Challenges of Scaling AWS Skills
The strategic topic “Amazon Web Services (AWS)” is at the top of the agenda. The hyperscaler AWS has come even more into focus, mainly due to the high project demand from customers and the foreseeable strong interest in the market in the coming years.
The focus is clearly on the customer: identifying customer challenges, identifying and implementing solutions that ultimately run on the AWS cloud — ideally an end-to-end journey through the AWS cloud portfolio.
To deliver these consulting services in a way that meets our customers’ expectations, we face the following challenges: we need to deliver a large number of consultants to our customers on short notice, while ensuring high seniority. Despite the large number of AWS certifications we have achieved and the energy we have put into recruiting, increasing the number of senior hires and the corresponding seniority remains an ongoing challenge.
The AWS Expert Team
To address these challenges, the idea of the AWS Expert Team was born. Similar to the police rapid response team with “Special Weapons and Tactics”, the AWS Expert Team welcomes highly certified and experienced AWS architects and developers (“Special Weapons”) and applies two key principles (“Tactics”):
- Skills are offered versus long term assignment of consultants: It is important to solve the problem — if necessary, flexibly from a pool of consultants and without permanent commitment of consultant profiles.
- Only project engagements of manageable duration: The SWAT team operates on a “quick in, quick out” basis. The goal is to “enable” projects in the background rather than in front of the customer, similar to a “train the trainer” approach, so that the project team can solve future AWS challenges independently.
There are now several AWS expert teams that specialize in various topics such as data lakes, migration, or SAP@AWS and are successfully working with customers. In order to bring the breadth and depth of AWS topics into the company, one goal is to integrate employees at the beginning of their AWS learning paths (“AWS Trainees”) into the AWS Expert Teams and thus achieve a maximum steepness of their learning curve. However, it is important that the ratio of experienced to AWS Trainees remains “healthy”, i.e. that there are enough experienced Trainees to train the few and that there is enough freedom for the project tasks at hand.
The concept of AWS Expert Teams is an important building block to further position companies successfully in the cloud hyperscaler space.
