How to Land A Role As A Cloud Engineer In 5 Simple Steps

You want to get into the cloud industry, but you’ve been finding it to be more difficult than you anticipated.

You’ve been getting rejection after rejection and you’re starting to wonder if you have what it takes to break into this industry

What if I told you there was a simple 5-step process you could follow that would take you from getting ghosted by recruiters to getting that job in the cloud industry?

Most cloud beginners don’t follow a process, which means that they end up stuck in tutorial hell, where they keep jumping from one tutorial to another without making any progress and end up wasting a lot of time.

This lack of structure means that you are not actually learning the skills that employers are looking for, which leads to rejection when you apply for jobs

I don’t want that for you

Today you are going to learn the 5 step process to getting your first cloud job.

This simple process has helped dozens of people from all over the world break into the cloud industry. These are people with no technical background or computer science degrees. I’m talking about nurses, scientists, and factory workers.

Trust me if they can do it, then you can too

By following this proven process you will not only increase the number of calls you get from cloud recruiters and also develop the skills to impress hiring managers so you can get that cloud job

Are you ready?

Let’s jump right into it

Let’s start with a little analogy. Let’s say you’ve been invited to a really fun pool party at the other side of town. There's going to be food, drinks, and good music. You’re really excited to go, and they send you the address. You’ve never been to that address before, and you don’t really know where it is but rather than putting the address in Google Maps to get directions, you decide to try to find your way by yourself with no directions.

What do you think will happen?

The most likely outcome is that you will get lost and confused and will never make it to that party because you don’t know how to get there.

This is a perfect example of how a lot of people try to break into the cloud industry. You know where you want to get to but have no idea how to get there, so you just try to learn random technologies and hope you can reach your destination of a cloud job.

But hope is not a strategy

When trying to break into the cloud industry, the first thing you need is a learning roadmap. This roadmap should not only tell you what technologies to learn, but also in what order you need to learn them.

A lot of cloud technologies build on each other. So by learning some technologies first, it will be easier to learn other technologies. For example, if you learn the Linux Command Line first, it will make it a lot easier to learn CICD because a lot of CICD is setup with Linux commands and if you try to learn CICD without learning the Linux Command Line, then you will find it extremely difficult

A good learning plan not only provides structure to your learning, but it also gives you the confidence to keep going when things get difficult.

Here are the general technologies I tell cloud beginners to learn: Linux command line, AWS, Terraform, Git, CICD, Python, and Serverless

Btw, if you want to know where you can get a detailed learning plan, I recommend you watch this video to the end, and all will be revealed.

Once you’ve got a learning plan and have identified what technologies you need to learn.

This means that you not only need to understand the importance of the technology you’re learning but you also need to learn the basic commands.

I’ve noticed that when beginners start to learn a new technology they miss this step and immediately try to start building complicated projects. They end up getting confused and quitting. There is a time for complex projects but that is further on in the process, for now it is really important to understand the basic commands.

For example, if you are learning Python, rather than immediately trying to build an Instagram clone app. First, take the time to understand the basic commands, understand what strings and integers are, and understand how to use loops and conditional statements. These are the building blocks you need to for a solid foundation in that technology

Now that you’ve mastered the technology fundamentals, the next step, Step 3 is to Build Simple Projects.

Simple projects are a great way to  gain confidence with that technology as there is limited complexity which means it is easy to troubleshoot any issues.

For example lets say you want to test your AWS skills by deploying a Wordpress Server in AWS. You can spin up an EC2 instance in a default subnet in AWS where you can install wordpress on it and run a test.

This is a basic project because it doesn't take into account important cloud concepts like Security, scalability, reliability, and all the other factors you need to consider in a real deployment. 

Once you have done a basic project like this, you can then move on to step 4 which is Build Advanced Projects

Advanced projects are projects that reflect how the technologies are used in the real world.

There is usually a lot more complexity, but it is important to do these projects because this is how you stand out to hiring managers.

Earlier on, we looked at a simple deployment of WordPress, where we installed WordPress on an EC2 in a default subnet.

Now lets take this same example and make it more advanced.

Now we are going to create a VPC with 3 public subnets and 3 private subnets. In the private subnet we have an RDS which will act as the external database to store the data. We will then have an EC2 instance also in the private subnet where the wordpress application will be installed. We will then have an application load balancer in the public subnet that will route all incoming traffic to the worpress application.

You can see that this is a much more comprehensive deployment of WordPress that reflects how applications are deployed in the real world.

It is important to have multiple advanced projects across all the technologies you are learning to be able to stand out from the hundreds of other candidates who only have more basic projects on their resume

Once you have completed some advanced projects you can now move on to Step 5 which is to learn how to Communicate your experience.

I have found that a lot of cloud beginners are poor communicators and this holds them back in their job search

If you want to break into the cloud industry, you need to learn how to craft your resume in a way that attracts the attention of recruiters so that they give you a call. A lot of cloud beginners don’t know how to write a resume that stands out and this might be a reason you are not getting calls.

You also need to learn how to talk about yourself and your projects confidently in interviews as this is the only way to impress hiring managers so that they give you a job offer.

Now that we’ve gone through the 5 step process you need to get your first cloud job I want you to ask yourself these questions.

Have you understood the fundamentals of the technologies you are learning?

Have you built basic projects to test your understanding of the technologies?

Have you built more advanced projects that show that you have mastered those technologies

Do you know how to write about your projects and experiences on your resume to attract recruiters?

Do you feel confident talking about your projects in a way that impresses hiring managers in interviews?

If the answer to any of these questions is No, then I recommend you check out our program on cloudcareermentor.com where you will learn all of these skills and more