I studied Business Management and became a Platform Engineer

Curiosity didn't kill the cat, it got me a job in tech

In the final year of studying Business Legal Regulations at university, which was a very literature-based degree (a lot of extensive writing), one of my buddies told me about the news of him getting a role as a DevOps engineer.

I was ecstatic on his behalf, and I also knew that he had studied Mechanical Engineering, so I thought, “OK, he’s got an engineering role, but it makes sense; after all, he did study engineering at university”. He later explained to me that engineering wasn’t just exclusive to Civil/Mechanical or Chemical, but in fact, it encompassed a wide range of disciplines, within tech, software, security, data, platform and of course DevOps.

Curious about it, I did what anyone would do and “YouTubed it”, after binge-watching videos titled “What is DevOps?” or “How to work with the cloud”. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more, and so I took to LinkedIn and started to connect with anyone and everyone with the job title containing the buzz words “Cloud”, “Infrastructure”, or “DevOps”.

When you have something in mind, have you realised how you begin to see it everywhere?

That may sound slightly odd, or perhaps I’m not be wording it well, but all I had in mind was tech . So, One evening on campus, a month before the dissertation deadline, I was sitting on campus minding my own business when I overheard a friend advocating for tech as a career. I was curious and so I asked questions and he answered, he told me had recently been "certified". I asked what it meant to be certified, and after expressing my interests, he introduced me to his teacher: Abdullahi—Senior Network Engineer and CEO of Maaltek Institution.

I advise anyone who has any interest in learning the fundamentals of IT to reach out to him.

Abdullahi adopted me as a student and presented to me the concept of extracurricular independent studies & self-investing with certifications. I began some basic courses to familiarise myself with IT.

Fast forward to February that year, I finally landed a role as a Tech Analyst. After working as a support engineer by this point, I still had the seed of DevOps in the back of my mind, but the only issue was I had no specific “DevOps” guidance. I stumbled upon the cloud after reading a few articles and realised how much of a growing space within tech it was. I procrastinated about it for a while, but I decided to take action and took to LinkedIn.

Visual Representation of IT Support

I searched “Cloud” and filtered it to “people” and found the cloud engineers. I remember trying to find professionals who had similar journeys to me (i.e., someone who didn’t study a technical degree, or a person from an ethnic minority—with similar experiences) who worked in the field, and I direct messaged most, if not all.

I got in contact with a community moderator of a tech chat; he was very helpful in offering advice and pointing me in the right direction. There I found many people just like me; I was able to ask the professionals questions and found out a great deal about the industry. With the pertinent advice, I finally had a plan for my goal.

Goals are crucial in any target

After observing the group chat for a while, a member posted a free Microsoft sponsored AZ-900 course, which I enrolled to, and by the end of the training Microsoft awarded a free exam token (original price of exam: $99) — It is still active and I advise for anyone who would like to begin to start there.

I sat the exam several times, and I had finally passed it on my 4th attempt (which shows that I am clearly not a natural or an IT geek lol). I used materials from Whizlabs, in particular the AZ-900 Fundamentals Mock Exams. Scott Duffy’s Udemy Course on AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam Prep also came in handy.

Thankfully, after passing the exam, I then decided to study for the Amazon Web Services—Cloud Practitioner, which I did. For this exam, I used Stéphane Maarek’s Udemy Course: [NEW] Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — 2024 as well as the WhizLabs AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner practice paper.

Note: Udemy course prices start relatively low: $10 for new users. The courses mentioned above can be listed anywhere from $10 to $99.99 or maybe even more, you can find it again possibly within 24 hours up to 90% off. You can pay in your own currency as well which could reduce the cost further.

December- Febuary— The struggle after getting certified

But I still had a massive issue; you see, usually, interviews have several different stages. The first stage would generally be a few competency questions, which I’m fine with. However, there would always be a technical testing stage, and here I’d always struggle; I’d feel all the pressure. And I know that it was the cause of most of, if not all, the rejections I received. It was time I went back to the drawing board. An additional resource is the article How to Become a DevOps Engineer in Six Months.

With a firm grip on the fundamentals of the cloud, it was advised I familiarise myself with some Infrastructure as Code and, in particular, Terraform. I began going through some of its content. Helpfully, the community leader recorded labs that he went through with the members, and I was able to pick up some further transferable skills, familiarising myself with technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and I was finally able to see how all the different tools tie in together. This proved to be imperative and gave me a lot more content to talk about in interviews.

After a few tough rounds, difficulty with denial, and trust in Allah, I finally landed my first gig as a Platform Engineer.