Site-reliability engineer roles did not exist 10 years ago. With the growing cloud adoption, we find roles in the market that didn’t exist 5 years ago: “Cloud-Native engineers”, “Cloud-Architects”, etc. Where do suitable candidates appear from?

My answer: people evolve into those new roles. For the companies it’s faster to find people with the right (but not necessarily perfect) combination of the required skills in this way than trying to find someone filling in all new job requirements. And for us, employees, it’s a chance to grow and take on new professional challenges, which is usually combined with a boost on the motivation (and on the salary!). It’s a win-win situation.

Stepping into the unknown requires courage. I’ve been in this adventure since early this year when I joined a cloud-migration project as an engineer in a platform team coming from a system analyst role in a product team. The technological learning curve has been very steep and difficult, but other kind of skills have been my key to tackle the challenge and not to lose sanity in the way.

In this talk I will take the audience in a journey from catching the opportunity, starting in the new role, growing into it and learning to be prepared for whatever is coming next. I will provide tips on how to improve our self-confidence, self-awareness, adaptability and effective learning through storytelling with daily-work examples that anyone can hopefully use whenever it’s time to step out of the comfort zone and grow into any new role, even beyond the cloud.