Certifications provide only a partial answer to the cloud skills gap

A Cloud Guru, now a Pluralsight company, sets out some solutions to the cloud skill gap, considering the perspectives of both employer and employee.

A Cloud Guru, now a Pluralsight company recently surveyed 1000 technologists and leaders to create their "State of the Cloud," report, and a stark finding was the fact that 75% of leaders said they were putting all of their new products in the cloud but only 8% said that they had the cloud skills necessary to do so successfully, including cloud security, machine learning and data analytics skills - those that go beyond the basics.

Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect at cloud training specialists A Cloud Guru, speaking at the IT Leaders Festival 2022 believes that while certifications have their place, they should be considered more of a starting point than a full solution to the cloud skills crunch.

"Increasingly, we're hearing from our customers that they want more than just certification related content. It's actually really important to try and get some real-world experience for engineers and to get hands on practical experience. Certification is a great first step but we have to do more if we want to deliver that real world cloud transformation, " she explains.

One area where Ellis thought certification were particularly useful was in the identification of individuals who might have a particular affinity or interest in a certain technology.

"Who is your next Kubernetes expert? Who's the next machine learning expert? Who's the Terraform genius? Who loves infrastructure as code? Once you've identified those individuals create some development activities to grow those skills in a way that's going to be useful for your company. At Pluralsight we've set up mentorship programmes so that junior engineers can buddy up with more senior engineers and discuss activities that will help them to progress their career. "

"We also give dedicated learning time for a couple of hours a week when everyone can spend time on developing activity in areas that are important to them but also to the company. And of course, incentivize people. So some of our some of our customers have previously used our courses as a way of incentivizing people to complete certain tasks and challenges. These are all things you can do as a leader. "

Building real-world experience

Ellis suggested three ways that junior engineers could build that crucial real-world experience on top of their cloud certifications.

• Develop a specialisation which is as important to the engineer as it is to the company using some of the tools and methods discussed above.
• Create a portfolio of personal projects to demonstrate their technical skills. A Cloud Guru offer an extensive list of these pre-defined projects such as creating a secure website using SWA, GCP or Azure, creating a 100% Azure hosted version of your resume or architecting and building an image upload and recognition process using different cloud providers. These should be similar to real life scenarios the engineers are likely to encounter.
• Build a personal brand to highlight your expertise and let people know what you're doing. What specific skills are you working on in your spare time that you can share? An example would be getting a team member to present to the rest of the team on a project that they've been working on, how they architected, how they troubleshoot etc.