Becoming a Cloud Engineer it’s not very easy, but if you are determinate you can realize your objective even without a degree. I’ve broken it down into five sort of tips, three or four getting actually into the field and into our ones who 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 helped us. Scroll, 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. Remember, there’s an infrastructure team. Maybe there’s a clown 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 team.
See with the cloud team is working on. I was at a help desk job. Looks like an entry-level help desk job and I, when I had down time, 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 a WSO.
They allowed me to really see what was going on. That led me to getting a to be a certified, which I would also recommend doing get certified and whatever Cloud platform you want to become certified in and I got kind of in an introduction to how it works. Thanks to desertification 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 and Google and Amazon, and Microsoft, and Apple. And those are great. If that’s your goal, definitely go.
But that was completely off the table for me because I didn’t have a degree. I don’t have degree. I didn’t even go to high school here. I was living in South America. I did two semesters are I dropped out of school and moved back to the States.
I barely had any work experience really on paper, so I was like, all right, let me try to go for the 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, we’re getting certified and getting it to cloud. Computing was still very, very nice. So this was about three, four years ago.
I had that going for me, but I definitely applying to smaller mid-sized, companies work well for me. And I feel like it’s a little less competitive. And there are a lot lighter on what requirements, you need to even get into the field and what say 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 You’re going for, maybe not your next step isn’t necessarily a cloud in junior public Computing role, but maybe it’s like Cloud adjacent, like, you don’t give you exposure into it. I know for me after the help desk job got certified, and then, I was applying to rolls, I was applying to bunch of cloud rolls, but I was also applying to any rules 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, we have to do sysadmin and some it stuff, but it help desk things.
But they mentioned in the bullet points are in the piston and the listing is, if you have any interest in Cloud, we’re currently migrating, and you’ll have exposure to that as well. And then, for the first year, I was not only taking care of all the roles of my, all the tests on my rolls to find. But also, I was volunteering to be on any of this one project that will give me exposure to cloud. And I remember working,
Flying bat like 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, 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 with a lot of weight and being anxious, but I learned so much and I got so much exposure and sometimes there’s that sacrifice that you do have to make do in order to make the next step in your life.
So that was definitely worth it. But I would have not landed in that position or not guarding the exposure. If it weren’t for me being hoping, To not necessarily running a cloud roll, 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 it kind of like the same as sometimes. You don’t need to move out of the company. Sometimes you can move up, eventually, I was promoted into a Conjuring role, but that happened within the same, the same company, so that might be a possibility to my fourth tip, is once you’re in your role and this is, I guess for any rolling, any, and not specific.
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 and 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 had become unemployed or something or I stop making money. But yeah, that’s kind of just like that’s my like a life tip. But I would say just because sometimes these Are rules. Come with salaries that are pretty big. Yeah, it’d be smart with your money. That’s number 4. And number 5 also is like, once you duel and your role lean on your community, continue to educate yourself. I’m not telling you to be studying costly every single day.
Learn every single new tool but beyond 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 feels work. Feels good for you utilize, things like LinkedIn, and Media in general are great ways to do it too tapping into the community but Network 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 this in starting this channel. I’ve built an amazing Network in. So many opportunities have popped up for me in order to say take a next step of maybe being employed as a college near doing, it completely on my own which is the step that I’m taking at the moment.
So you never know what? Comes from networking and building. Yeah, those are, those are my five, I guess bullet points as to 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. I apply for apply for anything, really? 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 you before just go for it. Anyway, reach out to me on Twitter and if you’d like to chat, if you need
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. Opening in the time and resources to grow it.