Is Cloud the ‘Bully’ in Your IT Training Domain? Here’s How You Can Come Out on Top

I recently had an idea to write a white paper with all the input I receive around cloud training. To confirm my findings I put out a request for contributors and collaborators on a popular expert forum. The immediate response was, of course, ‘what about the cloud?’ There’s just so much to learn around the cloud, just the questions asking me to clarify ‘cloud training’ filled a page.

So, I am posing the question to you – and offering what I know to be a good approach to positioning yourself in cloud training:

What exactly is a ‘cloud professional’? And as an extension of that question – what is a ‘cloud trainer’?

With every new technology, there’s a burst of best practices, frameworks, and standards saturating the IT training industry and inundating IT professionals. Do you scrap your expertise and reinvent yourself as a ‘cloud training provider’? Are all IT professionals suddenly ‘cloud experts’ – more importantly, is that even a function?

You are likely abreast of the cloud and incorporating new computing models in your training for many years. Similarly, organizations and IT professionals need to adopt a certain cloud mindset and direct correlation between cloud best practices and their espoused best practices to do their job. You have your areas of expertise your customers appreciate. Would you abandon that to put a trending term in a title?

Realigning Instead of Reinventing the Wheel

I’m sure you’ve encountered some version of discussions such as ‘how ITIL® and Cloud fit’. What I’ve found is you can basically replace ‘ITIL’ with the leading ‘best practices’ for a given IT domain and see more of the same. It’s pretty clear that the cloud is a computing model and the greatest challenge, as with most new things and change in general, is adapting people and processes to leverage cloud to it’s full potential. Often this is most successful when coming from a valued shared point of reference.

In the case of cloud training, the Cloud Credential Council (CCC) Competence Model answers this contextual gap between training program design and the real-world needs of IT professionals, organizations and the consultants and trainers guiding them. Very practical terms, directly correlating key roles with a dedicated cloud certification. So direct in fact, we actually had a neat little graphic of in our cloud marketing in a box.

As depicted in the image, the CCC portfolio is role-based. It’s been designed to address your customers’ cloud interests directly from their and your IT domain. Whether that’s Architecture, Security, Service Management, IT Operations, or in the line of business working closely with cloud, cloud projects or even big data. You’ll spot some technical training in the image as well. Note, the portfolio was vetted by cloud technology leaders to validate the applicability and cohesion of the program with industry, including various cloud technologies.

Long story short, your customers have or are working on, their cloud flight plan. Up to 95% of organizations are in the cloud. This is how you can support them from your shared domain of interest. Select the certification that most directly correlates to your IT domain and get your customers up to speed quickly.

The ‘Best of All Worlds’ Cloud Competence Model

The CCC Cloud Competence Model cuts through the hype and jargon. It aligns with the reality of IT and business professionals in its design. The CCC certification program and syllabi were defined in conjunction with IT best practices experts from various domains and leading cloud technologists. Much research went into the selection of the ‘critical roles’ for successful cloud adoption to identify and address the key roles and qualifications for cloud readiness (not only cloud technology). The comprehensive foundation level Cloud Technology Associate and Big Data Foundation fill the gaps of those business and IT professionals just moving into or working around these technologies.

The combination establishes a shared understanding and holistic view for;

• organizations to achieve cloud readiness.
• IT and business professionals to develop cloud competence effectively.
• and an overarching transformative ‘cloud’ mindset to form between the key players in an organization.

At ITpreneurs, we’ve translated this into courseware which directly discusses ‘the fit’ between the cloud concepts taught in any given CCC course and the existing ‘de facto’ IT best practices involved in that area. That is in addition to meeting the key learning objectives as defined by the CCC Cloud Competence Model and certification syllabi of course. In combination, the CCC portfolio enables our partners to select the relevant certification(s) for their IT domain. Ensuring you, your training portfolio and your customers are ‘cloud-proofed’ and not ‘cloud-washed’.