Cloud computing is one of the most in-demand hard skills employers in the Bay Area looked for in 2019, according to LinkedIn. Businesses as diverse as Gap, Sirius XM, Pinterest and many startups are moving their products to the cloud because it’s cheaper and easier than maintaining servers. The cloud has become a multi-billion dollar industry quickly, and there still aren’t enough people with cloud computing skills to fill all the jobs available.
“Companies are hungry enough for that skillset that they’re willing to get pretty creative to get talented people,” said Ethan Van der Heide, a technical recruiter for Workbridge Associates in San Francisco.
Van der Heide described DevOps — a common title for these positions — as a mixture of coding, operations and people skills. Before the cloud started to dominate the industry, most companies had software developers who wrote the code and operational people who made sure it ran. Cloud computing collapses the distance between those roles, requiring knowledge of both sides.
“The skill sets are constantly changing,” Van der Heide said. “The tools are constantly changing. What’s relevant is constantly changing. So the best indicator is somebody who is constantly learning to keep up with it.”
As a recruiter, he’s looking for people who like to learn new things and who seek out learning opportunities. There’s a whole group of them just down Interstate 280 at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills.
“I was looking for quite some time and hoping to see something,” said Meilani Widodo, a student in Foothill’s first introduction to cloud computing class. It’s part of a four-course sequence that will result in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) certification.
Widodo has worked in the tech industry for many years as a Unix systems administrator, but is looking for a new and better opportunity. She regularly takes classes at local community colleges to keep her skills sharp and was excited to see Foothill offering a class based on the AWS platform.
“I do see a lot of jobs posted by Amazon and I do see some opportunities,” Widodo said.
She has enjoyed the Foothill class because it’s hands-on and problem-based. Students are working together in groups to build a voice- assistant, like Alexa or Siri, using AWS. For many of them, the cloud is new, even though most are technology industry professionals. Many see how the industry is changing and know they need to keep up.
“It’s not really about switching jobs, but adapting to the new reality,” said Hip Long, a 28-year-old software developer and Foothill student. Long saw a demo video posted on AWS showing a software developer giving Alexa specific instructions to create a program, which the machine then created. In his experience, building a program takes months of communication with the finance and operations teams — he was inspired.
“I can see the changes of the traditional way of writing software to the new way,” Long said. “It makes something impossible in the past become reality.”
He doesn’t want to get left behind.
These professionals are glad Foothill is offering cloud computing. At $31 per credit it’s an affordable way to upskill. But the genesis of the class did not come from students. It came from industry.
“Amazon Web Services, their Educate Team, came knocking on our door and they said, ‘We need people with this skill and we don’t have them. What can we do about it?’” said Teresa Ong, associate vice president for Workforce and CTE programs at Foothill.
