How to get your first job as a DevOps Engineer
As the Head of Platform Engineering, I am involved in the recruitment of DevOps and SRE and wanted to share some tips on what I look for in Engineers, and tips on how to get your first job as a DevOps engineer. In this article, you will find more than $500 of credit in cloud providers you can leverage for your study.
This blog will go over some tips to land your first job as a DevOps engineer, please remember a DevOps engineer is a senior role and requires a lot of study and hard work to get, this blog is aimed to give you a kick start in meeting some of those requirements and give tips for your CV and interviews.
In this blog we will cover the following:
- Discount links
- Certs
- Community
- Study Tips
- CV Tips
- LinkedIn Tips
- Programming / Github Tips
- Interview Tips
1. Discount links
Here are some links you can use here to get started in the cloud, and DevOps for free!
# $300 GCP Credit
https://cloud.google.com/free# $200 Azure Credit
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/# AWS Free Tier
https://aws.amazon.com/free/?all-free-tier.sort-by=item.additionalFields.SortRank&all-free-tier.sort-order=asc
2. Certs
Certs will help you get your first job. They are valuable to employers not only because it shows your basic knowledge in the subject, but it helps them with the partner status with cloud providers. For example, if they have the required number of people with a certain certificate they get big discounts and a lot of benefits from the cloud provider.
Certs will give you the edge over other candidates in the interviewing process, some initial screening will throw away CVs that don't have certification in certain companies due to a high number of applicants if you don't have previous experience in the industry.
Before studying check for DevOps jobs in your area to see what they are looking for then set a goal to go and get them.
Here are some certs I recommend studying. Focus on one cloud to start with and remember there are a lot of discounts and free credits when you first sign up to a cloud provider, so research that.
AWS — If you choose AWS to start with I recommend sitting your Cloud Practitioner first, this is an easy exam, and it will get you into study mode and exam mode. Then I would get one Associate exam eg Solutions Architect. This will show employees you have the basics covered. I wouldn’t try and be a hero and get them all, as there are a lot of other important things you need to be doing to get your first job as listed in the chapters below. Aim to get the DevOps Engineer Professional, at the interview if you haven't got that on yet, you can tell them you are studying towards it.
Azure — Microsoft Azure certification is another good pick, in Australia, there are much more AWS engineers than Azure, so this could be a good path to take as you will have less skilled people to compete with when applying for the jobs. I recommend starting off with Azure Fundamentals then going for your Azure Developer, or Azure Administrator, and that will be enough to start off with, as these meet the partner requirements for companies. You can aim for DevOps engineer as you are applying for jobs, and tell them you are studying towards it.
GCP — For GCP I would start off with the Google Cloud certified Cloud Engineer Foundation course and then go for your Google Cloud Certified architect. Not as many people have certification in GCP as opposed to AWS, and Azure so it is another good pick also to specialize in Google and more and more companies are slowly starting to adopt GCP more because of how cheap it is and they want multi-cloud for their business.
Terraform — Terraform is a great infrastructure as code tool, this can be used with all cloud providers so it is highly regarded by hiring managers, let's say you know AWS only, and Terraform. If you are going for a job in Azure, managers won't worry as much if you know terraform as they know it is easy to pick up another cloud and you can automate the infrastructure using terraform modules. I have done a blog here on how to get certified in terraform.
Kubernetes — Last but not least there is a learning path for Kubernetes. These courses are highly regarded by me. After doing them myself I see that these exams are really good and 100% hands-on, so no multi questions, it shows that you need to understand what's going on and a good start to securing your first job as a DevOps engineer. If you are interested in learning Kubernetes you can read a blog I have done for these exams here.
Community
One thing I love about DevOps is the community. There are great communities out there that are there to help you on your journey. These communities have a lot of experts in the industry that are there to help you and share knowledge. The good ones have a Slack channel and you can join channels you are interested in and chat with some really nice helpful people.
My favorite community is the DoK community, you can join here where you can signup to their slack channel, and find upcoming meetups and blogs, once you have signed up in slack make sure you introduce yourself in the intro-yourself channel, all welcome.
I also run a CNCF community that focuses on upskilling people and teaching them all things open source we have weekly sessions to teach people Kubernetes and DevOps, you can also join this community here.
Study Tips
There are many great platforms to study on. Don't pay the full price for a course, there are lots of discounts that come up, I often post these on my Twitter once I see them on @bradmccoydev so you can look out for them there. Another tip you can do is sign up to a well-established platform and flirt with them, sign up for free and click on some courses you want to do even add it to the cart and don't go to the checkout, wait a few days and their marketing campaigns will see that you were interested but never brought it, therefore sending an email to you seeing if you want the course for 50% off.
I personally like Udemy, but there are many other platforms, like Kode Kloud, acloudguru, Pluralsight, tutorials dojo, etc.
Do a lot of research before you pay for a course and check reviews etc as you don't want to waste your money.
CV Tips
CVs are hard, they are also one of the most important things to focus on for securing your first job.
If you can afford it I would look around to see if you can get someone to do it for you, a good recruiter will help you with your CV and give you feedback to make it better so try and leverage that when you are talking to them.
Only put things in your CV that you know, it will be very embarrassing for you to go to an interview and get questioned on something you don't know. Remember there's no one that knows everything, being honest will get you much further, When I interview I look for how people solve a problem and if they can self-learn. I'm not worried about if they have 100 things on their CV. It's good to know a lot about one thing instead of a little about a lot.
LinkedIn Tips
If you don't have a LinkedIn account yet, I suggest you sign up. These days it is a common way recruiters find people. Make sure you spend the time to fill out your profile good.
The skills section is important, this will make sure you come up in searches when recruiters are searching so make sure you add your all skills.
Make sure you have a good professional photo where people can see you properly and you are smiling.
If you need some feedback on how your LinkedIn is looking you can connect with me here and I can take a look.
Programming / Github Tips
If you don’t know a programming language yet, I suggest you learn one. One thing you need to understand is that a DevOps engineer is a senior role, most managers like the engineers to come from a Development background. I would suggest learning Python. It is really easy to learn, and a lot of documentation and tutorials out there, and big in the data space also. Python is an easy way to fast track your cloud skills, for example, if you use the boto3 library you can connect programmatically with almost any AWS service enabling you to automate tasks. Python is also becoming big in the Azure world also, last time I was at the Microsoft campus in Redmond there were a lot of engineers there developing in Python!
It's good to have a Github account, you can start a repo to showcase some work you are working on, and it also proves you have git skills. Don't get carried away with too many repos, make it easy for people looking to find value and interest in what you are working on
Interview Tips
Culture is very important in the DevOps world. Remember to be yourself as much as you can, as generally, the team will make the decision if you are hired or not as they need to know that you will fit into the culture.
Generally, DevOps guys dress however they want, for interview day I would recommend dressing semi-formal, wear a nice ironed shirt and nice pants, shoes, etc, and if you find when you get to the interview and everyone is dressed in hoodies, you can make a comment that you don't normally dress like that unless you do normally dress like that, which is also fine. If in doubt ask the recruiter how you should dress when meeting the team.
Conclusion
Good luck with your journey, if you would want to learn more you can watch our video podcast here, where we talk more about how to get a job as a DevOps Engineer!
