Four Ingredients for a Successful Cloud Career

When it comes to the IT industry, bigger is most certainly not better. And that is why the industry has captivated everyone by their continuous and phenomenal advancement in the field of storage infrastructure. Today the storage drives have reached their own saturation and the industry that has never stopped to take a breath has jumped yet another pedestal creating what is popularly known as Cloud Computing, the future of storage, hereby making the classic hard drives redundant.

Cloud and Career

According to Forbes, there are currently 3.9 million jobs in the field of Cloud Computing

IT professionals with Cloud Computing experience have a median salary of $90,950

According to Technical Reuters, there are 100 jobs chasing each qualified candidate at this point in time.

Which field do I get in?

IT Architects responsible for main solutions

IT Administrators who shall maintain infrastructure for service providers

IT Consultants for the evaluation of the clients’ needs

As of now, the major fields with promising career prospects in the Cloud Computing industry require either specific Cloud Computing skills or Cloud Architecture skills. Companies that require specific skills are already engaged with a specific cloud providers like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Service. But companies that sought out for Cloud Architects seek people capable of defining the cloud. Along with the technical jargon they also require a strategic knowledge of Cloud Computing. Salaries of a cloud IT professional range from $150,000 to $250,000 annually, depending on location and experience.

Certifications Provide Authenticity

The majority of IT pros who work in cloud positions are either trained on the job or are self-taught. But these skills will only take your resume to a particular point, beyond which the employers shall filter based on your qualifications and legitimacy. Getting certified from a respectable certification program will provide the extra-curricular push your profile needs and prove your authenticity to the employers. Maybe if you were born in the 80s, you could have gotten away with your prestigious degree. So the way you like your applications and operating software to be updated, the very same way your employers would like to have an up to date workforce that is familiar with the industrial workings and standards.

Keep Learning

Five most demanded skills for IT Cloud Computing professionals are Structured Query Language (SQL), overall software development skills, Java, JavaScript, Linux and some experience with software quality assurance.

Some of the other skills that employers look out for are:

Systems administration

Storage networking

Business-IT alignment

Data analytics, data warehousing, master data management

Information

Integration is the key

Microsoft published a paper on the essentials for every IT professional that said, “The change is moving from building and supporting local IT infrastructure to managing IT services in the cloud, which requires an extension of skills and capabilities.”

There are enough IT professionals that are capable of managing both virtual storage and the virtualization of servers. But they will have to adjust their skill sets to function within a private or public cloud. IT professionals with the agility to adapt their technical skills while subsequently retaining and growing their business skills will be the highest in demand. A PhD in Particle Physics might just be hired instead of an IT professional in the Silicon Valley since the candidate with a PhD has a flair for learning and the inquisitiveness required for innovation in the company.

The bottom line is, if you want to jumpstart your cloud career you need to take four factors into consideration, namely: