Investing in cloud certifications pays off for companies in faster time to value for new products and for IT professionals in the form of higher salaries, according to a new survey.

The training site A Cloud Guru analyzed more than 3 million hours of activity on its platform and surveyed 6,108 cloud learning administrators and 20,000 individual cloud learners on Cloud Guru or Linux Academy for the 2020 State of the Cloud Learning Report. 

About half of administrators in the survey were in leadership roles. Among that group, 82% of hiring managers said that cloud certifications made a candidate more attractive. Also, 87% of those managers said hands-on experience and certifications were more valuable than a four-year degree. 

SEE: Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players (TechRepublic)

This seems to match the experience of job seekers with 52% of individual survey respondents stating that cloud certifications gave them more career opportunities.  Eighty percent of respondents stated that they were able to command a higher salary after completing cloud certifications. 

A Cloud Guru President Katie Bullard said the most surprising survey finding was that 56% of the managers said they had a plan for training their team members. 

“This is a big shift in managers recognizing that they need to put in the time to plan training,” she said. “The lightning moment will come as managers don’t simply understand the value of training but calculate the impact of not doing it.”

The benefit of training IT professionals on cloud technologies is supported by another survey finding: 71% of leaders said that using cloud platforms speeds up time-to-value for new products and features.

Also, 94% of employees said they would be more likely to stay long term with an employer who invests in their career by providing training.

AWS was the most common cloud platform skill set among respondents with 80% having trained on it, followed by Azure at 35%, and Google Cloud Platform at 30%. The analysis also found that Azure training time was up 800% year over year, a significant spike when compared to training time spent on AWS and Google Cloud.

A Cloud Guru has 2 million individuals on the platform and 4,000 business customers.  

“Because we have such a large community of learners, we can monitor in real time what people are asking for and what they need,” she said.

Bullard said most business clients start with a skills assessment of a team to figure out where the knowledge gaps are. A Cloud Guru provides learning paths for people interested in developing  a particular skill set.   

She added that the company recently has seen increasing interest in Kubernetes, Terraform, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and data science.

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