Turn cloud investments into ROI

On average, organizations are planning to increase their cloud spend by 28% over the next 12 months. Yet more than half of SMBs and enterprises don’t get the desired value back from cloud spend. 

This gap between cloud investments and return is fueled by a different gap: the skills gap. 

When teams lack cloud skills and confidence, execution stalls and organizations never see the intended impact. And when cloud forms the basis of AI initiatives, cloud fundamentals are more important than ever.

Drew Firment, VP of Global Partnerships at Pluralsight, and Faye Ellis, Pluralsight Fellow and AWS Hero, explain how to close cloud skills gaps, align skill development with business priorities, and turn cloud spend into meaningful cloud and AI ROI.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

As organizations look to deliver value with their cloud investments, executives are focused on three questions: 

1. Are we ready?

2. Are we there yet?

3. Are we getting value?

Drew and Faye dive into each of these questions and what it takes to answer them.

Before you can get value from tech investments, your workforce needs the skills to deliver. So, how do you know if they’re ready? Skill assessments are one way to determine readiness and apply a data-driven approach to workforce development.

“This is all about finding out,” explains Faye. “What's your baseline, and what's your current state? One of the ways that we can do that is through skill assessments. This allows you to discover exactly where skills exist already within your organization, and at what level.”

Once you’ve identified your organization’s skills, you can personalize learning to close skills gaps faster. For example, if people already have foundational cloud knowledge, they don’t need to sit through that information again.

Faye gives an example. “Think about compliance training where you're forced to watch all of that content, and then you get assessed right at the end. So inefficient. Wouldn't it be better if we just assess you first, and then only make you learn what you don't already know? That way, your time isn't wasted, you're engaged, and you're learning new stuff.” 

Leading organizations apply the same principle to tech skill development, and use that data to drive outcomes. 

Adds Drew, “We're seeing these leading organizations really doing a lot of data-driven decision-making when it comes to their workforce to be able to assess that current state, baseline, benchmark, and then aggregate that data to be able to actually migrate talent to the cloud.”

Get more tips to turn cloud investments into ROI—download the How to Close the Cloud ROI Gap guide.

After you’ve established your current state, leaders will start asking a different set of questions: Where are we going? What’s the path to get there? And are we there yet?

When organizations migrate to the cloud, there are established frameworks like the 7Rs that help organizations make the transition. Likewise, when it comes to migrating a workforce, instead of a workload, to the cloud, there are different ways to bring people up to speed. Learning paths and certifications are two ways to do that.

Curated learning paths aligned to specific roles (such as architects, network engineers, or DevOps) provide targeted content that helps teams learn skills they’ll actually use.

“With skills, it’s use it or lose it, so you want to be learning the skills that you're actually going to be using in your day-to-day job. When we think about cloud migrations, if you're a database administrator, you want to learn the tools that are going to help you migrate from your on-premises database to your cloud database,” says Faye.

“What are the skills you’re going to need in order to know how to build a database in the cloud or how to maintain it? What are the differences? How do you upgrade?”

From ELB to EC2 and RDS, cloud computing has its own language. 

“You have to be able to understand the basic language before you can actually be fluent to apply it,” says Drew.

Cloud certification training helps build that vocabulary and prepare employees to execute cloud initiatives.

“The things you learn for certifications become second nature,” explains Faye. “They're a really good way to get yourself on board with all of the proper language to use, all of the best practices, and the well-architected framework approach to doing things. But they’re not the be-all and end-all. You want to get some practical, hands-on experience as well.”

Finally, executives will move on to the last—and most important—question: Are we getting value from our tech and workforce investments?

“Enterprises don't get value just by migrating workloads. That's not the value. The value is when these services are actually being consumed. You get that flywheel of innovation going, and you're starting to increase the velocity of your delivery. You're able to drive innovation and deliver customer value,” says Drew.

Getting hands-on is the key way organizations connect the dots between skills and outcomes.

“The most important element is the practical, hands-on experience. So, actually building stuff in the cloud, touching the cloud, using it, breaking stuff, fixing it again. . . those kinds of skills that allow people to be more effective in their roles,” explains Faye.

“Allow them to perform tasks like configuring security groups, building applications in the cloud, configuring a multi-AZ database, knowing how to fail it over, or just connecting services together. They should also be able to practice those skills safely in a sandbox or a lab environment that's not going to affect production in any way.”

“When we talk to our customers that are successful, they’re able to reduce that gap between intent and their ability to execute on AI because they are cloud-ready. They're constantly asking about the value of their investments, not only in technology, but in their workforce,” says Drew.

Pluralsight Cloud Ready brings all of this together to help you close skills gaps and build a cloud and AI-ready workforce. Learn more.