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Tag: cloud certification

  • How to Achieve AWS Competency Accreditation

    How to Achieve AWS Competency Accreditation

    For businesses in the early stage of their ventures, proving that they have the expertise and technical know-how when it comes to cloud technology can be difficult. An acceleration toward digitization due to COVID-19 and an increasingly crowded cloud market, dominated by the big players, means that simply shouting about your skills in cloud engineering and DevOps isn’t enough to get noticed.

    But what if you can work alongside these giants? Joining forces with expert brands and entering into endorsement partnerships can propel your business forward by supplementing it with seasoned expertise. Accreditation, if you can achieve it, can give you a stamp of approval and reassure prospects that you have the relevant knowledge to support their digital transformation efforts. Collaborating with industry leaders on skills accreditation programs is a great way to demonstrate your capabilities and provides clear goalposts to work toward when it comes to building and learning.

    So, how do businesses achieve this status and what are the long-term benefits of the process?

    Become an AWS Partner

    Achieving accreditation as an AWS DevOps Competency Partner takes a lot of hard work and investment into building the technical skills required to reach such a high standard–logging and evidencing every action your team takes is no mean feat. From beginning to end, the course takes around six months. The process begins with researching and selecting which specific competency your team is interested in achieving. It’s important to understand which competency your business is most suited to, so doing your homework is key. From there, there’s a lot of work to evidence, certificates to achieve and reviews to undergo. Becoming an accredited AWS partner brings a multitude of benefits to your brand, so it is well worth the investment.

    Top Tips for the Accreditation Process:

    Create detailed accounts of your work: To become a certified DevOps partner, businesses need to evidence four case study examples; two public and two private. As such, it can be useful to bring in a tech writer to consolidated your notes and observations throughout the process. We began, for example, with a technical exploration from the team to understand the best case studies to put forward; our work had to be clearly evidenced with strong examples and the documentation to back it up which took a considerable amount of time to pull together. Maintaining clear and detailed accounts of previous work can prevent any delays. This information is firstly analyzed by AWS to check that it met the specific requirements before being passed on to be examined by a team of external auditors, so every detail counts when it comes to showcasing your work.

    Prepare the marketing team: As part of the process, businesses are required to have certain marketing collateral in place across their website to aid with lead generation. For the DevOps competency certification, we needed to evidence three technical blogs–businesses applying for the certification need to ensure that the content best reflects their expertise in the given competency. Once the accreditation is finalized, the partnership should be displayed on the site. Even if a business is tech-agnostic, demonstrating your skills in a particular type of cloud engineering is highly valuable to your brand and AWS is a respected platform to use.

    Advance technical training in the workplace: Having members of the team qualified in cloud engineering is another requirement for accreditation. For DevOps, we needed eight people on the team to have achieved their associate certifications and four to have achieved professional certifications. To fulfill this requirement and ensure we’re on top of our game when it comes to cloud training, we’ve invested in third-party tools, provided access to LinkedIn Learning programs and we give our people additional time off from client-facing work to prepare for their exams. Building and learning in tandem is the fabric of our culture, and a similar approach would benefit any company looking to achieve certification status.

    The Benefits of AWS Accreditation

    Being able to showcase a close association with a major player such as AWS opens up a number of doors for smaller businesses. Operating within this kind of business ecosystem provides the opportunity to demonstrate a business’ DevOps and technical skills to an enormous global audience which can drive new business conversations and drive quality leads. Confirmation that your business is a trusted partner for a major cloud organization will ensure that prospects have confidence in your capabilities and you’re taken seriously as a technical player in the market. Building confidence within your teams and supporting them in their learning is an investment that will pay huge dividends.

    Working alongside AWS as an accredited DevOps partner gives us a springboard to talk about our work and engage with other players in the market. The accreditation is a fantastic talking point and definitely gets you noticed in the cloud community–plus, you will be taken more seriously as a partner.

    Investment in Cloud Tech is Key for the Future

    As businesses everywhere begin to operate in an increasingly digitized environment, technical skills and cloud expertise are a necessary investment for any business. Working toward coveted industry accreditations while prioritizing long-term skills training is imperative. It’s a competitive, buoyant market for cloud engineers and DevOps at the moment; opportunities are at their fingertips and if they aren’t feeling fulfilled by their current work, they’re likely to look elsewhere. Investment in training and nurturing growth in this way breeds employee engagement and loyalty. For a company to thrive technically, it needs to host a wide range of diverse talent and be able to retain it. Learning opportunities should always be the key focus.

    The shortage of this talent means it’s critical to advance the business’s cloud expertise by pursuing recognition from major global players like AWS. Providing advanced training and certification opportunities for your people will ensure long-term talent retention while making the business a leader in cloud engineering. That’s pivotal for long-term success.

  • Report: Cloud Expertise Now Superior to University Degree

    Report: Cloud Expertise Now Superior to University Degree

    According to a report by online learning platform A Cloud Guru, 90% of IT leaders expect to expand their cloud services usage over the next one to three years, yet only 56% have an actionable plan to upskill their workforce.

    The recently released “State of Cloud Learning Report” revealed interesting trends in cloud adoption and cloud learning statistics. The study frames cloud expertise as a top asset and reveals changing cloud service providers (CSPs) alliances, among other insights.

    Below, we cover the top findings from the report. I also chatted with Katie Bullard, president at A Cloud Guru, to dig deeper into critical takeaways.

    The Report

    A Cloud Guru (ACG) is an extensive educational platform hosting cloud training and certification programs. Earlier this year, ACG questioned its user base on cloud learning and cloud adoption patterns. The “State of Cloud Learning” report surveyed 6,000 cloud learning administrators 20,000 individual leaners.

    Cloud Certification > Degree

    Amid an increasingly remote economy and developer drought, demand for skilled cloud professionals is rising rapidly. According to the report, 82% of hiring managers say cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive and 87% of hiring managers value hands-on experience and certifications over a university degree. “Gaining cloud expertise is a top skill for anyone entering the tech industry,” Bullard said.

    It appears cloud expertise is directly correlated to career advancement, regardless of whether candidates possess a traditional degree. Eighty percent of individuals surveyed realize a higher salary as a direct result of cloud certification, and 52% say cloud certifications expanded their career opportunities.

    Cloud Acceleration

    The cloud is ramping up, as is the need for cloud specialists. Seventy-one percent of leaders surveyed have seen cloud adoption speed  their time to value for new products and features. Yet, 80% view a knowledge gap as a top barrier to cloud success. Deployment and orchestration and IT security are leading barriers to cloud success at 40% of institutions.

    Cloud agility requires niche skillsets. More often than not, we see those skills cultivated with on the job training. Eighty percent of cloud leaders reported it’s easier to upscale existing talent than to hire new roles. Training benefits both parties, as 94% of employees are likely to stay longer at companies that invest in skills development.

    “They can’t solve by just hiring,” noted Bullard. “They must also upscale the current team they have.” As CSPs change so rapidly, continuous cloud education is an ongoing need.

    Azure Popularity Skyrockets

    Azure learning is up nearly 800% year-over-year on ACG—an order of magnitude far outpacing 50%–100% for AWS and Google Cloud. The report surmises that this spike in interest could reflect Microsoft’s massive investment in Azure’s marketing in recent years.

    Among the three top cloud service providers (AWS, Azure and GCP), AWS still holds dominance. Analyzing the use of its eLearning courses, the ACG report found 76.6% of total view time related to AWS during August 2020.

    However, current training doesn’t correlate to which cloud is most desired. Interestingly, when questioned on their desired cloud expertise, respondents ranked the top three providers equally, each at around 50%. Other CSP incumbents Oracle, IBM and Alibaba have also grown in interest.

    The Future Is Multi-Cloud

    According to the ACG study, 70% of respondents are currently utilizing multiple cloud platforms. The report contends there is tremendous interest in AWS, yet alternative CSPs such as Azure “may provide a unique benefit to some companies.” From arctic code vaults to underwater data centers, Microsoft indeed is innovating, which could influence the future CSP hegemony.

    “It’s not that companies are moving away from AWS to Azure,” Bullard noted. A company may port a portion of its load to another cloud “for efficiency benefits, to make the platform fundamentally stronger, or to innovate faster with multiple solutions.”

    Hottest Cloud Skills

    Besides CSP training, cloud adjacent skills such as container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD tooling have risen with the need for agile deployment. Highlighting the current top cloud skills, DevOps-related technologies including Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker and Ansible are among the top 10 most searched terms on ACG.

    “DevOps, as a skill, is still relatively new,” Bullard said. No longer a dedicated side team, DevOps has become integral to the entire development process. “No matter if you’re on a DevOps team or not, it’s becoming integrated into everything a developer is doing,” she noted.

    Final Thoughts on Cloud Andragogy

    Analyzing the statistics from a cloud learning platform provides a unique window into current cloud implementations and future adoption. In summary, the ACG report demonstrates that:

    • eLearning for cloud technology makes candidates more attractive in the job market.
    • For many hiring managers, cloud certifications are more important than traditional college degrees.
    • Although AWS holds the most significant market share, interest in Azure has grown substantially.
    • Organizations are finding benefits in multi-cloud environments.
    • DevOps skills are emerging as necessary to keep pace.

    “We’re in a transformational point in time,” noted Bullard. “The cloud market is accelerating, education is accelerating and people are rethinking the way they approach training.”

    With COVID-19 forcing a remote economy, online learning is far more pervasive. Now more than ever, companies must consider how they strategically scale teams and how they scale on-the-job technology training for cloud and DevOps. Because, if the goal is always to be evolving, then adults need school, too!