Financials

<p>Talking about Cloud, I&rsquo;ve noticed there&rsquo;s a tendency for the discussion to focus on the benefits to business.&nbsp;</p><p>Certainly there are many.&nbsp;</p><p>But what about the benefits to employees?</p><p>I&rsquo;ve observed five ways Cloud makes businesses better places to work - and which also explain why opportunities to work on Cloud are so hot in the jobs market right now.</p><p><strong>1)&nbsp; &nbsp; FOCUS&nbsp;</strong></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;">When you build everything on premise from scratch, your developers are often compelled to spend a significant amount of their time on tertiary stuff like admin and Ops, stuff that they're probably not particularly interested in. Cloud on the other hand lets developers focus largely on what they are really good at, which is development. Imagine being able to work only on the aspects of the job you&rsquo;re interested in. It&rsquo;s liberating.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>2)&nbsp; &nbsp; CREATIVITY</strong>&nbsp;</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;">Cloud has opened the door to all kinds of innovation. Cloud, teamed with its ecosystem of services such as AI and data tools for example, means we can be more ambitious in our goals, more confident in our analysis and more imaginative in our solutions because we&rsquo;re no longer limited by what we can build ourselves. It&rsquo;s transformative.</p><p><strong>3)&nbsp; &nbsp; IMPACT&nbsp;</strong></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;">We all go to work wanting to make a difference. But in the legacy world, it can be a very long wait before that difference goes live. In contrast, Cloud projects are much faster to market, so employees get to see the impact on customers in weeks or months - not years. Being able to measure the impact we individually make is an important factor in most measurements of job satisfaction.</p><p><strong>4)&nbsp; &nbsp; GROWTH&nbsp;</strong></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;">Cloud is constantly evolving and to keep on top of it requires continuous professional development. Most, if not all, the big Cloud providers offer online education portals where, for a nominal fee, you can learn anything and everything about working on Cloud. Courses range from basic to seriously advanced so wherever you happen to be in your career, there&rsquo;s something for you.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p><strong>5)&nbsp; &nbsp; BALANCE</strong></p><p style="padding-left: 40px;">When you offer your employees the very best tools to work with, you&rsquo;re not only unlocking greater productivity for the organisation. You are also giving them the keys to seamless remote working and flexible hours &ndash; in essence, a better work-life balance. This can be a significant advantage for any business looking to attract talent and in my experience, it also leads to happier, healthier and more productive teams.&nbsp;</p><p>I get a lot of messages from people who want to work on Cloud but haven&rsquo;t had the opportunity yet in their business or career.</p><p>My advice is always to enrol on a course. Today&rsquo;s generation of courses are no less brilliant for being online, the instructors are very knowledgeable and there&rsquo;s usually lots of opportunity to get real hands-on experience.&nbsp;</p><p>Ultimately, there&rsquo;s a worldwide shortage of Cloud skills. I have witnessed this massive challenge over the last 3 years whilst recruiting to build Cloud capability, so if you have the drive and are willing to invest the time, the opportunity is there for you to realise.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>