Get started on a skills readiness path

As more organizations embrace cloud solutions, IT professionals might feel anxious about their roles. Cloud technologies require a different set of skills. However, learning these new skills doesn't have to be hard. With the right training, you can gain the expertise and confidence to help your organization understand and embrace the changing technology landscape.

Diagram of skills mapped to IT roles in a cloud-hosted environment. Figure 1: Mapping of skills to IT roles in a cloud-hosted environment.

Cloud Adoption Framework resources

The Cloud Adoption Framework guides you through the full adoption lifecycle. Each section of the framework provides opportunities to build necessary skills. To help you get started, the following skills-readiness paths describe key skills for success in adoption phases.

  • Strategy phase: Develop the skills needed to prepare an actionable migration plan, including business justification and other required business-planning skills.
  • Readiness phase: Develop the skills needed to prepare the business, culture, people, and environment for coming changes.
  • Migration phase: Gain the skills required to implement the cloud migration plan.
  • Management phase - Monitoring: Gain the skills needed to monitor a cloud environment.

Each of these learning paths shares opportunities across multiple media types to maximize knowledge acquisition.

You can also explore certification paths. The Azure Certification Deck provides an overview of Microsoft Azure training journeys and certifications.

Microsoft Learn

Microsoft Learn can help you develop valuable IT skills at your own pace. With hands-on learning and customizable paths, Microsoft training offers a rewarding approach to online training. Earn points and levels, and achieve more!

Examples of tailored learning paths that align to the Cloud Adoption Framework include:

  • Evolve your DevOps practices: DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to your end users. Azure DevOps is a set of services that gives you the tools you need to do just that. With Azure DevOps, you can build, test, and deploy any application, either in the cloud or on premises.

  • Azure for the data engineer: Explore how the world of data has evolved and how the advent of cloud technologies provides new opportunities for business to explore. You'll learn about various data platform technologies, and how a data engineer can take advantage of this technology to an organization's benefit.

  • The Principles of Sustainable Software Engineering: Sustainability, or cloud efficiency, is a fundamental topic to understand to optimize your cloud infrastructure, applications, and workloads. Regarding skilling and sustainability, you might benefit from reading the report on Closing the Sustainability Skills Gap: Helping businesses move from pledges to progress.

Learn more

To discover more learning paths, browse the Microsoft Learn training catalog. Use the roles filter to align learning paths with your role.

Learn about paths to Microsoft Certifications.