Cloud vs Network Engineering - Salaries, Jobs, and Certifications

hey everybody my name's trevor and today i'm going to be talking to people who are new or considering a change in their it career and are asking themselves the question should i pursue a specialty cert like maybe something like a networking cert from cisco or a more generalized cert like a cloud computing cert from a company like aws the reason i decided to make this video is because i've had a lot of people reach out to me recently on linkedin who are trying to get started in their career who are just at the very beginning of their technology journey and they wanted my opinion on this subject and i realized as they were asking this question hey i'm actually uniquely qualified to help i've been in the technology industry now for about 10 years i spent about half of my career working in network engineering and the other half in infrastructure and now cloud computing so i thought i would share three things that might help you as you're making this decision first i'm going to walk through some data about jobs in networking and jobs in cloud computing so you can get a feel for which one might make more sense from a pay perspective and from a job opportunity perspective then i'm going to share some opinions this is where i'm just going to pull on my anecdotal experience to let you know what i would probably do and how i think about the subject and finally i'll make a suggestion at the end but even though i'm making a suggestion i want to make it clear a certification is better than no certification and you should always follow your heart if you have an interest in something more specialized like networking then just go for it okay however if you're not sure how to decide and you're new in your career i hope this helps as you're working to make that decision all right let's get started i mentioned that i wanted to share some data before i shared opinions so let's start with the data i've done something here where i have looked at network engineering salaries and cloud engineering salaries as well as um job opportunities that are open in both of these spaces so that way we can look through and get a feel for what might make most sense for you so first and foremost network engineer job salaries pretty good right it's still an amazing field to be in in 2022 however um i want you to look at the scale see the low end the high end in my experience this is probably about right for the average network engineer in a uh premium job market most likely um but here's here's what i want to show you on the cloud engineering side if i show you how much a cloud engineer makes yeah it's a little bit more it's relatively close but a little bit more i guess that's about 10 to 15 more but i want you to pay attention to the range right and this is just data from glassdoor i'm going to show you some other sources soon but this cloud engineer range goes up a lot higher than the network engineer range now i'm going to say this there are not a lot of cloud engineers that i know making half a million bucks a year they're probably out there but um i would just take that range as something legitimate to consider uh as you're planning this uh part of your career here's another data point from from a different site indeed and i like this one because it tells me exactly how many salaries that they're using as a sample size so here we see across three point four thousand salaries is about eighty three thousand dollars a year for a network engineer and for cloud engineers across 2.3 k salaries is 120 grand but salary isn't everything what about job opportunity where will it be easier for you to get a job if you're just starting your it career so what i've done is i've gone to indeed and i've searched on the keyword cisco the reason i'm using cisco is because they would be kind of the leader in traditional network engineering as far as i can tell and that's definitely where most people would get certified if they were trying to get a start in networking so we can see there's about 33 000 jobs listed on linkedin right now with the keyword cisco okay so what if i look at aws and us being the leader in cloud computing i see oh my gosh that is what is that more than five times the amount of job so according to the jobs with those keywords on indeed uh it's starting to look like cloud computing might have some more opportunity let's look at one more source just to be sure all right very similarly i'm looking here and i've searched on the keyword cisco and i can see that that's got about 38 000 jobs available and then if i do the same search for aws holy cow again we've we've now seen a substantial change in the amount of jobs that are available so i think by the data it seems like between networking and cloud engineering uh there definitely is gonna be more opportunity from a pay perspective and from just the sheer number of jobs that are available i'd say cloud computing has the edge over network engineering in that regard so there's the data now let me share some thoughts that are just my own somebody reached out to me and asked should i get specifically a ccna or an aws certified solutions architect associate for somebody who's trying to break into the technology field and outside of the opportunity and the pay perspective let's talk about the differences in those two certifications and what i might recommend it and why so i think that when i'm looking at a certification like cisco which by the way is ccna that's the first cert that i ever got in my career it's a great certification it is a specialized certification and so that's good if you know that you want to be a network engineer however a lot of people that i know who are starting their i.t careers they're still in what i would call an exploration phase right they they are not ready to commit to being a specialist in one area they just know that they see opportunity in technology and that they would like to enter this field because they want to get a better life for themselves and so because of that when i consider a cloud certification like an aws cert for example i believe that it might be a better starting point because of this if you look at an aws certification the amount of ground that's covered is pretty broad it touches a little bit on networking but it also touches on storage it touches on security it touches on systems design compute other types of infrastructure message buses it's got a lot of information and it's like you know an inch deep in a mile wide but i think that's amazing for somebody who's just trying to start and maybe is looking for you know the opportunity to learn about a lot of different things at once and see what might make sense for them whether they want to go down the cloud computing path or maybe they learn through taking an amazon training course that they actually do love networking or they do love storage and they want to dig deeper into that and so i think that for somebody who's new getting that type of broad exposure actually can be more beneficial even though that's not what i did when i when i was younger however i chose to do my ccna in 2011 which at that point in time cloud computing was really kind of in its infancy still uh in the last 11 years since 2011 that has that has changed substantially as you saw by the data just a second ago that is my opinion and so i want to close on some specific suggestions for where you might choose to get started so let's go ahead and look at the certifications that might be available from a leading networking vendor like cisco and then let's look at certifications from a vendor like aws leader in cloud computing so if you know you are just dead set on being a tcp ip nerd and you love networking well hey there's nothing wrong with that that's what i thought i wanted to do when i was earlier in my career and so what i would suggest for somebody like that is to start with your ccna okay you could get the cct in routing and switching first but i believe that if you really just know you love networking targeting the ccna is going to be the best way to learn a lot in the shortest amount of time i would just go straight for that if i was personally starting with no experience from a networking perspective however if i've convinced you throughout this video that cloud computing might be a better option where i would suggest that you start are with aws certifications they're still the uh most pervasive cloud vendor today they really pioneered the space and there's a lot of jobs available as you saw in those searches so if you were going to get your feet wet in aws and you're a complete beginner it may be smart to start with the aws certified cloud practitioner okay it's a cheaper exam and it is meant to be the entry point into aws certifications however i would encourage anybody who is serious about getting a job in technology not to stop there you should probably pursue one of these three certifications and specifically i would suggest the aws certified solutions architect associate now you could go straight for this if maybe you have a little bit of it knowledge maybe you took some classes in school or maybe you have just been interested in technology and you already know some fundamentals maybe you can go straight for this but if you're just brand brand new and uh and you don't know the first thing about technology it would probably behoove you to start with a cloud practitioner just to get your feet wet first however if you're a go-getter and you're ready to put in some time and really um you're not scared of some things not making sense at first this is going to give you a lot of value for your time and also you're going to get some good hands-on with this certification as well by the way i made another video that has the training resources and a study plan that i would recommend for this certification if you're interested in that i'll throw the link in the description for you okay thank you for watching i hope that this was helpful to somebody who might have had this question again it was asked to me three times so i thought maybe there's some other folks out there who are trying to figure this out as always if you have any questions for me the best way to reach me is on linkedin there will be a link to my linkedin in the description if you want i would not say to smash the subscribe button you could like gently touch it uh there's no need to be too aggressive here but if you like the content and you want more hey go ahead and subscribe you'll get notified in the future and until next time happy it career congratulations on starting this journey and take care of yourself all right bye

Channel: Trevor Spires

Views: 40,366

Keywords: cloud engineering careers, cloud vs networking, cisco vs aws, ccna vs aws, cloud engineering salaries

Id: cGaAPrDaLZ8

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022