Mike Gibbs had been working in the technology sector for half a decade when he discovered that he loved helping others to find and to excel at tech careers.
“I found that I really loved teaching and coaching others, helping them get their first tech job, helping them learn new skills, teaching them how to get promoted,” Mike says. “It was something that I did just as a hobby, just to help others.”
But after a decade of helping people as a hobby, something happened that led Mike to convert the hobby into a full-time pursuit; he was in a life-changing accident that forced him to push pause on his tech career.
“I was injured in a martial arts accident that left me unable to walk,” Mike explains. “I used to travel 200,000 to 300,000 miles a year consulting with clients, but the accident left me in no condition to travel the world. I was actually in a physical therapy clinic for six to eight hours a day every day for about six years straight.”
During Mike’s recovery, he started to dream about his coaching hobby becoming something more.
“While I was doing physical therapy, I continued to coach people in my spare time. And I thought, if I am ever able to walk again, if I am ever able to sit in a chair again, then I am going to develop a program to help others,” Mike remembers. “I wanted to do my coaching on a larger scale. I started gearing up for it.”
The catalytic moment came when Mike was asked to guide a friend’s son in finding the best tech sector career. Mike recommended cloud computing, then set up the young man with several cloud computing training courses that he purchased online.
During the first week of the training, Mike quickly discovered that the training courses, which were the top three courses on the market at the time, had serious problems.
“I watched these videos in horror,” Mike says. “All they did was mention the name of the service and how to configure it. These courses were sold as training for solutions architects or cloud architects, which are systems designers. Systems designers don’t configure anything. What they do is design systems. And in order to design systems, you must know how they work. If an architect’s job is to design, they need to learn how the technology works, why the organizations use it, and how to design it.”
After sitting through the training, Mike decided he needed to do something. “I said to myself that nobody would potentially teach training in technology without talking about what the technology is and how it works and why you would use it. Without that, you are only creating technicians whose skills are limited to typing in a few keys. You’re not creating architects.”
Mike confirmed his suspicions about the effectiveness of the training courses by doing extensive research. He interviewed 1,000 Amazon certified professionals who had received Amazon Web Services certification as a solution architect.
“I wanted to see if I could hire any of them to work as a cloud architect,” Mike explains. “And none were capable. All knew the names of the services and how to configure them. But none knew how they worked or how to design them. None of them knew about digital transformation or any parts of the cloud architect job.”
Mike responded by producing a YouTube video that explained how to get a cloud architect job. Within hours, he received so many emails requesting more help that he knew it was time to launch Go Cloud Careers.
“It was the same work that I had been doing; it was coaching,” Mike says. “But now I was going to do something different. I was going to create a coaching program that would give people the elite career guidance that I had been sharing for years. But I was going to do it at a price that everybody can afford.”
Mike launched Go Cloud Careers and offered an elite training program for the cloud architect that includes everything necessary to get someone started in a great technology career.
“It is training that would normally cost $25,000 to $50,000 because it teaches all the critical skills for the cloud architect who is also a business leader,” Mike explains. “We teach cloud computing. We teach architecture. We teach business acumen. We teach CXO relevancy. We teach people how to have executive presence and how to deliver presentations. We teach the student how to do an ROI model. We teach the student how to sell. We teach the student how to write, how to present, and of course how to negotiate.”
And the results of the training are remarkable. “We’re able to take people with limited experience and get them hired every single day at major cloud providers, major banks, major data centers, and all kinds of wonderful technology companies,”
One year after launching, the program has attracted students from around the world. In addition to giving students a deep knowledge of the technology with which they will be working, it provides leadership training, emotional intelligence training, soft skills training, and communications training.
“Our competitors have a 20 or so hour program. Our program is approximately 500 hours,” Mike explains. “We charge a single day’s pay for the average cloud architect for this training, because our whole goal is one thing: help people get hired. All of the other training courses focus on helping people get certified. We help people get hired. We give them all the tools necessary to do it. It’s a certifications ‘plus’ approach.”
Building on the success of its initial program, Go Cloud Careers is expanding beyond the cloud architecture space to launch a cloud engineering program that will provide training on everything necessary to go from beginner to being hired as a cloud engineer.
Go Cloud Careers is also developing a program to be released before the end of 2022 that will train those leaving military service on how to get high paying technology careers.
“We believe that no veteran should ever leave the US military without a six figure job and we’re going to do everything we can to help veterans to secure a high paying tech career,” Mike says. “That’s a program we’re very excited about and launching this year.”
During 2022 Go Cloud Careers also will continue to offer free programs to assist people in obtaining certification for the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate, the AWS Advanced Networking Course, and the Cisco Certified Network Associate. Presently, the company sponsors a group of 50 volunteers in Sub Saharan Africa who are teaching cloud computing to those looking to get their first technology job.
For those looking to break into the technology field, Go Cloud Careers offers a revolutionary approach that delivers outstanding results. For those already in the field who are looking to advance, Go Cloud Careers offers a Tech Career Accelerator Program that will help them to take the next step. Regardless of your dream, Go Cloud Careers will make sure that you have the skills that you need to achieve it.
As Mike says: “Our focus is 100 percent optimizing the careers of our clients.”
