Level Up Your AWS Skills: The Insider's Guide to AWS Skill Builder

Introduction

If you are passionate about AWS like I am, gaining AWS skills helps to fuel your career's engine, because knowledge is power. Considering the pace of AWS innovation, it's pretty much "learn or die". You might know some of the popular learning platforms such as A Cloud Guru, Udemy, and courses from Adrian Cantrill, but have you ever looked into AWS's own Skill Builder? Who better to teach AWS than AWS themselves?

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." - John F. Kennedy

What is AWS Skill Builder?

AWS Skill Builder is an online training platform that launched two years ago, and is part of the overarching AWS Training and Certification site. Site Builder provides 700+ training lessons that help you learn and refine your AWS skills and knowledge, through online courses, self-paced labs, and certification preparedness courses. Much of the content is free, but there is also a paid subscription available for additional content.

Languages supported include Indonesian, German, English, and Spanish. You are reading this in English, but hey - we are a global community! Whether you say hello, hola, or hallo - Skill Builder has you covered.

Free Content - But Doesn't Free Mean Extremely Limited?

Now you might be thinking that free means skimpy. Honestly, I thought exactly that same way when I began to review the free content. But here's the plot twist - AWS is providing some solid training content.

The type of content available for free is illustrated below (copied from the Skill Builder site):

The free courses can run anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours, and are self-paced. Sample topics include core AWS services, FinOps, generative AI, containers, and many more. To assist you in finding the right courses out of the 600+ provided, "Learning Plans" have been created to provide access to a curated series of training modules for learning subject domains such as containers and EKS, DevOps, serverless, analytics, security, and generative AI.

Here is a sampling of free courses available on Skill Builder:

Will you find every course perfectly suited for your training goals? Probably not. And let's be honest - if you want to to specialize and have your skills be an inch wide but a mile deep in a subject such as Kubernetes or generative AI, there will be more suitable training options out there for you. But if you are looking to broaden your AWS knowledge across a wide spectrum of technology domains, Skill Builder will likely fit the bill. And it is hard to beat free.

If you are working on AWS certification, the free subscription provides exam question sets and prep courses for many of the AWS certs, including professional and specialty certifications. For those driven by gamification, you can also earn training badges to demonstrate your will to learn and master AWS.

Free often means "of little value", but I think you will find that in this case free means a great opportunity to increase your skills and knowledge.

But Wait, There's More (Content)!

Online training is a great way to learn, but it isn't a true substitute for getting hands-on with AWS. Do you want access to hands-on labs? For the cost of several lattes a month, Skill Builder has you covered with their $29 a month subscription plan.

"For the best return on your money, pour your purse into your head." - Benjamin Franklin

Interestingly enough, you cannot pay the $29 monthly fee directly - instead you will be billed via an AWS subscription (you must provide an AWS account number when you sign up for the paid plan). As long as you stay within the free tier services, having an AWS subscription in order to pay for Skill Builder is at most an inconvenience, and shouldn't be a deal breaker. If you sign up for monthly billing, you can cancel your subscription at any time. If you commit to a full year's subscription, a discount is offered.

So what does your $29 monthly investment buy you? Here is a comparison between their free and paid plans (again, copied from the Skill Builder website):

There is also a "Team" plan that provides the ability to assign training and track progress, but I won't be covering that in detail here.

To provide you with actual hands-on training, the paid subscription provides you with 125+ self-paced builder labs to get your hands dirty, all without requiring you to use your own AWS subscription. A sampling of some intermediate and advanced labs are illustrated below:

From a certification perspective, the paid subscription builds upon the free certification content by providing more detailed and robust certification training as well as test exams to test your mastery of the subject.

Lastly, I want to mention the AWS Jams that are also provided with the paid subscription.

To quote AWS, "AWS Jam challenges individuals and teams to apply their AWS Cloud skills to solve real-world, open-ended problems using AWS services". Jam challenges bring a gamification aspect to online training, and it uses simulated use cases within an AWS sandbox to reinforce your learning. It's an interesting take on hands-on training, and clues are provided if you are unable to solve a particular task.

The Jam challenges currently available are:

I'm currently working through the "Selected Challenges of re:Invent Security 2022" Jam. For me, having real-world use cases makes the training more compelling. The Jams will challenge your brain, especially if you are outside of your primary domain interest. Or at least if your brain is the size of mine, anyway.

Wrapping Up

So are you ready to rev up your AWS skills? Don't miss out on this often untapped resource - dive into AWS Skill Builder today!

(link to Skill Builder moved to the comments in order to avoid the LinkedIn "punishment" of decreasing reach when external links are present).

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