🇬🇧 Mike Parker 🇺🇦

If you can, work on certifications that interest you. Some of the advanced certifications can take up many hours of study and practice. It will make the process a lot easier if you are interested in the subject. Also consider the learning material. Some video and written content is better than others, some have not been updated so no longer contain relevant information. Look for special features such as sandboxes to practice on or end of module quizzes to check you have the understood the information.

During my Azure certification journey, I felt it was important to cover all the generalist and big picture stuff first to demonstrate a solid understanding of what the cloud can do so I can offer recommendations to my organisation based on the whole ecosystem. Only then did I start working on things that were more specialist. With the context obtained with the broader subject matter certifications, it made visualising a specific product or subject within an interconnected architecture more straightforward.

Ensuring customer loyalty starts with offering excellent service. Without delivering your core product or service well, no amount of extra mile stuff will build confidence and trust. Once a company is meeting or exceeding expectations, any reward or benefit needs to be enticing enough to create a call to action. For example if it takes an abnormally large amount of spending before the customer can take advantage of a reward, the appeal may be limited to a very small number of your overall customers.

All the major public cloud providers offer a certification path, which starts off at a basic level and progresses to advanced levels. Once you have mastered one, it is less of a stretch to consider another, especially if your organisation requires you to be multicloud skilled. This is because many of the services are similar, but with different names. For example, many of the major cloud big data solutions will include Apache Spark capabilities. Oracle Cloud (OCI) even has a learning path for existing practitioners of other major cloud services to learn the Oracle platform by building on terms familiar to them already.

Having worked through many online learning resources, the best ones for retention of knowledge is where you can follow along. Information sticks if you create a muscle memory of a given task. Many online training resources give you access to a cloud sandbox or you can follow along on your own subscription.