Cloud Professional Career Path

Thought of the day: Public Cloud expertise is fundamental skill for all contemporary ICT professionals, but it is based on General ICT Skills.

These days I deal a lot with the training of University of Applied Sciences Bachelor of Business Administration students that either want to learn things about Public Cloud or want to become Public Cloud Professionals. So I guess my text is mostly directed at them, but I think it has some general merits to it as well. I recently had the opportunity to hear about a career path story from a Solution Architect (Cloud), which made me to think about what does it take to become a Public Cloud Professional? Do Bachelor of Business Administration students even become Cloud Architects? Yes, some demonstratably do.

I reflected on the story and my recollections about one of my younger colleagues whom I supported as they progressed from an ICT Specialist to a Solution Architect (Cloud) - a highly successful Public Cloud Professional - and concluded that the career paths resembled each other. Having also become a Public Cloud Professional myself, I thought I’ have some insights into what it has historically taken to become a Solution Architect (Cloud) and decided to publish this material about the subject, as I thought it might contain useful information for those considering whether they should pursue a career in Public Cloud. I reviewed this material with another colleague to further confirm my thoughts, and herein I present them to you. This material is mainly meant to be used during instructor led trainings, but I think it will be an interesting read for anyone interested.

Interestingly, the path towards career in Public Cloud start with General ICT Skills. You could call such skills Basic ICT Skills, Foundational ICT Skills or Technical ICT Skills, but to be consistent in this text let us focus on General ICT Skills term to discuss what most technical ICT work - not just Public Cloud - requires from a ICT Professional. General ICT Skills are not about general handwaving, but about the ability to put hands in the mud and apply one’s skills to find solutions and to bend technology to solve technical problems. This is what future Public Cloud Professionals should focus on, as they prepare themselves to be relevant for the contemporary job market.

In the illustration above, I outline a career path to interested learners, from a mere Human to a true Mentat, based on my own experiences and knowledge, and motivated by the stories I reflected on recently. The outlined career path is by no means the only imaginable career path an ICT Professional can take in Public Cloud, but it is a story told thousands of times across various ICT fields, including programming, information security, data engineering and - recently, the hype - AI. The outlined career path could apply in one field or another, simply by replacing titles and some minor technology words seen in the illustration. Not everyone makes it to the top positions, but some do, and most progress in a career path that resembles this one.

The career path to a particular job position doesn’t take exactly 10 years. Public Cloud Professionals might remain in some work position because they enjoy that work, or that they take a break making babies, or for some other reason. The path to become a Solution Architect (Cloud) could take anywhere between 5 to 7 years after graduation. Some Solution Architects (Cloud) could get there sooner, some later. This is not to say that everyone will become or should become a Solution Architect (Cloud), but I chose to reflect the subject from this point of view, because it is personal to me and has a lot to do with my daily work. In the end, there really aren’t “Cloud Architects”, “Information Security Specialist”, “Fullstack Developers” or “AI Whisperers”. There are just humans - sometimes mentats - performing Technical ICT Work relying on their General ICT Skills, which they are continuously expanding and maintaining. Advanced, technology specific skills are built on General ICT Skills. Without that foundation, the structure would collapse. Every Public Cloud Professional is a person capable of doing Technical ICT Work first and foremost.

So what does it all mean to the learner who wants to proceed to Public Cloud or other technical field of ICT work? Well, it means, that as the learner is selecting courses to study, they should heavily focus on building General ICT Skill base first, and take secondary studies in the current favourite hype areas, like Information Security, Data Engineering or - the latest offender - AI Whispering. Along with General ICT Skills, the Public Cloud expertise is now an essential requirement, because increasing amount of ICT systems are being deployed on hyperscaler platforms like AWS, Azure, Google or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The happy thing about General ICT Skills is that the learners don’t have to master all aspects of them during a single course, because topics often repeat across different courses. Wax on. Wax off. Then what are these General ICT Skills for future Public Cloud Professionals? Well, I have outlined this Cloud Readiness Checklist that explains the situation on topic level (I won’t go deep into each category to keep the text short):

General ICT Skills
- (Soft Skills)
  - (Collaboration, Co-operation, Communication)
- Attitute
  - Enthusiasm, Stamina, Troubleshooting, Industriousness
- Study Technique
  - Book Reading, Pen and Paper Study Notes, Doodling, Structural Thinking
- Documentation and Visualization
  - Mind Maps, Diagrams, Architecture
- System & Infrastructure Skills
  - IAM, Compute, OS, Software, Network, Storage, Database
- Web Technologies
  - DNS, TLS, Web Application, Web Browser
- Scripting, Programming (basics)
  - bash, cmd, PowerShell, JavaScript, Python, Git
- Virtualization, Containers
  - Virtual Machines, Docker, Docker Swarm
- Public Cloud
  - Concepts, Service Categories, Good Practices

It is important to have marketable General ICT Skills, so that any ICT Professional has something to offer to the technical ICT work field. If the foundations are not properly built, then on what can we base our secondary advanced hype studies or our future work? From a professional like me - a person who has taken part in the recruitment, coaching, mentoring and training of many ICT professionals - you can make a positive impression by showing effort in things that you do and that you are able to do Technical ICT Work Tasks. How about using Bachelor’s Thesis as an opportunity to create something that demonstrates your command of General ICT Skills to employers? Deploy Web App, create Digital Business Card, design and implement Cloud teaching or Cloud training session? Let me know if I can help you! Later on in their career ICT Professionals need to consider getting Public Cloud certification, not least because Public Cloud vendor Partner Programs require that their Partners have cloud certified employees to reach higher partnership levels!

Ok, ok, did I succeed in selling you on the importance of learning General ICT Skills? Now, how to learn them? Well, learning is always through doing. Trainings can facilitate learning, but participating to training - for example attending to online lectures while washing dishes and watching television - is not the same as studying. Trainings can assist with learning, but the learner needs to actively study by reading books, taking notes, structuring their thinking and doing practical tasks with different ICT technologies. AI can do the homework these days - something that seems to start to detract from learning -, but it can’t do the actual learning on the learner’s behalf. It is up to the learner to either gather study credits or to truly learn something during studies. Ideally, both should happen at the same time, but they can also occur independently of each other. Specifically, within the scope of formal education, I highly recommend that learners place a strong emphasis on General ICT Skills when selecting courses and throughout their studies.

Once a learner has a firm grasp of - hopefully - several skills described here as General ICT Skills, they can specialize in some additional areas like Information Security or Programming, or even take advanced Public Cloud trainings (for example architecture and operations), as our example career path is that of a Solution Architect (Cloud).

As a closing though, here you gained some context and good suggestion on what to focus on as you build your General ICT Skills, so that you can develop as a Public Cloud Professional. Keep in mind, that this material may become outdated in time, for example related to rough salary estimations, which I checked from online salary services while writing this text. Salary estimates by the way are from Finland, if you are wondering! I do think that for next 3 to 5 years, the points I make should remain relevant, and after that, we’ll just wait and see.

Thank you for reading.

Pekka Korpi-Tassi
Holistic ICT, DevOps and Cloud Professional
March 2025

PS. Illustration contains an easter egg! Can you unravel it?