Why Entry Level Cloud Tech Jobs Require 3-5 years Experience And What To Do About It As A Beginner

If you’ve started applying for cloud tech jobs, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of these jobs ask for three to five years of experience, even for jobs that claim to be entry level.

If you’re a cloud beginner it seems like a bit of a catch 22 situation, where you can’t get a job because all the entry level jobs ask for 3-5 years of experience, but you can’t get any experience because you can’t get a job in the first place.

This can be really frustrating because you begin to doubt if you have any chance of breaking into the tech industry. 

But what if I told you that there was a simple process you could follow that will help you get that first job even if you have zero technical experience?

Before we talk about that, it's really important that we understand exactly why employers ask for three to five years of experience in the first place. 

By understanding why, we’ll be able to develop a strategy to overcome their concerns and worries, so they can see you as a viable candidate.

The first reason employers ask for three to five years of experience is because as a cloud engineer, you’ll be working on projects that have really high stakes. 

The decisions and actions you take as a cloud beginner has the potential to make or cost businesses thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands.

For example, I recently heard the story of a cloud engineer called George who was given a task to clean up some rows in a company's database, except, rather than deleting a few rows, he ended up accidentally deleting the entire database.

This database was really important to the company because it contained all of their products as well as their customers' information and purchase history. 

Basically, by deleting this database, George could have cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars and potentially bankrupted them. 

Luckily, there was a backup of this database which meant that all the deleted data was able to be restored successfully. 

I hope you can begin to see how a cloud engineer who doesn’t know what they're doing could really negatively impact a company and cause serious damage. 

This is why employers prefer engineers who are more experienced as they are less likely to make these sorts of mistakes than beginners are.

The second reason why employers usually ask for three to five years of experience is because if you’re a cloud engineer you’re not just working with the cloud, for example AWS or Azure. You also need to understand other technologies like Linux, Bash, Python, and much more.

In addition to these technologies, you also need to understand system design concepts like, Security, cost optimization, backup and disaster recovery, autoscaling and so much more.

There’s a lot more that goes into being a cloud professional than just knowing how to create some S3 buckets in AWS, and employers are always on the lookout for candidates who understand these more advanced concepts. 

Unfortunately, most cloud beginners don’t dive deep into these concepts, which is why employers ask for three to five years of experience because they are more likely to find engineers who understand these technologies and concepts.

The final reason why employers ask for 3-5 years of experience is because if they didn’t, they would get thousands of unqualified candidates applying to these roles, which would make it really difficult for them to find the right candidates. 

By putting three to five years in the job description, they effectively discourage the unqualified candidates from applying so they can focus on attracting the best candidates.

When we talked about the reasons employers put three to five years of experience, the three main reasons we identified were that:

1. The stakes are very high for employers and they want to hire someone who knows what they’re doing
2. Cloud engineers need to understand a lot of different technologies and concepts and beginners generally don’t dive deep into these topics
3. Employers want to weed out all the unqualified candidates as efficiently as possible.

You might have started to notice that there is one underlying reason why employers ask for three to five years of experience and that reason is down to risk.

Risk that you don’t know what you’re doing and might bankrupt their business

Risk that they will have to spend a lot of time training you and holding your hand which will cost them time and money

And finally, risk that if they hire you, in 3 months time they will have to let you go because you’re just not qualified for the position, which will of course mean a waste of time and money for them

This means that if you really want to get an entry level cloud job with zero technical experience, you need to do one thing.

And that is to de-risk yourself.

Here’s what I mean.

You need to upskill yourself to the point that employers don’t feel like they are taking a massive risk hiring you.

The more you can increase your technical skills, the less risky you become to employers, the more likely they are to take a chance on you and give you a job offer.

Now I know the next question you might be asking is this: 

how exactly do you de-risk yourself?

Well the answer is really simple and you can do it in 6 simple steps:

1. Get comfortable navigating the linux command line.
2. Develop high quality cloud projects projects that utilise networking, security and scalability.
3. Learn how to script infrastructure with Terraform
4. Create complex, multi-environment CICD pipelines
5. Learn how to automate processes using python.
6. Learn how to communicate your experience effectively both in your resume and in interviews

We’ve developed a simple test to know if you’re the kind of candidate employers are looking to hire.

Let’s assume that you’re in an interview and I’m an interviewer. 

If I ask you to tell me about a CICD project you’ve done, would you be able to talk for five to ten minutes about a project?

Do you feel comfortable talking for five to ten minutes about a terraform or python project you’ve done?

If you can’t do that then I’m afraid you have a lot of work to do.

Your ability to work on high quality projects and more importantly, talk about these projects in an interview setting, will significantly improve your chances of getting hired even if you don’t have three to five years of experience.

How do I know this works? Because we’ve seen it be successful for multiple candidates from all over the world.

In a minute I’m going to show an example of how a candidate was able to go from being a quality analyst to making a career switch and getting her first cloud job simply by de-risking herself and implementing some of the things I’ve spoken about today.

Earlier on I mentioned that a student of our program was able to successfully transition from being a quality analyst to becoming a cloud engineer by de-risking herself and following the cloud career acceleration program. 

We asked her to share her story so you can learn exactly what she did to break into the cloud industry and follow in her footsteps.