How I became a Cloud Engineer with no college degree

hi everyone welcome to a new video it's gonna be a little bit different this isn't a tutorial or a study notes so if you interested in that skip to the next video or don't watch this one if this is more of a life update kind of thing I want to do reflect on the journey of how I actually got into the cloud engineering space and my background is a little different as you see the title I had no experience I had no degree I still don't have a degree and going into the field so I figured if anyone else is out there and they kind of find themselves in a very similar situation providing a little bit of transparency and insight into how I got into it might be able to enable you I've broken it down into five sort of tips three are for getting actually into the field and then two are once you are in the field what could enable you to take the next step or take different risks and such so the first one is going to be try to lean on resources that you already have a lot of people are in already like a developer role helpdesk role a sysadmin role and networking role and want to move into cloud sometimes at the places that you are already in they'll have someone who is working on cloud maybe there's an infrastructure team maybe there's a cloud engineering team already see if you could maybe like negotiate some downtime with your supervisor maybe you can get an hour a week to just see what they're working on and it's like the cloud seems to be what the cloud team is working on I was at I helped this job it was like an entry-level helpdesk job and I when I had downtime I was able to sort of shadow any team I wanted to and my only interest really was the infrastructure team because I got along with them and they were moving some stuff into AWS so they allowed me to really see what was going on that led me to getting AWS certified which I would also recommend doing get certified in whatever cloud platform you want to become certified in and I got kind of an introduction to how it works thanks to certification and thanks to being exposed to AWS with this team then this rules into my second tip which is widen the pool of areas that you are applying to everyone wants to work at Facebook in Google in Amazon and Microsoft and Apple and those are great if that's your goal definitely go for it but that was completely off the table for me because I didn't have a degree I don't have a degree I I didn't even go to high school here I was living in South America I did two semesters there I dropped out of school and moves back to to the States so I barely had any work experience really on paper so I was like all right let me try to go for these smaller mid-sized companies maybe a little work better for me and I heard back from a lot of these I will say that I was sort of at a time where getting certified and getting at the cloud computing was still very very niche so this was about three or four years ago so yeah I had that going for me but definitely applying to smaller mid-sized companies worked well for me and I feel like it's a little less competitive and they're a lot lighter on what requirements you need to even get into the field and what se experience you need and sometimes they're willing to take a bigger risk on people just because they need Talent so yeah give that a try my third tip is be open to what roles you're going for maybe not your next step isn't necessarily a cloud engineering computing role but maybe it's like cloud adjacent like it'll give you exposure into it I know for me I help desk job got certified and then I was applying to roles I was applying a bunch of cloud rolls but I was also playing - any roles that would give me exposure to cloud and I landed on the role that I'm in now well the company that I'm in now where there it was a sysadmin role obviously would have to do sysadmin and some IT stuff but IT Help Desk things but they also mentioned in the bullet points there and in the pith in the listing is if you have any interest in cloud we're currently migrating and you'll have exposures to that as well so for my highlight I landed the job I actually did like really well in the interview and that could be a whole video on itself but I you know did Welling interview I landed the job and then for the first year I was not only taking care of all the roles them I all the tasks on my roles defined but also I was volunteering to be on any additional project that would give me exposure to cloud and I remember working a lot like that lot that year or time on the weekends obviously I'm in a privileged position where I don't have kids depending on me or like a partner or anything depending on me so I really had all my time to myself and I wouldn't necessarily say it was a healthy behavior because I remember gaining like a lot of weight and being anxious but I learned so much and I got so much exposure and and sometimes there's that sacrifice that you do have to make in order to make the next up in your life so that was definitely worth it but I would have not landed in that position or not gotten exposure if it weren't for me open to not necessarily landing a cloud role but getting into a role that would get me there eventually and that leads into my what is this fourth tip well I guess this is kind of like the same is sometimes you don't need to move the company sometimes you can move up eventually I was promoted into a clown engineering role but that happened within the same the same company so that might be a possibility too my fourth tip is once you're in your role and this is I guess for any rolling any and not specific to engineering is be smart with your money I was never like literate when it came to personal finance up until a couple of years ago where I started making some money enough to save and I was like maybe just saving isn't enough so I started learning about like retirement accounts and investing in stuff like that and you know now I'm in a position where if I take risks I have a great cushion to catch me in case I become unemployed or something or I stop making money but yeah that's kind of just like that's more like a life tip but I would say just because sometimes these engineering roles come with salaries that are pretty big yeah it'd be smart with your money that's number four and number five also is like once you do land your role lean on your community to continue to educate yourself I'm not telling you to be studying constantly every single day learn every single new tool but be in the know stay updated you know chat with other people who are in the field or chat with other newbies or chat with other professionals whatever it feels work feels good for you utilize things like LinkedIn and social media in general are great ways to tapping into the community but network and and you'll never know what opportunities come from that I speak from my own personal experience I tweeted about this as well as like since starting this channel I've built an amazing network and so many opportunities have popped up for me in order to say take a next step of maybe being employed as a college and you're doing it completely on my own which is a step that I'm taking at the moment so you'll never know what comes from networking and building yeah those words those are my five I guess bullet points us too how to get into the field and once you're into the field how to keep growing don't be afraid to go for it apply for apply for anything really I I applied to a lot of things and I got rejected to a bunch of things but you know becoming comfortable with rejection is a skill set on its own so go for it just go for it um anyway reach out to me on Twitter if you'd like to chat or if you need to talk about really how you know some struggles or anything really hundreds of cloud is still going on I think I mentioned that in my previous video if you are looking to get hands-on with a couple of projects or the community or talk to us we're over 230 members now and you know we're dialing the code of conduct right now to make sure it's a safe and open environment for everyone and you have my word that I'm fully fully committed to that and it's an open source project so no one's making money off of it it's really just a bunch of volunteers putting in the time and resources to grow it so yeah hundreds of cloud comm if you want to learn more cloud things as always you can find me on Twitter at me by GPS and I will see you in the next video

Channel: GPS

Views: 61,799

Rating: 4.9551191 out of 5

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Id: kluKaLXJ2lg

Length: 7min 49sec (469 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020