Read this if you've been rejected from cloud jobs for not having enough experience.

If you’ve been trying to land your first cloud engineer role, you know that the recruitment landscape is brutal. One of the key reasons people are turned down for jobs is because they do not have enough experience.

But is this true?

I believe that when you are told you do not have enough experience, the recruiter is actually saying one of two things:

You actually do not have enough experience
You have enough experience, but are not communicating that experience properly

Let’s address the first scenario first. If you don’t have enough experience, there are no shortcuts, you need to put in the work.

The best ways to do that are:

Learn the fundamentals of Linux command-line and Bash Scripting
Create AWS projects

By learning the fundamentals and creating projects, you will improve your hands-on experience with AWS.

Every time you see “Job Experience” on a job description, replace that with “hands-On experience,” as the results are the same. All the employer wants to know is that you have executed projects on AWS, which means that you will be able to help them.

Alright, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let us address the second point. This is where you’ve learnt the fundamentals and have created multiple projects. In this case, recruiters are not rejecting you because you don’t have enough experience; they are rejecting you because you are not communicating that experience well.

I review the CVs of the people I mentor, and this is one common mistake I see. They usually write something like:

I have worked with AWS services such as EC2, RDS, S3, etc.

All this tells me as a hiring manager is that you might know what those acronyms mean, but it doesn’t tell me how you’ve actually used them.

A much better way to communicate your experience is by writing:

A recent project I worked on involved configuring an Application Load Balancer in a public subnet, which I routed through a Target Group to an EC2 Webserver in a private subnet, which could also communicate with an RDS instance also in a private subnet. All of the networking was controlled through a Security Group.

You can see how much better this is, because it not only shows what services you have used but also communicates that you understand how the services interact with each other. When you are communicating your experience, definitely aim for too much detail rather than not enough detail.

Remember, good communication skills are just as important as good technical skills.

In the comments section, I’d love to see what changes you’ve made to your CV after reading this. Write down a section of your CV where you are talking about your experience, then make a change to add more detail. Basically, I’d like to see a before and after. I will also be providing feedback on what you post in order to make it even better!

P.S To increase your chance of landing a cloud job in the next three months, you can sign up for my mentorship program