him i'm telling you you're going to love him and then they say i've got this other person doesn't have the personality not the charisma not the charm not as motivated as yvonne but you know what they've got 20 years experience in data center networking technologies in five years in the cloud i think you should talk to them too then i interview both and i say okay i've got the tech guru over here and i've got yvonne i like it von i'm hiring yvonne so then what i do is i call hr and i say i'm hiring yvonne i'm gonna then tell yvonne fill in the application he's then going to fill in the application i'm going to call hr and say i am hiring ivan but i like yvonne so much i want to pay him 1.3 times the average person due to his emotional intelligence and leadership skills hr says fine they come back with a package i then call yvonne tell him he's hired he says yes and he starts working now he's going to be happy nine months later yvonne is promoted to senior cloud architect because he did such a good job and that's what's going to happen now about a year later he could potentially get an auto rejection email from hr sorry you don't meet the necessary requirements please come back when you have more experience because that's very common but meanwhile he's still working there so the play is vnhg we can't use traditional memes when you don't have experience we can't go through hr still apply but we've got to use recruiters and that's why we have 300 recruiters on that network for you guys but we also want you to build your own recruiter network so go out there and start finding recruiters polish up those linkedin pages polish up your resume and go out there and find recruiters tell the recruiters how you can be the best cloud architect for their clients the recruiters get paid twenty to fifty thousand dollars to find you a job they wanna help you find a job leverage people they get paid to find you a job to do it it's not only your own journey the nht chris you wanna bring in the oh yvonne do you wanna say yeah is that like uh i did like i said i can say applied but nothing was moving so i started reaching to multiple records from internal customers from aws and that's how because when she went to when i emailed they recorded a job description two days later i was on the skill assessment test right so it just to show that on the on the hr level they have so many recommendations and they have those uh they do some algorithm so maybe if you don't have two or three of those recommend of those requirements then your your resume will never pass the hr but maybe because they will never take a look at your blog right maybe by taking a look at the blog they're going to see that wow you have the competency for the job right but maybe someone just like might say yes all those python or all those cloud computer software uh all those 20 years or 10 years experience then you're going to pass the hr but you're going to this talk on the interview because it doesn't have that solution architect uh uh or in in him for example so by going by always trying to reach out to a recruiter on linkedin and when you reach out to them don't go there asking for help but god and showing that i have what it takes i am an amazonian you don't know yet but i am one right and i have to have to work for you i'm the person that you're looking that you'll be looking for for for so long so sell yourself very high and and i think they're going to take a look at your of your resume right so it's not like you just applied and didn't and you got discouraged you got rejected a few times or not responded to a few times and you kept going hire me hire me because of this look at me notice me so whether they rejected you or not i'm not saying they did but the point is is everybody's not going to hear back you got to fight you've got to show them that you're different you can't be one of 5 000 people because then what's going to happen is you're leaving it up to the technology systems in their algorithms algorithms don't tell you the yvonne study eight hours a day for six months trade they don't tell you that they don't tell you the way he speaks they don't show you the way he writes when we just use algorithms we miss the big picture that's why in architecture they've got all these little technology things aws house and they all have them how to design your architecture how do they sign your systems you can't use any of that anything that's auto magically designed doesn't take into account workflow process redesign how to change things the business it's just arbitrary it takes the human side so that's why we need to be human and that's why keep going bnhg keep keep keep going it takes a while chris you want to bring in the next one miss lam and jammin are you a visual learner what are the visual learning hacks you came across that help you absorb cloud educational material well miss lama and jamin i i think you need to hear how he actually did his learning materials um so he talked about listening well yvonne why don't you tell her how you learned the materials and that shows that you'll do anything and find any way to learn uh the way i learned the way i learned the the material um uh i would say i'm a visual learner a little bit because i always like i say i always think trying to take a step back and always look at look at the big picture look i'm where i am right now and where i'm trying to go right how i can bring all those pieces together to create a better solution right uh so that did play a big role in how you come across and how i absorb um i was always taking note that's something that i i found very interesting because every time mike would design that i would talk about a problem right he would say okay today i'm talking we're talking about this business this business has this problem right i'll take note of the business what issue does the business have right all the spec that they have in the data center and then one other classmate gonna ask questions about okay mike what type of server are you using okay mike how many benefits are you how do you have i always take note right and then after that when you start building all the design i was always taking note because after that i can go back and look at the different the questions the answer that he gave and then the solution because sometimes if you don't take note you have to go back on the video every time it become very hard but when you have those on your note it's easy to really understand what's going on and to really picture that solution how he was able to come to come to life yeah but i want to highlight on two things uh ivan had said earlier he said that while he was driving back and forth to class for three hours per day he was listening to replays so even if he's eventual learner he's using everything he's listening while he's driving he's watching in class while he could oh he mentioned one other thing about writing notes did you know that when you write handwritten notes it activates a part of the brain called the reticular activating system which helps you remember it not so when you type computer notes yeah so write your handwritten notes out it is a very good literal tool and it reinforces it in your brain so excellent excellent excellent chris bring in the next one and i love that you deduct well in cloud driving mario millen yvonne congrats were you aware of aws principles before you had the interviews if so did you apply them during the interview um hi mario um i won't be able to answer that uh i mean i wasn't aware of the principle i i discovered the principle as i was preparing for for the interview uh but the principle is something that you have you have to you have to answer so because they let you know that uh all the behavior are based on the principle i mean even on the website they have it right that's that's it obvious culture they live through those principles and every employee uh either i mean amazon the entire thing amazon aws everything you have to implement those on your on your daily on your daily tasks while you work for amazon so uh the principle i came across those i was preparing for the for for the interview and i have to implement those by answering all the behavioral uh question of tasha with it yeah so mario here's i'll i'll give you some guidance on those behavioral principles so i made a video on those aws behavioral principles and how to show them you're the right person now i have some really really really smart students and a lot of my students have mbas and phds and lots of master's degrees and 20 years experience in the industry and other industries as well and my students that had leadership positions said mike thank you these will work in any company and the answer is yes so if you know what those employers are looking for it's the same for every single company so if you know how to be a good employee treat your customers well be focused on making your customers successful don't do the wrong thing to take a short-term win to lose a long-term customer or destroy your name if things are wrong take a stand don't just cave into the peer pressure these are principles that apply to every good organization and all organizations want this so i made a video on that but really i should have called the video but it wouldn't have been as good on search engine optimization i should have put it what employers desire and how to get hired but aws leadership principles sounds much better on search engine optimization and they were specifically framed as aws leadership principles but they're also get hired and promoted principles chris bring in the next one actually i think it was another one of my young prodigies president deb that noticed at first a lot it's so good to see here milad thanks a lot ivan for your information is there anything special they should have done to get attraction of hr recruiters for example networking or publishing articles on linkedin oh okay i hope i pronounced your name right um uh so what i did uh like i said uh we probably didn't um like i said was to have a blog right i have my blog and then all the lab that he performed that i did on my on my server and also difference that like i would take a technology for example like platform and i would describe what is platform uh when they use it and why would you use platform so i have all those different stuff on my blog so what i did is every time i was reaching out to recruit that i was this is what i put in in in the message is that i am uh i'm 24 years old i'm passionate about cloud and data center technologies right i've spent the last year of my life 20 hours a week learning about cloud computing uh i am highly energetic highly motivated and i i am the host that you can bet on and be sure that you're gonna win right take a look at my work you know and i put in the the link to my blog right and please let me know what you think about it i'm very interested to work with you so that's that's something i was thought i was putting in there every time i was reaching to different uh recruiter but but also just understand that not all of them will reply right but only if only one answer that's it you only need one right you don't need you don't need 10 or 15 to answer and that's something that i did so by having my blog they were able to click on it and go see my work and my work now talk for me right was able to uh to to be my to be um to be like my job something like that to really say okay yeah he knows about the technology he's passionate about right i have 10 posts on my blog i have 15 i have one post where i i wrote like 500 lines or 500 words about client computing that's not not many people are going to do that and also there's one thing at aws they want you to be what they call an evangelist someone going to go out there and talk about aws sell it they want you to write white papers even the global high manager of aws she constantly write write papers the global high manager of solution architect so when they see that you already have it you don't even work for them but you're already selling the product right you're already talking about platforms are you talking about uh different services that they have that's something that they want to see in a candidate someone who's passionate about the technology passion about what they have so if you have that that's going to set you apart from every other candidate and i'm going to second that malad when you write and you can prove you can write it can really improve your occur i'll give you two examples malad when i was a little young bear and i was a hardcore engineer i had been an expert on something called ip multicast now there were really only five of us in the world that knew it i was at riverstone bow williamson was at cesco and we all knew each other and we all collaborated in any case periodically in any case i wrote a paper on introduction to multicast and nobody understood multicast that paper caused me to travel 200 thousand miles that one year get two promotions that one company and if i told you twenty years later cisco systems in nur knock where they were doing troubleshooting was using a paper that i wrote 20 years ago at riverstone networks to do their diagnostics that's how much that built my career then when i was at cisco they decided they wanted to focus on the healthcare industry and as someone that could practice medicine and had been an architect for years i was the lead architect you know how i built that i wrote a paper that one paper got me three more promotions and i'm known worldwide for medical grade architecture because i designed it and presented it to thousands of hospital systems across the globe so publish something but make it great make it so good that the world sees you as that expert now you've got a cloud architect brand that matters a million times more than any certification in the world chris you can bring in the next one chris it's hard behind the scenes with all this going on arla chris now i understand um mike can you reiterate the importance of not getting 10x aws servers for someone on the call i almost went down that path but found your youtube channel first time enjoying your class i'd be honored to talk about that the most important thing you have in your life is your name your brand and your reputation how you treat others is your brand what your capabilities are as your brand now what goes into a brand a brand needs to be known for something what is porsche known for high performance cars what is apple known for fun and easy to use what is uh what is ge known for i don't know i used to know but you don't know now which is more valuable to you can apple charge more for a computer than ge yes can porsche charge more for the same car than a chevy yes why because they have a focus brand and the world knows it they know exactly what it is it's clear it's not all things to everybody so if you want to go to a doctor you want to go to somebody that studied medicine and if all they did in their life is medicine you feel good in your heart that they can help you now if during that doctor's years of life the first thing they did is was english literature and they were good at it they wrote a couple books on english literature then after a few years of that they studied economics and they worked as an economist and then after that they decided to start a business cleaning houses they made a lot of money cleaning houses and then after that they opened a greek diner which is something my family would do which i've worked in and i love and then after that they decided to be a doctor now what do you really think that person is do you think they've been let's say they're 50 years old now do you think they've got 50 years experience or 25 years experience in medicine no or 20 years you think they've got five years of experience in medicine and lots of time is an economist a house cleaner and everything else so what is their brand is confused what is their value what is their salary it's down here now by comparison you had someone that decided to be a neurosurgeon they're like yvonne they know exactly what it was and they're going to focus on it so he finishes school he does his four-year residence has four years of medical school he does his three-year residency and he does a fellowship so he gets out as the distinguished fellow he's got a huge name for himself now he speaks at conferences on neurosurgery and does neurosurgery and nothing else he's now spoken in everywhere and he's now been published in 40 magazines and journals which doctor do i go to the one that did everything else order yvonne i'm going to yvonne because he's going to help me so that's the reason you've got to have a brand if you're an architect you're a designer the second you become a sysups person you're the maintenance person and designers and maintenance people think differently and it'll damage your brand now devops our automation is the most wonderful thing in the world i love it and is a great career but deploying infrastructure as code and automating software releases is not meeting with the ceo and what happens is when you have all these tech things it makes people see you as an engineer which is great if you want an engineering job but when you've been an architect they're going to be looking for an mba or mba like business acumen they're going to be looking for your leadership skills they're looking for your executive presence your emotional intelligence they don't want to see you as mr or mrs tech they want to see you as the person that can transform an organization because your knowledge of tech is good but your knowledge of the customer and business and customer transformation is better that's the reason marla um yvonne since you're now hired do you have any any thoughts yeah oh oh my i mean the way you put it was i was very i mean i would say it was perfect you know um i think i thought about the same thing you know when i was like i said i took our certification on my toes after and after after getting a professional certification i would get a job that that was my thought back in the summer but after getting certified i was like i don't feel like i can do this job really i i didn't feel like i can i could do the job and that's why i decided to join the program so i think getting a certification uh kind of say good because they can bring you can make your resume positive hr or they can show to the to the high manager or the recruiter that you have the ability to learn that's something that company like aws are working they want people the ability to learn on their own because they grow so fast that they won't have time to babysit you right you have to take care of yourself you have to go out there and learn every time because adw services constantly get updated right so you have to learn that's what certification shows that you have the ability to learn but now having too many certifications also like you say can show that maybe you don't really know where you're going right because your brain won't be very uh it won't be accurate because you need to have a brain and what is your brain what do you want to sell what do you want people to okay when i when i look at my own i look at ivan okay ivan is good that he is good at this thing you know i know that this is this domain is an expert in this domain so that's something i want to take into consideration why thinking about getting certified because if you have the developer certification you have solution architecture you have 6 ops i look at it even for me i was like ok yeah he can learn but does he know everything you know what i mean and company aws they will never hire someone uh because they have money if they hire you they want to be in a specific domain right because they don't want you to be pretty much everywhere because they want to be efficient and to be efficient you need to work with people who master the domain number people who knows about everything so that's why i think getting too many certification could play could play against against against you you know i was the lead architect for a voice project for one of the world's largest banks and all they were concerned about was how this voice project would transform their business what tools would it give the financial advisors to sell more product to their customers what would enable them to process transactions faster what would give people information about a customer's risk tolerance i i was a ccie at the time but you know it wasn't in voice and if i talked about my certifications they'd be like mike that's great now tell me how you can help me so it's good to show that you know the materials and it's good to help you get an interview but it's really about the job and being able to do it and knowing what is the job chris you want to bring in the next one perez the dev uh one of my students he's amazing too uh thank you for your time yvonne curious at what point do you think you went from training to okay i'm ready to apply thank you again oh yeah thank you that's that's a that's a great great questions uh because i never felt that i was ready to apply that that's the trick about it i i remember uh i think was probably uh early october or uh maybe the end of september uh there was a mike has a plot what received um people from itself on his platform and they were talking about uh applying for jobs and how you can reach out to proposals instead of directly and then i think i post a question about me having not posted all my certification on my linkedin profile because i didn't feel like i was ready i didn't want to post them and have all those people coming at me maybe asking me to interview right but then uh um brandon brandon asks brandon was like no go ahead and pause the certification regardless just post them there's a big deal right and i was like i'm not ready yet if they come at me i won't be ready to to to go for an interview because i just go ahead and pause them and that's what i did and i think the more you you start and the more i started uh after the skill assessment test i was like wow do i so i can do this you know even going into the aws uh technical interview the first one um it was my first thing i interviewed i've never done any internship the the only interview i did in my life was the interview for restaurant job and i remember going into the phone interview uh i was like am i going to get this i mean i was kind of preparing myself to take it as a as an interview experience right if i don't get it at the beginning if i don't get it yeah it's fine i'm going to learn right i will be ready for the next one but then i started thinking about mike right you told me is the story where you get your first job your first uh i.t job on your first interview i was like yeah so mike did it right he got his fair job coming from a medical field in his first interview it means i can do it as well it doesn't matter it is a big company i've never done any tech interview and this one is for a big position but i can do it right so i think i started picking up confidence the more i was going through the process of the of the interview but was that uh did i feel uh ready before applying no i wasn't but the confidence came on as the more i was i was evolving through the process so there's two things i'd like to highlight there one is the champion mindset and something else that i'm really proud of so what i'm really proud of is brandon that he mentioned is another student that's part of my program and that's really what i'm most proud of in life i've created a 500 person family that talks to each other every single day and coaches each other so if when i look back on my life that's probably the best accomplishment i have as a family of cloud architects all over the world but i also want to say something that's really important feelings aren't facts and a champion a true champion will always feel that they're not prepared so i've interviewed two kinds of people in my life the people that tell me they're experts and i say how long have you worked with something and they say three weeks and i say it takes at least ten thousand hours to become an expert i'm an expert and when you ask them something about it they know absolutely zero and when you're really dealing with somebody that's humble and really knows have you worked at this yes this is my area competence i do know are you an expert i've got moderate knowledge and then you ask that person about their moderate knowledge and you find out that they know 10 times more than anybody you've interviewed yet it's the quiet confidence so yes i'm really really really happy that uh first somebody else in our family helped encourage you so brandon thank you so much brandon's another amazing student of mine he's a fantastic cloud architect he's got a great security background he's also a marine so you know i can't say enough good things about brandon and he does a lot to help us and our students so brandon thank you for helping fellow student it makes me happy and proud and uh but that's the point is you did it feelings aren't reality and someone like you will always feel like you need to learn more so chris if you want to bring in the next question and then i'm going to announce some prizes for you in the end surprises immediate 2.1 do you recommend going for a new cloud job as an as an individual or creating a company for corp the corp okay so yvonne may be a little young for that one so i'm going to ask answer this one generally speaking when you lack experience it's recommended that you work for a company for a year or two the reason is you're gonna need training and you might need a lot of it and when you're an employee the companies may know you can't do anything for six months and they may send you for six months of paid training and additionally the expectations are going to be lower when you're a paid employee and they'll give you the time to learn and develop the skills and the reality is for someone that's new they really can't do a lot of consulting for people until they get some experience and background and lessons learned develops in contact with other architects in the industry industry experts executives etc so you know it's better to be working for somebody else until you have that rolodex contacts list etc now when you actually work for these companies it depends so if you're someone like me that's been known in the industry forever and you're looking for these 600 an hour contracts for like two months because you want to work 16 hours a day for two months and then go to greece and visit your family for the rest of the year then you know corp the corp is good but realize that these jobs if you're focusing on the leadership skills and you're focusing on the executive presence and you're really working on the presentation skills and the executive communication skills and these high value skills reality is you're going to earn more long term by being an employee one of these companies because the difference between that hundred and fifty thousand dollar architect and that 350 000 architect is all soft skills and leadership skills so people go corporate court because they're trying to get 10 20 more per hour i'm saying don't worry about 10 or 20 more per hour while you're about those business skills those leadership skills those emotional intelligence skills those skills that get you an extra hundred dollars an hour so in that way you don't really need to go corp to corp so corp to corp is good if you've got an expert in one thing maybe you are the cloud network expert you have the ccie you've been working for cisco for 20 years and you're mr clau or mrs cloud networking expert sure that's a great place to go corp the court because you're now a higher gun with an extremely valuable 6 800 an hour skill set but for the rest of the architects probably better to work for somebody daniel pike a good question for another fellow student when you recorded yourself practicing interview questions how did you know what needed tweaking your presentation how did you insert confidence in every answer oh thank you daniel that's a that's a that's a good question uh one of the things is i was always one one of the person that i used to prepare also for the interview i watched a lot of video from from jeff bezos when he's had like different uh uh um it was different on a different talk show and how he would present himself how he will talk how he will help gesture right and i was also i also watched a lot of video from kind of a different type of executive right on youtube how to present themselves right so when i was presenting when i was recording myself and looking at myself i know i know what is wrong i know maybe here i'm talking maybe too fast maybe here i'm not i'm not pronouncing maybe the world right maybe i'm not uh i don't have a lot of energy in the video because when i look at myself i need to feel something you know i need to be able to buy whatever product i'm selling in that video because if i if i'm not able to buy that product then nobody else will able to buy because i'm i'm my the first consumer for my product is me if i can buy my own product no one else would so that was something that's the different metrics that i use to see how i how to either tweak the presentation or i have to i mean how to improve myself through all the recording you know at the end of the day you have to be able to buy to put i don't know if the product is only 10 right whatever you're selling in that video if you're able to take 20 and put on that product say okay if someone sell me this product i will buy it for 20 bucks then you can go out and start and start uh maybe start with interview or job but if you can buy your own product i mean there's something wrong in there and then you have to fix it wow he highlighted on some major major innovation concepts they used to call it eat your own dog food that's when we all called a spade a spade then what ultimately happened in life people started to get the concept that we're gonna make everything sound really cool and fun and they called it sip your own champagne and what that meant was and really great technology companies like cisco do this cisco say it's got 80 000 people it takes a pretty big network to support 80 000 people so cisco would build the network for its employees with all of the own cisco stuff and that way they could find out where it would break so we would always use our own products to know where it would break so we could always deliver best things for his customers now i know another major computing company that had a cloud and they ran it on somebody else's servers now that's generally not good if you can't run your cloud on your own tech so you know that says something so really great companies with really great quality so they use that eat your own dog food that's what you did you recorded yourself to see when you would be willing to hire you you're young you're innovative you're super smart following the technology practices of the world's best technology companies and all best technology companies do that they run on their own stuff because if they don't if they break it they know their customers are not going to be happy so they fix this and they run into their own stuff first so love that great advice for anybody again more wisdom from the 35 year old 24 year old yvonne chris do we have more questions marla so glad you learned the need to focus my efforts and look focused when presenting myself and marla i saw you give some presentations very recently and they were really really awesome chrissy what are bringing the next one b 2.1 appreciate the information mike always a wealth of information thank you so much cloud hired nimit i absolutely absolutely love that so let me give you guys a surprise in i think it's giant the week of january 4th we're going to do a completely free aws live certified solution architect associate boot count it'll be live every day you'll be able to ask questions interact because we want you to have that live boot camp experience we know that when you really take a live boot camp they get really really really expensive and we know the four or five thousand dollars for a week's live boot camp is infeasible for most people so guess what we're just gonna do it free we're going to do it in the first week in january and in the end of january we're going to give you guys some really good network training too network training is pretty important for the cloud architect why the cloud is just a virtualized network in the data center that's virtualized and some really amazing people from my team um uh evo doiki is one of them alonzo coleman's another one another really great cloud architect lemons another one have been working with me to create a comprehensive networking training program so i look forward to doing that when it's completely ready so we're going to give you guys a lot so please subscribe hit the bell and tell your friends um when the lin there's already a link on linkedin to sign up for that so chris from my team if you can find a way to post that linkedin link or those registration links to the free ebook that everybody should know about and i'm going to mention the free e-book again our team has gotten together about 40 of my amazing amazing people that were part of go cloud architects we've gotten together and we've written a new version of the certified solution architect professional book we started from day zero so you could use it for the cloud practitioner certified solution marketing associate on professional exams we see no point in doing it three times we want to give you the deep knowledge from the beginning but we're going to start it with fundamentals and build you good fundamentals it's completely free i'll leave the link for you below and when we post the networking training which is coming soon we'll post a link for that and that's going to be really really special so you know make sure you get signed up for that okay so letting everybody know we have a lot of interview videos on how to interview for free on this channel and also i'm going to ask chris to post the link next thursday it's thursday right where we're going to do our how to get your first cloud architect job webinars thank you thank you jamal thank you so much uh for that jamal uh we're happy to be here and thanks so much tomorrow okay so um please join us on the free how to get your first cloud architect job webinar um we'll talk about how to get a cloud job with no experience we'll talk about what our players are designing we'll talk about exactly the things you need to know how to interview for example things that you can tweak and interview especially when you're stuck to get hired we'll give you tips in your cloud career because really we're all about cloud architect job training my whole goal in the world is just to get you guys cloud hired i know what it was like when i started my cloud architecture career i know what it was like when i started my networking career it all starts with what is the cloud architect and then mastering those skills learning how to become exactly what the employers want because guess what you go to the store and buy something you buy what you won so you know what we make you exactly what the employers want not only they want you more they're willing to pay you a lot more so go out there and get clout hired robert welch thank you so much um so appreciate margin um welcome thank you over there in amsterdam pierre uh you're welcome and thanks so much for you over there in canada and actually tell us where all you're at um hello hello mike uh thanks again jim q uh this is really great thanks so much i see miss lam and javen loving my cloud family wonderful we love you and we love it um and i know exactly who you are with that name um thank you so much uh assam and gentlemen love that thank you daniel pike thank you so much um robert welch is out there in dallas texas you're relatively close daniel pike is tuning in today from texas that's pretty interesting uh mario milan is in bethesda i'm a feeling we've got a lot of people from a lot of places um um looking forward to the next sessions nimit definitely so absolutely trying to figure where you guys are at i have a feeling we've got people in a couple of different continents right now at least i know we did earlier okay mike you you didn't say when the webinar is next thursday it's nice i actually i actually asked you what time it was how to get your first glad i could take job webinar yes and i i i've been trying to get you to say it so that's why yeah what time is it thursday at 11. thursday at 11 a.m eastern standard time which is three p which is 4 p.m gmt um pike thank you mike chris and yvonne for your time today and value information you're so welcome robert dallas fantastic i love how i love where everybody's coming from thank you dan thank you uh mike before your journey chrome program you're corroborating limbaugh and now you'll see the light at the end of tunnel thank you roberto we're so happy to hear that carlito a thanks mike chris and yvonne dan dtm chicago is here that's great perez the dev thank you both from las vegas nimit my name is parwan in uk but from india i love that poem in denmark from bulgaria i think the nhg is in miami you're close i'm over there in port st lucie florida right now and uh we've got uk patience you very much for bringing your experience in great history mike thanks the great for the great job you and your team at coco architects are doing thank you so much patience ogre happy to be here from the uk that's great mars ends in amsterdam and i will be the big bad wolf you got some people trying to say we got no class next week it's like no company's going up that easy we'll hopefully definitely hold class on tuesday yeah we'll have class tuesday jamal's wow he's in germany but he's from syria i mean this is just great i know uh milad is persian that was in uh germany right now munoz in baltimore this is so wonderful that is great that we're all from so many places new jersey you're from uh srinivas new jersey i lived in princeton new jersey there for a long time i actually liked it all right not the winters so uh just to just reiterate what are the things that we've got coming up we've got our book coming out soon yes and we've got the aws certified solution architect associate and is there anything else that we're going to announce um so we've got the certified solution architect associate boot camp for free uh january 4th is your first date uh and then at the end of january we'll be doing the networking room as you said don't i don't set dates yet okay well now you know what's going on behind the scenes from the person that knows when i can actually do the things i'd like to do and then we've got some other things that we're not quite ready to announce okay there's a lot of work going on there's lots of exciting things coming from go cloud architects you're going to see and hear about us from a lot of different places it's going to be fun so thank you all for spending some time um miami's another person i think is really great yvonne thank you for sharing your experiences with others i wanted people to know no matter what you can do it now you're very special you've got an incredible career ahead of you you're a future cto unless i steal you back somehow in this company which you know i might desire to do at some point in the future because you can never run out of great people that are hardworking with innovation-focused people like you so one day i might need to steal you but in the meantime go build your career at amazon and learn some great lessons and do that mba and wow i'm so excited for you thank you very much so excited for him thank you thank you for having me today and thank you for creating this amazing community i think you've did a great job thank you to chris for everything yeah so you know i may have big dreams but someone has to help me make those dreams possible and that's chris and not only can chris do that chris can tell me what's going to work and not work he's behind the scenes making this work so chris is you know 50 of this team in every way shape of the form so chris thank you for everything you've done today i know i'm constantly we know that but you know like i said some people i like to be customer facing and front end some people do their magic behind the scenes and it doesn't really matter as long as we find the place as architects you're going to be out there in public and uh as engineers you're behind the scenes people that like to be behind the scenes love those analytical engineering type positions accounting positions they're really great those of us like those architecture or finance or consulting your sales decisions gravitate towards those doesn't matter they're all great it's just what makes us happy that's really the key for me is what makes us happy so with that go out there and get your best cloud computing job whether it's a cloud architect job solution architect job enterprise architect job let us know how we can help you along the way and we look forward to seeing you on another day take care everyone thank you very much thank you

Channel: Go Cloud Architects

Views: 726

Keywords: how to become a cloud architect, how to get first cloud architect job, how to get a cloud architect job with no experience, cloud architect, cloud architect job, cloud career training, cloud architect career tips, cloud architect training, cloud career, cloud architect job training, cloud career tips, how to get a cloud job with no experience, cloud computing career, What is a cloud architect, cloud architect resume, cloud architect vs cloud engineer, go cloud architects

Id: exhf00Wuwh8

Length: 173min 2sec (10382 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021