Welcome, everybody. Todd Weatherby is the Vice President of AWS Professional Services Worldwide. He joined AWS over nine years ago and started the professional services organization from scratch, which today is in over 40 countries, serving 2,000 of the largest enterprise organizations and government agencies in the world. AWS Professional Services, works with both the largest global organizations, but also with the AWS partner network. Todd also serves on the Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (ID&E) Advisory Board for all of AWS. Prior to joining AWS, Todd held a number of roles, including multiple leadership roles at Microsoft and Oracle. Welcome to our studio today, Todd. Thank you very much. It's great to be here, Nancy. It's an important topic, important audience, a talented community here so I'm looking forward to our discussion. That's awesome, Todd. Let's start out by helping our learners learn more about professional services at AWS, and so what does that mean and what is your group responsible for? Yeah. I appreciate the question. Wind it back to about -- AWS is 15 years old, about 12 years ago or so. Enterprise customers in particular who saw the value of the cloud model started to ask for more help. They wanted not only to know the good, what is AWS and why would I use it? But they started to ask the how questions. They needed help with the hands-on implementation and integration of cloud-based solutions and the migration of legacy environments in order to a cloud model, the development of new capabilities on a cloud model, and they really wanted dedicated resources to work on projects with them. We built our professional services in that way so that we could have specialists across what is now about 25 different specialties, 20 of them technical and five of them more business and advisory, and we're able to do large projects now with customers over a long period of time to help them get to their outcomes faster. Then we take that experience back into our engineering teams to help inform the platform. We work with our partners, and of course, we're always recruiting new talent up and down the stack and across industries and in all geographies. It's a fun ride and the nine years has been crazy. We just got started though, it's still day one. It's still very early. Absolutely. What a wonderful a myriad of viewpoints your group must have been really around the world. What kind of opportunities and especially career opportunities do professional services and APNs [Amazon Partner Network member companies] provide for learners who might be mid-career professionals, who are interested in customer-facing technology roles at AWS? The big picture answer is that analysts say that there's about $3.7 trillion of IT spend every year and that only about four percent of that, five percent of that has moved to the Cloud. Imagine that. When I say it's day one that's what I mean, is that they're still over 90 percent of IT that is going to move to a new model. There's no question about if it will. It's just when it will. Any stage of your career, if you're looking to get in the way of the future model and customer demand and provide some valuable skills, there's a huge skills gap and skills shortage in the market. All of our customers are asking for more help, all of our partners are asking us to help them ramp up so that they can go service those customers, and so as a career stage for you to get the skills and certification to put yourself in position against that supply and demand imbalance there, I think it's a great move, and I can validate with a whole bunch of data, but trust me that there's a big move happening, and it all starts with getting deep and getting your hands on and shedding old ways of learning things and learning new ways, and putting yourself through these training resources, certifications. That's a great credential, a great valuable credential in the market. To your point, Todd, this is excellent timing to do that, and in going with the Amazon leadership principles, it's always day one, and certainly we encourage everyone taking the specialization to learn and be curious. This specialization in particular prepares students to pass the AWS cloud practitioner exam. How important is the AWS certification to a career in professional services or an APN partner? I think I can say for a fact, if you are hiring into our organization or into any one of our partner organizations, there's a learning curve to get through to learn how they work and to learn how their customers work and get yourself prepared, and so this is a key building block for that journey, a key stepping stone to that journey, and it starts there with getting the education. Now, training and certification are important and necessary, but not sufficient. You're going to need to get more experiential learning on top of that to get yourself in a position to where your organization is confident and you're confident in front of a customer. If you choose to apply these skills in a field organization, customer facing role, you can take in other directions back into product teams and other things as well, but in the space that I'm in and where we work with these partners, it's all customer facing and we're very careful about it to make sure we prepare our people so they can be successful with the customer. Customer is a great experience, the client has a great experience and then we can build on that. This is all about preparation. It's all about reducing the time from when you start to the time you're out with customers at the beginning, and we surveyed our managers recently and 90 percent of them said the certifications are the key and are just as important as the soft skills and consulting skills. You really got to have these hands-on technical skills to really be credible in front of a customer and be comfortable yourself in front of a customer as well. That's why it -- is one reason why it's important, and then beyond that, there are more things you can do to build on that foundation. Actually, speaking of building the right skills and the foundation, one of the more abstract sections of the cloud practitioner exam are the questions around the well-architected framework. In your own words, Todd, why is the well-architected framework so important? I was part of building that out here over the nine years, there were a bunch of teams that contributed and there's a great team that led it. Over the years, what it amounts to is the patterns and practices that we've seen from customers about how best to architect their environments and specific workloads in a cloud-based model to be secure, to be resilient, to be reliable, the pillars are all there. I'm not going to get them all right. To be cost effective, cost optimized, and the certifications get you in a position to be able to understand those patterns, understand the recommendations to the customer, understand how to assess the customer's degree of being well architected, either on a workable level or beyond. Clearly, there are specific things in there and tools that help you do those assessments in a very objective way, but these certifications put you in a position to use those tools effectively. If you walk in without the certifications, you're going to a much harder time understanding or being able to explain to the customer how to apply that framework and how to give the customer a deep and accurate assessment of their preparation or their degree to which they are well architected. I'll say specifically as an example, we look at security, we call it "job zero" around here. You'll start with this practitioner certification, but then you might follow in behind there with a security specialization, security certification, as well as part of your contribution to the application of the well-architected model. So certification is a great part of the preparation, a great part of the application in a customer environment so that you can guide the customer in the right way. Going through the importance of the well-architected framework to all learners is certainly an important piece of content to pay attention to as you prepare for the exam. Coming back to our interview here as well as the overall Coursera specialization, this course is taught by the non-profit Advancing Women in Technology, which works on increasing female and other minority representation in the tech field. In your words, Todd, why is diversity so important, and have you noticed any trends where your clients or customers you work with express more interest in working with diverse experts? Yeah, for sure. I'll be a little locally self-critical here to say that when I started here nine years ago, I knew diversity was important and I had some thoughts in my mind about why. But we were so busy setting up a business and growing. I think I gave it lip service. I don't think I really took it seriously and really embedded it into our business. About three years ago, I had some conversations with women in particular around the business, but others with different backgrounds who pointed out the real connection between business performance and diversity and the inclusion of that diversity in the way we work and then they really got my attention and I realized that we can apply a lot of the other techniques we use to launching new capabilities in our business. We could apply that to improving our diversity and our inclusion and providing more equitable environment for our people in their growth and learning too. Over the past three years here on my team, we've gotten more serious about it. But it's been a real pleasure to watch the company here at Amazon and even the industry get more serious about it too. At Amazon, makeup of the board of directors is different now, includes more women inside our organization, we set goals for hiring and career development differently, includes more focus on diversity in different communities. Then inside our teams, we're driving different behavior on the inclusion of this more diverse environment that we created with good focus the last few years that the why for me has become if we're going to line up with the customer as best, we need to have the understanding and empathy and relationships and background that the customers have. I can tell you, by working with, for example, a CIO of a large enterprise that I spoke with earlier this week, she and I were talking about this topic and she said, "I'm really looking for you all to have more senior women that I can connect with better and differently across the AWS business. Here's why it's important to me. Here's why it's important in our relationship," and it doesn't get more clear than that. But it's not just at the senior levels. It's all the way through and including the technical roles where those connections are important with our customers. The second why for me is the part of our decision making. If we all have the same point of view going in, we're not going to exercise the options very well. We're probably not going to make the best decision that we could. First is how we're going to best relationship with the customer, second is, are we going to make the best decisions, and third is, are we going to create the best environment for people to do their best work. As organizational leader, I think a lot about, do we create the climate in which each individual can be their best and perform their best and feel comfortable in that environment to do so. This is another part of why ID&E are important to our business success. The customer, the decisions, and the employee experience. Get all that right, we can really be top performing organization well into the future. We've made a great run on raw skills and energy and momentum, but what's going to really sustain that for us and separate us from the pack in the future is how we embrace all those concepts into our business every day and that it'll show up for our customers every day. Yeah, that sums it up really perfectly, Todd because from just your own career journey and seeing how your own thoughts about ID&E have evolved, and then of course, that being reinforced by customers and clients that your team works with all around the world is that we see that diversity being represented in the products, in the projects and initiatives that are being driven. Yeah, I think it all comes back to adding value and to connecting with a customer, whoever that customer is, whether they're internal or external partnerships, those are going to rely on creating value. Creating value comes back to, I've always told my adult children, you've got to know something about something. You can't just handle things and you can't just talk and be excited about things. Passion is part of it, but knowledge is critical. A certification program like this really gets you into the details to where you can really know something about something, add value, build relationships, build credibility, and then layer on whatever additional specialization or additional interest you have on that foundation and you'll go very far. There's a huge opportunity ahead for everybody here. Yeah, that's such a great inspirational note to end this interview on time. Thank you so much for joining us in studio today. For learners, please definitely check out any job opportunities from Todd and the Professional Services team, and best of luck on the exam. Great. Thank you, Nancy. Good luck, everyone.
