Simon starts after Azure Academy as Cloud Engineer at TeamValue
How to find the ideal combination of hard & soft skills in an Academy and how to continue that journey at TeamValue.
You've known all your life that you wanted to work in IT. You follow a track Microsoft Cloud Engineering at ITPH's Azure Academy and then suddenly, within six months, with the necessary certificates in your pocket, you find yourself facing the next challenge: finding a new job. That in itself was not a task in IT and in the current job market, but choosing the right organization does not happen overnight. Simon consciously opted for a family feel and the focus on new technologies. He takes you on a journey with him in this blog.
Working in the cloud. After the Azure Academy, that choice was a must!
I was looking for bootcamps and courses on Microsoft Azure. I came across the track where you could do very well with a background in system administration. The combination of soft skills and hard skills also appealed to me", says Simon. With the certificates Azure Fundamentals, Administrator Associate and the MS-100 Microsoft 365 Identity and Services in his pocket, he is ready for the world of cloud. According to us and also according to Simon, this is no longer the 'new' world but the standard. PowerShell, Infrastructure Monitoring, Modern Service Management, you name it. You can't fool Simon. Curiosity is number one in his vocabulary. Together with a healthy dose of guts, we are appreciated for that. Working in the cloud with clients and working on the cloud with colleagues from TeamValue. We do this so that we can keep our satisfied customers just as satisfied in the future.
Feeling safe, being honest, a family atmosphere and focus on soft skills
His first job in IT. Simon himself says: "You want to belong somewhere, grow, feel safe, be able to fall back on your colleagues and have the feeling that you are a family when necessary. I know everyone here personally and can always go to them with things I like and things I don't like. Whether I am on the right track in terms of work content? You just check in with your team! Fortunately, it is not hierarchical here and development is paramount''.
Simon: "When I started, I knew a bit about Scrum Frameworks, but I had no experience with them. Well, that was quickly sorted out. Within two weeks, I knew what a sprint looked like and I had learned it. And do you want to get your mind off things in between? Then you grab the punching bag or go and play with Sammie the dog''.
What else did he find out in the first weeks? That seniors don't know everything either and that as a junior, developer, medior, architect, senior, cloud or data specialist - you all work together on a solution. The Microsoft updates, the (online) lessons of the Azure Academy, the principles of the Golden Path, our internal Wiki and the Azure news channel keep him up-to-date. But apart from these hard skills, which are so important according to Simon, he also appreciates the focus on soft skills and team building.
Cloud Engineer at TeamValue
In the first week at TeamValue there was an immediate assignment. At Qualogy I'm working to further expand and maintain what my colleague Hendrik and Qualogy have established. Next to the technical challenge, at TeamValue I also find a nice network, a team full of professionals and time for my private life''.
Simon adds: "If something doesn't work out, I try again. If it doesn't work again, I ask for help and then it always works. Whether it's someone from the customer or from TeamValue. The value for the business comes first.
At Qualogy, we deploy business-critical applications in a scalable and DevOps-ready manner in the Azure Cloud. The best thing so far? I implement improvements to pipelines, for example. Where a release normally took 1.5 hours for the larger pipelines, we have now reduced that to 18 minutes. We save time per deployment, user stories are online sooner and we save costs. Tasks & bugs, I'm all for that, but only if I can also automate the solution in the end''.
I not only work together with my cloud colleagues, but also with Matthijs and Marco from Bizure. I know the environment of another customer, I know which resource groups to address and I make a cost analysis together, for example. In order to grow even further in this area in the future, I am also going to get my Professional Scrum Developer Certification and the AZ-204 soon. Because the combination of theory and practice will lead me in the future to a role as Azure Solution Architect. I can spar well with my colleague Joost-Jan, who already carries the necessary baggage and from whom I learn a lot.
Do you also want to keep learning, focus on both hard and soft skills, build cool technical solutions and just have fun at work? Then take a look at our junior, medior and senior vacancies on TeamValue
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