How to clear AWS admin interviews with confidence

Confidently Clear AWS Admin Interviews

AWS Admin is one of the top skills today and in past 4 to 5 years, many of my direct and indirect contacts have successfully placed, getting good packages and life has changed. I am sure more are still trying. I thought of sharing a few tips and preparation advises to help the scholars.

First things first, ensure you have won CV published on job portals, double check on presentation mistakes, grammar & spelling mistakes in CV. Make sure you have all the information furnished in CV starting your career overview, top skills, all skills, certifications, educational qualification details, professional experience details, and projects & awards you got.

One of the must ask questions in every interview is “tell me about yourself?” and based on your answers further interview will progress. There are two things from interviewer standpoint.

1. What company / project needs.
2. What you know.

They start questioning from what you claimed in your CV and progresses to what they want.

Prepare very well on the points you put in CV, especially initial few questions how you handle makes a huge difference. Back to the point “tell me about yourself?” so start covering the following points in 2Mins of time.

• Give a high-level introduction about profile like
  • I am Venkat Kurela having 15 years of IT experience in different verticals like Servers hardware, networking, storage, backup, VMware and different cloud platforms like Azure, AWS and Google.
  • I am VCP 4, 5, 6 certified, also VMware VCAP, Azure 104, Azure 400, AWS and Google certified.
  • When I get to work, I check my inbox for any shift handovers, then checks on ticketing tool for any priority incidents and start taking tickets.
  • Along with regular requests and incidents I also contribute to projects like On-Prem to Azure migrations.

That is a very good explanation, however you left lots of clues to interview so they may ask questions from any of the areas you mentioned. So, to that question prepare very well and write down on a paper so you will give perfect answer.

Secondly, ensure you are giving low level answers possible. Don’t allow interview to ask or repeat the same question to get expected answer, but understand the question / context and give a very clear answer to the topic. For example, if the interviewer asks what is a VPC? Don’t just say VPC is a virtual private cloud (well it happened to me many times, I really don’t want to ask what VPC to a candidate with 4–6 years of experienced)

Third area to be careful is confidence and giving low level answer, for example, if there is any question from topics like ARM templates then we feel less confident and just say either don’t have experience or never worked or we have different team to handle DevOps etc., but that is the area to capitalize because ARM templates is something new to everybody around, it is same with interview who is asking the question too so those are the areas to prepare well and give a shot.

In my experience, I have seen HRs / business units have selected candidates not having expected knowledge as per project requirement, but the candidate is strong / good at what he / she is doing in current job. So, the key take away is being good at few key services so that you have better chances.

Fifth area is hands-on-labs, yes, fortunately cloud computing platforms allow us to practice all the services for free or at nominal charges. So put your hands to work and practice all services to very low level.

Though I say many tips at the end your preparation and knowledge is the answer for the questions so it is the best tip to prepare topics very well.

All the best and see more tips in the coming blogs.