Funnily enough when I started at my first Managed Services job it was completely on premises work & coincidentally the same year AWS released their first product. Back then we were doing onsite server setups or data centre work aswell as desktop support.

I worked there for 3 years, loved the variety of work due to getting problems from all sorts of different tech to work on.

I then worked for myself for a while, had a child, took over fulltime parent for 5 years and watched him start school.

By then, having 5 years off in IT feels like basically a career reset.

So from leaving that Managed Services job in 2009… it ended up being 12 years out of a workplace, 5 years out of working in IT altogether.

I tried applying all over the place, with no luck. I was seriously doubting my relevance to the industry anymore.

Thankfully I had a friend of mine who’d been through this course created by AWS & run by Goanna Education called AWS Re/Start said to give it a shot. His words were, “Worst comes to worst it’s super easy, and they help you find a job after.”

So I spent 3 months in this course, which was pretty easy considering my previous experience. That said it wasn’t a waste of time. It helped me realise that my previous experience was definitely still relevant… Massive confidence boost! Thanks to the introductions made by Goanna I was hired nearly immediately after, and I’m coming up on a year here at Itoc. Super thankful.

After having been through it, I’ve kept in touch because I saw areas where they could improve, and after the opportunity they gave me, I was happy to help refine the experience for future grads so they had the best chance possible.

I’ve been doing talks for them to the grads when they finish to help out with ideas on what to do next. Not everyone’s as lucky as myself or has the previous experience I did, so I did up a bunch of slides which I give out, and have been giving advice afterwards when asked.

I hope this series of articles will provide a reference point I can point the grads or anyone else to when they’re after advice on what they should do to get into cloud.