If you have read some of my posts and emails, you know I am big on personal branding. In this modern day and current market, your online presence can give you a HUGE advantage over your competitors if you do it right. Having a blog and a good LinkedIn profile can be enough to make you bypass the dreaded "stack of CV's" where you'll have to wait for weeks only to get rejected. In the coming weeks I will be sharing some personal branding tips, and if you are interested, I will host a themed call about this topic. Comment below if you want to join! The first thing you should do when improving your LinkedIn profile is to get a proper picture. Your picture should look professional and you should wear workplace attire. Business casual is probably the best dress code to shoot for. As an engineer, wearing a suit might be a bit too pretentious. The best thing is to hire a photographer, but that can get very expensive. Instead, I have tried out a service I discovered recently, and I highly recommend it. You should get your profile pictures from HeadShot Pro. I gave it a try for you guys and I am very happy with my results. The process was really easy: it asks you to take a few selfies and in a few hours you have your photos. After I uploaded my new profile picture, a friend of mine messaged me: "nice LinkedIn photo, did you hire a photographer?" (it's attached) It was only $40 for 100 photos to choose from, and that $40 is NOTHING if you manage to double your salary because you actually made an effort to stand out from your peers. So ask your friend or your sister to make some professional photos, or use HeadShot Pro

This was what I was struggling with before. I started with AWS because my training started with AWS. I’m a .NET developer so I kept coming to a dead end. The Visual Studio AWS tools weren’t working for me and I couldn’t find any good tutorials… so I switched to Azure. I’m enjoying it A LOT more. Azure and .NET of course go together well. I’m studying for the 204 associate developer exam. If anyone else is studying for 204 I would like to hear about your training approach!! Please share. Thanks so much

Hello, I need some advice. I don't where to start. I'm overwhelmed. I got behind. I don't know if my goal is DevOps, so I hope it's okay that I'm in this group. I'm in a Cloud Foundations Course right now at Simplilearn with Caltech and it's covers both AWS and Azure and call me crazy, but I don't think this course should be designed like this. It goes like this: AWS Fundamentals, AWS Architect Associate, Azure 104, Azure 305, AWS DevOps, Final Projects. It's a great course, but I'm unemployed and I got a small teaching job teaching AWS Architect Associate and I can't teach until I get certified. So.... goal number one was to get AWS Associate Certified. Last week in my course we just moved to the Azure 104 section, so now I'm studying in depth for Azure to keep up in the class and no time for my AWS studying. I'm completely overwhelmed. I hate to waste my money, and I will have the videos of the class, should I just focus on AWS and get certified and pick my class back up when we hit the AWS DevOps section? I'm a .NET Developer, 13 years. The reason I bring this up is that I will be marketing my skills as a Full Stack or Backend Developer using AWS Cloud and then what for CI/CD? DevOps (because I want to build it). .NET usually goes with Azure, but I really don't want to start over with my studying and miss out on the Training job I got if I don't take too long to get certified. I also signed up for AWS Serverless course by Yan Cui, so I'll learn hands on Development with API Gateway, Lambda, etc... second week in November. Am I thinking correctly or does someone else have a better line of thinking or better idea/ advice.... please give me ideas... I'm overwhelmed and just looking for the simplest solution and clearest pathway. Thanks so much in advance! Angie

I didn't find my current job that puts me in the top 1% of earners in my country, my current job found me. By having my LinkedIn in order, I was able to be found by recruiters and was shortly after deemed the best candidate for that position. If I didn't put work into my LinkedIn, I would have never gotten this position. My life would have been completely different. All because of some work on an online profile. This is just one example! Do not neglect your personal brand, it can provide a wealth of job and networking opportunities.

Hello! My name is Angie . I am from Tigard, Oregon in the U.S and have interest in Azure, Kubernetes, community networking and mentorship. I want to learn this because I need to update my skills to get a Senior Developer position. My goals are Cloud certifications and getting hired and will commit to that through learning from the community.