Cloud/IT Engineers advice for job seekers and career growth
Apr 19 2024 - Showing your technical and writing skills will help you grow where you are and beyond.
For many years, I’ve been heavily involved in writing job descriptions, working with inside and outside recruiters, seen thousands of resumes, and have made hiring decisions. Writing a great resume that aligns with a given open position is always a challenge, but required. That same challenge also exists when you’re looking to get promoted or change to another role within your same organization. Lots of great content out there on resumes, but it’s only one asset and often hidden form the world (ok, LinkedIn is good too).
What you need is a way to continuously show your skills. I hope to convince you to buy a domain, build a site, write some content, and share your work on GitHub.
Yes, YOU CAN DO IT!!
Note: This is relevant to developers as well, but this comes naturally to you all. However, I hope this benefits you as well.
Table of Contents
The Why
Why even go through all this trouble? In the end, this is really about putting you in the best position to advance your career.
Another reason to build out your site (not just use a web based site creator tool like Wix or Wordpress) is it’s another skill! I’m not talking about building you up as an HTML web person. It’s learning how to connect to GitHub, automate your deployment (aka DevOps), deploying to Azure (in this case Azure Static Web Apps. Free.), writing content in Markdown (this is the way), and getting a touch of what developers do.
With AI booming, automated deployments, configurations via YAML, and more all end up connecting to Git repositories (GitHub cloud for example), and documentation is often in Markdown. Building your own site gets you connected to this world. And now you have your own site that proves it!
Recruiters & Hiring Managers
If you’re looking for a new job or maybe a recruiter has your dream job and is looking for you, this is how they’ll find you and spend more time looking at you.
Will a recruiter actually look at your site? Yes! Recruiters look at hundreds of resumes daily and are often using a few SaaS apps where people submit them or they pay a service to go find them (e.g. LinkedIn, Dice, Monster, etc.).
When they see a link to a website on your resume, it gives them permission to break free and see what you have to share.
We all know lots of people (not you of course) put things on their resume that they really didn’t do as much as they say or can’t even remember what they did when asked. By having your own site and maybe show some personal project work (e.g. scripts and command lines) there and in GitHub, you have evidence. It’s even cool if you write a blog post about something you found in another persons GitHub repo. Even better if you contribute too!
The Doubt
Let’s say I’ve convinced you. Building your own site will help you stand out with recruiters and hiring managers.
Now you face three common doubts:
- I’m not a developer
- Money
- I don’t think I have anything interesting to write that isn’t already out there
Let’s knock these out!
Not a developer
Building a website these days is pretty easy. You could use a service that helps you drag and drop on a web page and they’ll host if for you for a fee (we’ll talk about free options in a bit).
The gap between the traditional “IT” person and a developer is both closing and overlapping in many areas. But what we’re talking about here isn’t making you a “developer”, but building a skill that’s vital in the new IT landscape that is DevOps, Data, and AI.
Money
Building a website that looks good, fast, and showcases just you can be done with very little required investment. There is only one element to this that will cost you money which is your DNS Domain. A DNS Domain can range in price depending on the vendor between $9 (usd) to $25 (usd) a year. Everything else that’s noted later is free!
What to write
Honestly, this is the hardest thing for most people. I’ve managed many talented engineers in the past and it’s a common hurdle. They either think what they have nothing to say that isn’t already out there or they don’t have an interesting topic.
First off, if what you’ll write is already out there, SO WHAT!
What’s important is that you wrote up something with your own words and perspective. The fact that there are other pages out there with similar material, some you found while doing your research, only shows it’s a cool topic. Also, a recruiter isn’t looking for those other pages as they just found you!
BTW, don’t forget to add a link to those pages that helped you. I’m sure others will do the same for you. It’s just good manners.
As for not knowing a good topic, let me help shine the light on content you already have in front of you!
- Error resolution: How many times have you searched for an error message and it took you 2 hours and 25 different sites and pages to get the answer? I bet you even kept track of the links, screen shots, and your trial and error attempts. That’s a post. I do love a good blog post that shows the errors.
- Technical Research: A customer, your manager, or anyone asks you if something can work based on a given scenario. You might not post the exact answers due to your employers policy, NDA, and customer information. However, you can use a generic approach.
- Pricing: Those in IT mostly hate talking about licensing and pricing (except for a few like me). However, it’s something you might have to do. Share what you found.
- Product Review: There’s so many ways to do this, but let’s stay on the tech side. When reviewing a product, you often have technical requirements, integration capabilities, assess deployment costs and time, etc. Again, you can use a generic approach and give you view on the topic.
There’s no real rule (SEO experts, put your guns down) on how much content you need to have. You’re not building a corporate marketing brand. However, you are building your personal brand. Just SHARE!
Let’s not overthink things here. My goal is to get you going.
What to use
Lots of options out there, but I’ll my preferences.
- Astro: This is a Static Site Generator (SSG) that makes creating and managing a blog or website pretty easy.
- Cloudflare: You can purchase a new DNS domain and it will host domain for free.
- Azure Static Web App: This will host the website you build with Astro for free.
- GitHub: Manage your site content here (This is where your Astro code will go) and deploy to your Azure Static Web App. Yes, and free as well.
How do we do this?
To help you get started, I wrote a few blog posts with you in mind:
Maybe all of this will take you 1-3 hours as you’ll surely stop and learn as you go. You’ll have the core of what you need to get going and make a difference in your career and job search.
And then…
You should try and post something new at least twice a month. In looking at my blog as of today, I’ve also feel short of this. I was busy with my previous companies content and now need to follow my own guidance.
Thus this blog post and others I’ve made recently. Even as I’m starting up a new company, I still need to post here as well.
Good luck out there and let me know how it’s going for you.
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