A step closer to the cloud

Monday, July 4, 2016

A step closer to the cloud

A few weeks back I have blogged about "Being relevant even considered irrelevant" where I mentioned my employer did not value what I have done/accomplished as relevant to them. The company I worked for has not been doing too well in selling the products and thus at a point of to make the organization leaner. We see people from different departments in the company being laid off every month.

Once I found out my employer did not consider my skill and knowledge in the area of server and network virtualization, OpenStack and Docker container as well as my involvement in the community being relevant to them, I know my days in the company is numbered. Sure enough just before the quarter ends, I was given a package and I am being laid off after working from that company for 21 years.

Community is awesome

Nice things came out of this unhappy event and I was able to learn once again the community is awesome. Once I twitted about my laid off, I got a lots of responses from the community trying to help me find a new job. Some ask me to send them my resume and some said very kind words about me and I would be useful to different teams. I did not expect this to happen. So anyone willing to pick me up to join your team?

Crisis vs Opportunity

Being out of a job is a crisis to me. In Chinese, the word crisis comprise of 2 words - danger and opportunity. This is exactly my situation. Even being laid off is consider as danger or something bad for me, the other side of the coin is opportunity. For the pass few years I have had opportunities to pick up knowledge and experiences on the a variety of technologies and more importantly soft skills. (I have blogged about the importance of soft skill here).

This laid off is in fact an opportunity for me to be one step closer to what I have been pursuing - a place in the cloud.

Accelerates my journey to the cloud

Usually, when one is out of a job, one will feel lost or empty and worried because of the financial burdened. This is not my case for 2 reasons. The first is my religious believe that gives me the peace of heart. The second reason is that I have been doing all these "extra" work in learning about the various technologies and my involvement in the community in sharing what I have picked up.

This unfortunate event just accelerates the process for me to find my destiny in the cloud - getting a day job that is cloud related.

What about my soft skills?

Over these few years beside technologies, I have also developed for myself some soft skills. Some of the soft skills that I have developed are:

Writing skill
Smiling face
Presentation skill
People skill

The question is how do I convey these skills on my resume and/or LinkedIn profile?

Things to do in the coming few weeks

Over the weekend I sat down to think and to pray about what to do next. I wrote down all the possible areas that I have been learning and potentially get myself into. Here is a Mindmap that will help me visualize the different areas and just like a map for me to pursue opportunities:

In the coming days there are a few things that I plan on doing:

Prepare my VMUG user presentation - "A survey on SDN Technologies"
Start learning Amazon Web Services in preparation for the vBrownBag podcast in September. I will be going over section 3 of the AWS Solution Architect certification exam objectives.
Continue to learn new technologies as they move forward in the various areas listed above.
Start contributing to some open source projects.
Build a decent home-lab so I can play with different technologies as well as having a development/testing platform for the open source projects that I contribute to.
Of course, look for a job and preferably cloud related.