Getting a Cloud Job In 2024 ( 10 Things I Wish I knew before starting)

If you want to get your first cloud job, I’m going to walk you through the 10 most important things you need to know to be successful.

These are the lessons I wish I learnt when I was getting started in the cloud industry 7 years ago. Knowing them would have massively accelerated my journey in the cloud space. 

Make sure you keep watching until the end, because I saved the best for last and you really don’t want to miss that!

The first thing I wish I knew was how to escape “Tutorial Hell”... 

For those who don’t know, “Tutorial Hell” happens when you keep consuming one tutorial after another without learning how to apply that knowledge to real life projects. 

This means that you become really good at following tutorials, but if given a project without a tutorial, you don’t feel confident enough to tackle it on your own. You end up never developing the skills of a competent cloud engineer. Not ideal. 

There’s a simple trick you can use to escape tutorial hell and once you know what this is, your technical abilities will accelerate.

The trick is simple. 

When you’re following along with a course or a tutorial, once you understand what the goal you’re trying to achieve is, rather than following the tutorial on how to solve the issue, I want you to pause the video and try to figure out the solution on your own using Google and official documents.

For example, one of the projects in my cloud career acceleration program is focused on creating a secure and auto scaling web service where the EC2 instances can scale up and down depending on the amount of traffic coming to the servers. As you can see from this diagram there are a lot of different resources that need to be created. A VPC, public and private subnets, EC2 instances, Application Load Balancers, Auto Scaling groups and a lot more. 

In the program I create a Scenario video, which is where I outline what i’d like you to create and then I have a separate solution video where I walk you through how to create these resources and connect them all together.

Once my students have watched the initial scenario video I encourage them to try to figure out how to create all the resources themselves by using Amazon documentation, google, and stack overflow before watching the solution video.

Once they’ve figured out how to create the resources themselves and they’ve solved the challenge, they can then watch the solution video to see how I would tackle the challenge with best practice in mind.

Meaning they are actively engaged with problem solving and troubleshooting and they are building up the mental muscles they need to become better cloud engineers.

A word of warning though!

If you do this you will become frustrated, you’ll realise that solving cloud problems are actually a lot harder than you think.

You will encounter errors that will take you hours to fix.

Don’t fret - this is good!

This means that you’re engaging with the project and building up your troubleshooting muscles. Don’t worry, every single cloud engineer and solution architect goes through this phase. I want you to embrace it and keep going.

Following tutorials is easy, but in the real world you’ll be working on projects where there are no obvious tutorials. This is why it is important to escape tutorial hell and build up your troubleshooting skills because this is what will help you get that cloud job.

The next thing I’d recommend you do if you want to get a cloud job is to build a learning discipline. Have you ever found yourself struggling to find motivation to work on your cloud skills?

Maybe you  realised  that you're not studying as much as you would like to. You’re starting to feel guilty because you’re not working towards your dreams… It’s ok, I was the same at the start of my cloud journey. Some weeks I’d be super productive, other weeks not so much.

My progress was really slow and I never felt like I was making enough progress towards what I wanted to achieve. That is until I stumbled on the solution.  The answer was really simple. Rather than relying on motivation, I decided to rely on discipline.

Let me explain…

When I used to rely on feeling motivated, I would only put in the work when I felt like it and guess what… I rarely ever felt like studying.  There was always something more fun for me to be doing with my time, like hanging out with friends or watching Netflix.

However, when I chose to rely on discipline, everything changed. I decided that every weekday I would work on my cloud skills for at least one hour a day, and on weekends it would be 2 hours per day.

Because I made this promise to myself I had to stick to it even on days when I didn’t feel like studying. This meant that I was able to accelerate my cloud growth. Every week I was able to dedicate at least 6 or 7 hours a week to improving my skills, instead of the 1 to 2 I was putting in before.

Now don’t get me wrong, implementing this disciplined approach is hard. But trust me, once you get going you will find yourself becoming more productive than you’ve ever been.

Here are 2 tips that helped me make this process easier:

The first tip is to set yourself an easy target. When you start taking a disciplined approach, rather than committing to an hour a day, try committing only 15 minutes a day. This means that everyday for 15 minutes you will work on building your cloud skills. During this time, you won’t check your phone, you won’t scroll facebook. You will focus exclusively on building your technical skills. 

Trust me, after doing this for a couple of days you will find that you can increase your focus time from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, then 45 minutes and pretty soon you will be able to do an hour a day, easily.

The second tip is to always set aside the same time everyday for your studying to take place because by being consistent, it will become easier to form a habit. In my case when I tried to break into the cloud industry I already had a full time job doing something else. 

Usually I had to wake up at 7am to get ready for work. But to build in this new habit I decided to wake up at 6am every day so I could get an hour of studying in before my day officially started. I did this because building my cloud skills was the most important thing to me at the time and I always believe in doing the important things first.

This also meant that after work my evenings were free to hang out with friends or just relax guilt free because I had already studied. The actual time for you might be different, you might choose to do it at 6pm or 8pm. But it’s important to find a time that works for you. 

Pick the same time every day and stick to it.

Once you build in this daily habit you will not only find that your progression accelerates, it will also become easier to study than not to study and you’ll feel a real sense of motivation and achievement. What’s not to like?  

It might take a week or two to build this habit, but it will be worth it. Stayed disciplined. I’m curious to know what time of day you find works best for studying, 6am? 7pm? Or some other time. Make sure you drop your study time in the comments below.

A trap I see a lot of cloud beginners fall into is trying to learn multiple cloud platforms at one time. Jumping between learning  AWS and Azure or GCP.

At the start of my cloud journey I thought learning multiple clouds will make me more employable and on the surface this makes sense right? The more clouds you know the more jobs you can apply for. However, now that I have experience under my belt, I can tell you  that learning multiple clouds for beginners is deadly. It’s s a mistake for two reasons:

The first reason is that the cloud platform you learn is only a small component of the technical skills employers are looking for. 

Some other skills employers value include, programming skills, CICD, docker, Terraform and much more. The time you spend learning the second cloud platform is time better spent learning these other technical skills that employers are looking for and integrating them with the cloud platform you learn to produce high quality projects.

The second reason is that learning one cloud is difficult enough. AWS alone has over 200 services and there is so much to learn with one cloud that trying to learn more than one means that you never gain deep enough experience to be valuable to employers. 

The reality is that most companies only use one cloud platform and they need engineers who what deep experience in that particular platform, and so if they read your resume and see that you have shallow experience with multiple cloud platforms they just assume that you don’t have deep enough experience with the cloud platform they use and they are more likely to reject you because of this. 

Once you get your first cloud job and have built up significant work experience then it might be worth exploring other cloud platforms, but if you are at the start of your cloud journey and have not secured your first job yet, then forget about learning multiple cloud platforms

There is an old proverb that says if you try to catch two rabbits at once you will end up with none. So pick one cloud platform and go all in one cloud cloud platform.

Another mistake I see a lot of cloud beginners make is focusing too much on certifications.

I am always surprised when I come across cloud beginners who are keen to get their first cloud job. They have 3 or 4 AWS certifications and yet struggle to create a simple web server using the linux command line.

Don't get me wrong, one or 2 certifications is fine because they give you a high level overview of various cloud services and they help to improve your general cloud knowledge. But please don't expect certifications alone to help you get into the cloud industry

This might have worked 6 or 7 years ago when cloud roles were relatively new but the landscape has changed and cloud jobs are a lot more competitive. This means that employers now have higher expectations and you only need to look at job descriptions to get an idea of what employers are looking for. 

And what they are looking for is hands-on experience with various technologies like Linux, CICD, python and other technologies I mentioned at the start of this episode. Rather than studying towards that next certification, really spend time developing high quality cloud projects. This is the best way to stand out to employers.

Another mistake I see a lot of cloud beginners make that holds them back from getting that first job is applying to the wrong roles. There are a lot of tech influencers and bootcamps that make a lot of money from telling cloud beginners that they can earn 6 figures as a Solution Architect.

What they conveniently fail to mention, is that Solution Architect roles are relatively senior and they are usually given to people with years of real world work experience. Don’t get me wrong, you hear of stories of one or two people who were able to become Solution Architects, with no technical background and with no experience in the cloud How can you prepare for cloud interviews?

When you hear this I want you to know that these are the exception rather than the rule. These people are a small minority. Just like how winning the lottery isn’t good career advice, neither is expecting to become a solution architect as your first cloud role.

For most beginners your best option is to get a job as a cloud engineer or devops engineer. There are a lot more of these jobs available for beginners and after a couple of years you can work your way up to becoming a Solution Architect.

About a year ago someone who wanted to break into the cloud industry approached me for mentorship. He had applied to hundreds of jobs and received zero calls from recruiters. After talking to him for a while I realised that he was making this classic mistake.

Turns out the only jobs he had been applying for were Solution Architect roles because that is what he had been told to do by the bootcamp he was enrolled in at the time. Once I advised him on the roles to apply for and fixed his resume, he immediately started getting calls from recruiters and ended up receiving, not one, but two job offers.

This shows the power of applying to the right roles for you. So, if you are a cloud beginner, definitely don’t go for that Solution Architect role.

This next piece of advice could be the difference between you getting a job or not. This is something I wish I had done more at the beginning of my career. What's the advice?

The advice is that you must prepare for job interviews.

The job market is extremely competitive and if you get an interview you need to make the most of it. Every time I have an interview with a job applicant I’m always surprised when they can’t answer simple questions like “Tell me about some of the cloud projects you’ve worked on."

You know this question is going to come up so why haven't you prepared for it?

I am always surprised how little people prepare for interviews. And of course, this means they don’t come across very well in these interviews. If you had an interview that didn’t go well, chances are that this was a bad interview because you were not prepared for it.

When you don’t prepare for interviews you come across as nervous and flustered because you take longer to answer questions.  This means that employers think you don’t know what you are talking about and reject you. Confidence is key.

Now I know what your next question is going to be…

How can you prepare for cloud interviews? The answer is simple:

1. Research the most common interview questions
2. Do some research on the company you’re interviewing with so you can personalise your answers.
3. Prepare the answers to the common interview questions.
4. Practice answering those questions out loud until you can respond without thinking too much

By doing these four things, you will be able to impress hiring managers, as you can answer the majority of their questions without stumbling.

Let me give you a quick example to highlight the importance of interview preparation:

If an employer was interviewing two candidates, both candidates have very similar skills and experience, but one candidate is able to answer all the questions confidently, giving multiple examples of high quality projects they’ve done, while the other candidate answers nervously, with a lot of umms and ahhs in between their answers and struggles to come up with any compelling examples of projects they’ve done because they haven’t prepared.

The employer is always going to go with the first candidate because of their preparedness and confidence even if technically the second candidate might be better.

This is why in the cloud career acceleration program when a student tells me they have an interview coming up I always conduct mock interviews with them so they are as prepared as possible so they can come across as confident and competent to the hiring manager.

Remember all you need is for one interview to go well, don’t waste that opportunity by not preparing.

An easy thing you can do to catch the attention of recruiters is to share everything you learn on social media platforms like Linkedin. When you learn a new technology, or complete a new project, I encourage you to write about it on Linkedin.

By writing about the projects it has an advantage of serving as documentation in case you need to revisit the project to remind yourself of what you did, but more importantly it lets recruiters know that you are serious about your cloud learning.

When you apply for jobs the first thing a recruiter does is look at your Linkedin profile to get a sense of who you are. If they see you post regularly about cloud topics and projects they are more likely to call you in for an interview

I recently needed to hire for a junior cloud engineer position and I narrowed down the applicants to just two candidates, but I could only choose one to interview.  Both candidates had similar skills and experience and so it was really difficult to choose between them.

I decided to look them both up on LinkedIn and could see that one candidate was posting regular projects they were working on and about insights they had learnt, while the other candidate's profile was empty.

I ended up picking the candidate who posted regularly because I could sense they were passionate about the cloud industry and were engaged. I could also see their writing style and felt like I knew them.

This exact scenario happens all the time. The reality is that recruiters get so many candidates applying for jobs that they can't fully research them all, which means that they have to make snap judgements and use shortcuts to determine who to contact. 

If you're a candidate who posts regularly about the cloud and projects you are more likely to stand out than a candidate who doesn't. I know this doesn't seem fair but unfortunately that's just the way it is. Next time you learn a new technology or skill, don't forget to post about it on LinkedIn, because you never know which recruiter is hiring for someone with that skill in your network

At the start of my career I wish I discovered the importance of having a mentor to guide me on my Cloud journey. When I started to learn the cloud I had no idea of what I was doing and I know I wasted a lot of time learning technologies that weren't important.

I remember at one point I was trying to learn frontend, react and JQuery. While it was fun to learn these new technologies, they weren't relevant to the cloud industry and I would have been better off using that time to learn technologies like CICD or Docker.

A mentor would have been able to point me in the right direction and give me a learning plan that would have helped me to focus my efforts to achieve my goals.

This is the primary reason I started the Cloud Career Mentor channel. Back when I was trying to break into the cloud industry I didn't really know anyone who worked in the industry so I had to figure it out on my own and this cost me a lot of time.

A mentor will help provide structure to your learning which will significantly reduce the time it takes to break into the cloud industry and if you can't find a mentor in real life, then subscribe to this channel, as I release videos every week focused on helping you succeed in the cloud industry.

The final thing I wish I knew at the start of my cloud journey is probably the most important thing. And that is that I wish I had picked the right learning program to build my technical skills.

The reason this is so important is because the technical skills and high quality cloud projects you develop form the foundation of everything else. 

For example if you don’t have the right technical skills and projects then you won’t have anything to share on Linkedin, or you wouldn’t be able to prepare effectively for interviews, it goes hand in hand. 

If I didn’t have the right program to follow it would be difficult to build a disciplined learning regime because when I sat down half the time would have been spent wondering what I should learn that day.

Having a well structured learning program is one of the best things you can follow to accelerate your learning and I noticed that there was a lack of good programs for cloud beginners like you to follow.

This is why I created Cloud Career Acceleration Program which has been designed to give you a structured learning plan and materials to be successful in the cloud industry.

In the program, you will build high quality projects using technologies that cloud employers are looking for like Linux, AWS, Terraform, CICD, Python and more.

You will also learn the non-technical skills that employers are looking for such as how to write a resume that attracts recruiters, and how to interview in a way that impresses hiring managers and convinces them to give you that job offer.

If this sounds good to you then why not check us out at cloudcareermentor.com