Why This Technology Leader Pursued His Cloud Certification

Last week, I earned my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification. AWS has a full array of certifications for various levels of expertise and specialties. This is the entry-level one.

Many of you know that I am technology leader with overall responsibilities for cloud technologies at our company, but I am far removed from the hands-on work. It’s safe to say that I am not, nor do I plan to be, an actual cloud practitioner. So, why did I bother with pursing this certification? Certainly, I’m not bored and looking for things to keep me occupied. I’ll use this article to explain why.

Don’t hinder

The world we live in today is vastly different than the world I lived in when I was building my career as an engineer. For many years, my technology experience as an engineer was an asset to me as a technology leader. I knew the technologies my teams used, and could even pitch-in, if necessary. That created a bond between my team and me. They knew that I’ve walked a mile in their shoes and can speak their native language. I was a leader, but I was also “one of them.”

As time has ticked by, my hands-on skills have become increasingly irrelevant. My current focus lies in my strategic leadership and decision-making role. If I lose my fluency in understanding the language of my team, I could inadvertently become a barrier to progress. The worst-case-scenario is that I become a brick wall for technical advancement simply because “I don’t get it.” I never want to be one of those bosses.

To be fair to myself, I get the strategic value of cloud computing. I captured my intellectual journey on that one previously on this blog. I “got it,” but I didn’t “know it.”

Fun

I don’t get my hands dirty with technology every day, but I still like to every once in a while. In preparation for the certification, I performed various lab activities in an AWS Sandbox through A Cloud Guru curriculum. I not only learned, but I had fun. I was texting one my colleagues during a lab:

“I just built a web app hosted on autoscaling EC2, based on a bootstrapped AMI I created, load balanced across multiple Availability Zones, and backed by RDS MySQL. Woot!”

I’m not the smartest in the room, but hopefully not the dumbest either

I gave up my need to be the smartest person in the room long ago. I’ve learned to achieve success by building teams of diverse and brilliant professionals. However, that doesn’t give me a pass to play to the dumb boss card.

I need to be in strategic steering discussions around cloud technology every day. I’d rather not hold up the group because I don’t understand the concepts or terminology. That slows everything down.

Lead by example

I recently read Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT by Stephen Orban. The book was filled with a lot of practical and relevant stories to help mature enterprises navigate a move to the public cloud. Stephen recounted a time when he was in a position similar to mine and was encouraging his team members to get certified on cloud technologies.

He even made a big deal about recognizing everyone who earned a certification. Eventually, one of his team members called him out saying, “when are you going to get certified?” So, he did.

After reading that story a few weeks ago, I decided to get my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification. I too, have been encouraging my teams to learn and get certified. I thought I might as well lead by example.

If someone like me, with all of my traditional IT knowledge and decades of experience, can learn how to do computing in a completely new way, so can everyone else on my team.

Not a practitioner

The most ironic thing about this whole adventure is that I earned a “practitioner” certification with no intentions of being an actual practitioner. AWS hasn’t come up with an “executive” certification for technology leaders, so this one will have to do. As for the actual practitioners, following in my footsteps is just the beginning. I expect that many will go on to achieve the Associate, Professional, and Specialty certifications.

Could I have learned what I needed without going all the way and getting certified? Most certainly. I value certifications. If you’d like to understand my personal philosophy on that topic, read my previous article here.  

Our team is going on a great adventure to embrace advanced cloud technology so we can achieve our purpose to create connections to empower agriculture. I’m not the first on the team to get certified, but I really didn’t want to be the last.

Okay team, we’re going this way. Here we go!

Read this article on my blog site or listen to it on my podcast.