The job market for IT professionals in mid-2020 looks nothing like it did in January. Some sectors have contracted sharply. Others have accelerated. And cloud infrastructure is very firmly in the second category.
Organizations that had cloud migration projects sitting in a “maybe next year” queue have pulled those projects forward because the pandemic demonstrated very quickly that distributed, cloud-hosted infrastructure is significantly easier to scale for remote workforces than on-premises alternatives. The IT leaders who spent the past two years saying “we should really be moving more workloads to the cloud” are now getting budgets and urgency they did not have before.
That acceleration is creating demand for cloud-skilled professionals at a moment when a lot of IT people are suddenly looking at their options. So what certifications are actually making a difference in hiring conversations right now?
The AWS Solutions Architect Associate continues to be the most consistently cited cloud credential in enterprise IT job postings. It has market recognition, it validates a broad and practically useful set of skills, and the AWS ecosystem is present in enough enterprise environments that the credential is directly applicable in a wide range of hiring situations. If you are going to hold one cloud certification, this is still the one with the widest reach.
The Microsoft Azure certifications have picked up noticeably in enterprise environments that are Microsoft-heavy, which is a significant portion of the enterprise market. The Azure Administrator Associate and the Azure Solutions Architect Expert are both appearing in job requirements with increasing frequency. Microsoft’s hybrid cloud story, the integration between on-premises Active Directory and Azure AD in particular, resonates strongly with organizations that are not doing a clean lift-and-shift to cloud and need people who understand both environments.
Google Cloud Professional certifications are a step behind AWS and Azure in terms of raw job posting frequency, but in organizations where GCP is the chosen platform they are increasingly treated as baseline expectations rather than nice-to-haves.
One pattern I am seeing in hiring conversations is that cloud certifications are being weighted more heavily when they are paired with demonstrated hands-on experience, even if that experience comes from personal lab work or employer-provided sandbox environments. The certification alone opens the door. The ability to talk concretely about what you have built and how you solved problems you encountered is what closes it. Both AWS and Azure offer free tiers that give you a reasonable amount of hands-on access. The AWS certification prep resources and the Microsoft Learn platform both provide lab environments worth taking advantage of.
The practical advice for right now: if you are job hunting and you have the time to invest in a cloud certification while the market absorbs disruption, this is a reasonable use of that time. Cloud skills are not going to become less relevant when things stabilize. Quite the opposite.
Brian Rhoades is a Senior VMware Instructor and IT veteran with more than 15 years of hands-on experience in virtualization, systems engineering, and cloud infrastructure. He has trained thousands of IT professionals to confidently work with VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and has authored multiple books and study guides for outlets across the industry. Brian has a habit of being somewhere new every few weeks, which if you've ever tried to pin down a good VMware instructor, explains a lot.