One of the most common questions that I’m asked is: "What cloud skills do I need that will get me hired quickly?"
First, keep in mind that this is an emerging area, so what employers are looking for is constantly shifting. Second, even if they do hire you for a specific skill, you’ll be asked to retrain and retool as the cloud technology matures.
Still, here are three skills that should get you hired right now:
Any Amazon Web Services certification. My advice to people leaving college is always the same: Get AWS-certified. It does not matter if you take the developer or architect path for AWS skills; companies are focused on all those AWS certifications.
You’ll hear people dismiss such certifications as not really demonstrating any ability on the part of those who get them. But viewpoint misses the fact that companies really are not qualified to vet cloud talent themselves, so they need shortcuts these days to staff up. Certifications are an easy way to validate if an applicant has some degree of talent. So, get real about hiring works and get your AWS certs.
Internet of things and cloud. Companies have two technology pushes right now. First, moving to the cloud. Second, having all machines talk to all other machines and to people. Combine the two, and you have cloud-based IoT.
AWS has a strong offering here, but don’t limit yourself to gaining just AWS cloud IoT skills. Microsoft and Google matter in this area as well, so get skilled in at least one of those two as well. Many employers are looking for people who understand multiple public clouds, and most IoT systems are on those clouds.
Serverless or container anything. Both serverless computing and containers have achieved buzzword status, despite being truly practical technologies. So, there’s high demand for people skilled in these new areas, even if hiring companies don’t really understand them or know what they would do with them.
The funny thing about these skills is that you’re likely to get hired for possessing them, but you may not use them right away. Companies are looking to move to serverless, containers, or both—but they have not really done much to move the ball in that direction. Still, they are hiring now in anticipation of that day.
Good luck in your job hunt!