Building a highly-skilled and happy workforce is an art in its own right. Fostering a learning culture within an organization by encouraging employees to get certified in a specific technology or process requires leadership to collaborate, listen, and adjust internal processes so employees can take full advantage of training and certification opportunities during work hours.
When creating a more cloud-agile team, a number of obstacles stand between a manager and establishing a clear certification path for employees while also illustrating the value of a Google Cloud certification.
Establishing a clear path and projecting the benefits of Cloud certifications to the team requires each IT decision-maker to complete their own training and certification. Cloud training allows managers to compare the value and the time commitment of each task before assigning team-wide. Managers may see this training as tedious and beneath them, but it provides important hands-on experience in a highly dynamic industry, allowing them to better comprehend their team's day-to-day issues, and understand how the environment has changed since they were in a similar role.
Once the team lead has assessed each Google employee training & practices option, they must allot time during the work day for the employee to complete tasks. This gesture helps to show company investment in career development and can increase workplace happiness while decreasing turnover.
Pushing for employees to become cloud certified helps to promote cross-project work and projects to other internal teams that "cloud experts" are available to help with various efforts
In short, managers fail to see the value of Google Cloud certifications because they rarely complete Cloud training for managers or day-to-day tasks assigned to their employees.
What are the Benefits of Cloud Certifications & Cloud-Agile Teams?
The success of a well-oiled cloud adoption strategy depends on the capabilities of the team that's going to use it. That's why it's important to ensure that teams are properly trained and equipped to support any new technologies implemented internally. Continuous Google employee training practices help to sharpen the skills of all team members. In addition to organizations benefiting from Google Cloud certified employees, employees themselves benefit from specialized training.
Upward Mobility & Retention
Upward mobility and promoting from within allow organizations to scale with their growth while retaining top talent. Enterprise cloud adoption maximizes resources, focusing heavily on tools and ignoring operators. Investing your employees' cloud knowledge and skills signals to the team that you are driven to advance their abilities in addition to the organization's.
The demand for cloud solutions has sparked a surge in cloud-based solution companies that far exceeds the talent pool for these crucial positions. The scarcity of certified Cloud operations team structures makes a properly trained team a unique value proposition to clients. Pushing employees to grow their skills keeps them engaged and challenged in their positions, creating a happier and hungrier employee. The value of Google Cloud certification and training is avoiding the cost of hiring and training a new employee.
Skill Diversification
Obtaining a certification requires an employee to learn new concepts and skills. Employees -- especially technical staff -- need to keep educating themselves to keep up with the latest technology. By offering certification classes and tests, organizations can keep their employees current so they can use the latest technology to improve infrastructure.
Although certifications are assigned to employees, they also improve the organization's experience and knowledge pool. These certifications can demonstrate your organization's skills and experience to customers.
Job Satisfaction
According to a Gallup study, "People who use their strengths everyday are three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life". Introducing a new internal process, like a cloud adoption strategy, could present leadership with a great opportunity to improve their employees' job satisfaction if they couple that new process with applicable and specialized training. It will fall on the employer to choose the most relevant certification.
What are Some of the Things That Prevent Teams from Getting Certified?
While the benefits of Google Cloud certifications are many, busy individuals working in tech or any other client-facing industry can struggle to find time to work on new skills, improve their processes, or participate in lengthy meetings. If you're planning on rolling out a rigorous certification program, it's good to be aware of the limitations your team might be facing and plan accordingly.
Time
One of the obstacles that most frequently stands in the way of individuals obtaining Google Cloud certifications is time. Anyone who has studied for any college course knows that studying takes up many hours every week. Studying for certifications is no different: it requires hours of study time on top of a full-time work week. The time needed to study takes away family time, and requires the employee to study during their time off. It's a commitment that eats away at weekends and nighttime hobbies.
Cost
Training and onboarding individuals costs money, and there's really no way around it. Decision-makers need to determine the value of whichever Google Cloud certification they decide to go with in order to justify the cost. Some certifications are expensive, especially if you pay for several employee certifications. Google offers numerous certifications, and it's not unusual for employees to pursue training in several areas of focus. The costs associated with certifications can skyrocket unless employees limit the number that can be taken.
Goal Malalignment
It's not uncommon for employees to be interested in pursuing certifications outside of the organization's interests. When an employee expresses interest in an unrelated technology, the organization might not want to add the expense.
Most organizations will list categories or certifications that they will approve. In some cases, it might be beneficial to pay partially for certifications slightly outside of the organization's interest to keep employees happy with their study choices.
Types of Cloud Certifications & Picking the Right One for Your Team
Choosing the right Google Cloud certification for your team is the first step to creating a more Cloud-enabled workforce, and there are a number of certification types to choose from. If you plan to use a specific technology in the future, offer the certification now so employees can learn the skills they will need to manage it.
Google offers a range of certifications, but some are for experienced professionals and others are helpful for people new to the technology. Classify these certifications so employees know which are attainable at their current skill set level.
Security Certifications
Your business needs, your employees' capabilities, and your organizations goals will be the best indicators of which Google Cloud certifications hold the most value for your team. For instance, if one of your goals for creating a cloud-enabled team is to promote better security practices, the Professional Cloud Security Engineer (PCSE) certification path may be most relevant.
Developer Certifications
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is one of the most common cloud platforms in the industry. Google offers a developer certification that provides employees with the skills to design, develop, maintain, and secure SaaS applications. This certification is best for someone who already knows coding languages, but wants to know the development strategies and lifecycle of an application in the cloud.
Cloud applications run differently than local desktop applications, so developers pursuing this certification must learn the basics of remote code performance and monitoring. An employee who walks away with this certification can code, deploy, monitor, and maintain a cloud application.
Cloud Engineer & Architecture Certifications
Building a cloud environment is difficult, so Google offers engineering and architecture certifications to help employees understand everything about building secure private or public cloud insfrastructure. These two certifications are the most popular among operations people who want to take their infrastructure education to the next level.
With these certifications, employees will be able to provision, maintain, configure, secure, and design infrastructure for public, private, and hybrid clouds. For organizations with existing cloud infrastructure, this certification is equally valuable.
DevOps Certifications
In a microservices environment in which developers use containers to deploy applications, the Google DevOps certification helps developers and operations technicians leverage automation between local environments and the cloud. Google provides many opportunities to work in an automated environment, so this certification introduces DevOps practitioners to valuable tools.
If you don't have a DevOps department, these certifications can help your employees understand how they can accelerate their development and streamline the deployment process to reduce human error and testing timelines.
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