Hi, it's Forrest Brazeal, and this is Dear Gurus,
where we answer your pressing questions about your cloud career. And our question today comes from a
number of our learners here at ACG, and that is: how many certifications do I need to get my first
job in the cloud? Now the first thing I want to get out on the table right off the bat is, to
some extent, that's kind of the wrong question to ask. There is no hiring manager on the face of the
planet who's going to look at your resume and go, "Oh, this person has three cloud certifications.
They are a must hire!" You know, that's not going to happen because, for the most part, hiring
managers understand that you need more than just certifications, just a piece of paper. If
you're going to prove that you can actually do the work of a cloud professional, you've got
to show some experience of some sort. Frankly, if a hiring manager didn't understand that, you
probably wouldn't want to work for them anyway. And yet we know that there is value to cloud
certifications. I've got a number of those certs myself. they've been quite helpful to me
in my career as an engineer. Today we're going to answer the question first of when cloud certs
are valuable versus when they might not be. so we're going to teach you to think correctly
about the value of a cloud certification, and then we're going to talk about realistically
how many of those certs you need to get hired. Let's start with some reasons that cloud certs
do or do not provide value to your career. The first reason is that cloud certs give you a
broad base of foundational knowledge. Even if you've been an engineer for quite some
time working in the cloud, you may have only touched a narrow subset of services, and
you may find other engineers working with you who are doing things that you don't understand.
Cloud certs attempt to remove that imbalance by giving you a broad base of knowledge across
all the cloud's major topic areas so you can feel confident that you haven't missed anything.
that's valuable professionally, and it's valuable in your job prep. in some sense, if you actually
go through the training material and cover what's laid out by that certification path. it almost
doesn't matter whether or not you actually take the certification exam. just covering
the material gives you all the real value. second reason cloud certs can help your career:
even if hiring managers don't care so much about the cert, recruiters sometimes filter on that,
especially if you're missing a more traditional credential like a computer science degree from a
university or college. if you can bring in that certification, that's a signal to the recruiter
that, oh, this person's serious, they've got some external validation of the fact that they can
sit down and learn and that they know something about the cloud. Even though that might not get
you the job, it can get your foot in the door for that big interview. Here is the third reason
that cloud certs can be helpful for you. I know I said before, hiring managers don't necessarily
care about certs, but there is one particular area where certs are worth way more than paper. In
fact, they may be worth their weight in gold, and I'm talking about the consulting industry.
big consulting shops like Accenture or Deloitte all the way down to smaller consultants and
MSPs have a bottomless appetite for qualified people with certifications, and there are several
reasons for that. First, it's actually the case that a lot of these consulting shops have what are
called partnerships with the cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft, and their partnership level
increases and they get more benefits out of that as they have more certified people that work
for them. so they're always looking to bring in people who have a cert count. in addition to
that, of course, if you have a certification that simply communicates expertise to the consultant's
clients. If I'm hiring a consultant, I'd like to know that there's some external validation that
they can actually do the job. Finally, if I got certified, I may be able to do certain jobs as
a consultant that I couldn't do otherwise. When I was in consulting, I used to do many what are
called well-architected reviews for AWS. that's where you sit down with a client, and you look
at their architecture and determine if it's built correctly according to AWS best practices. It
turns out that you can't officially perform a war or Well Architected Review on AWS's behalf unless
you have an AWS certified solutions architect professional credential. Many reasons why
consulting shops absolutely love to hire people with certifications, and you can be that person
if you bring those certs in the door. Okay, you get it. Certs aren't magic, but they do provide
some value for you. The big question now is how many of these certs do you need to actually go out
and get a job in the cloud. Here's what I'm going to recommend that you do. There's no single right
answer to this question, but I've seen this work many times throughout my career and other people
I've worked with and mentored. the first thing I'm going to recommend that you do is go out and
get a foundational technical cloud certification. so I'm not talking here about something like
the AWS certified cloud practitioner or the azure 900. those are great certs, but they're
really designed more for non-technical people, and they don't communicate the expertise that
you would need to get hired into a cloud job. so I'm talking about something like the AWS
certified solutions architect associates or the certified developer associates or on the azure
side something like the az103. Once you've got that foundational technical certification, at this
point, I would say for you to set your cert prep aside for the moment and focus on pulling in some
of the hands-on expertise that hiring managers are also going to want to see. And the best way to do
that is with portfolio projects. if you don't have existing experience professionally in the cloud,
there are several key topic areas that you're going to want to know that will come up in these
interviews. First, you need to be able to code a little bit so look for something like python. it's
a fantastic backend programming language that's used by cloud teams the world over. A Cloud Guru
has lots of great courses to help you get up to speed on that. you're also going to want to know
a little bit about Linux and a little bit about networking. Okay, so on the Linux side, you
want to be thinking about how the Linux file system works. How do I use the basic commands like
your Greps and your SEDs and your aux? maybe know a little bit about containerization. and then on
the networking side, you're going to want to know essentially how the internet is put together, so
you want to know the basic protocols like IP and TCP. you want to know the layers of the networking
stack. you'll want to know a little bit about DNS, what happens when you send a request out of your
browser, and you know it goes to google and comes back. you'll want to be sufficiently familiar with
that. Then you'll want to do some projects that actually put that into practice for you as well
as pulling in some cloud services on top. once you have done those basic cloud projects and you've
got a series of stories that you can tell in an interview at this point, I would say go ahead and
start applying for jobs. while you're doing that, it's okay to go ahead and pursue a more advanced
certification like a professional cert or one of the specialty certifications like a security or
a networking cert. Still, you don't have to have that completed. I wouldn't say to actually go out
and interview. it's okay for the hiring manager to see that you're still learning, and you don't
know everything. yet you're not going to cover everything, and you may say, well wouldn't it
help me even more if I were to go get three, four or five certifications and have them under my
belt before I start applying. and I'm going to say no. Past a certain point, more certs will feel
like diminishing returns. So, on the one hand, if you don't have any certifications, it kind of
feels like, "how do I know that this person knows anything?" But if all you're doing is getting
certifications, you're not bolstering those with projects. At that point, it can feel like you
know how do I know this person can actually do anything. maybe they're just doing academic work
all the time. so you've got to have a sweet spot. you've got to have a balance in the middle, and
that's where a couple of these foundational cloud certs plus the hands-on projects are going to help
you. If you're looking for some projects to do, we do something every month here at A
Cloud Guru called the #cloudguruchallenge. you can find that on social media with
the hashtag, and you can sign up for free at acloudguru.com to participate. these are
challenges specifically designed to give you good stories to tell in a job interview. you'll
be doing things like event-driven programming. you'll be working with DevOps technology, CICD,
Git. you'll be building on serverless and other cloud services, and you'll be able to take those
into a job interview, and they're guaranteed to give you something you can talk to your hiring
manager about. okay, and that brings us to the end of this episode of dear gurus. make sure
to like and subscribe to our youtube channel, and don't forget to sign up at acloudguru.com to
participate in those challenges and study many of the free courses we have available on code
on Linux on networking, and on cloud. finally, comment below, and maybe your question will
be featured in the next episode of dear gurus.
