I am Raja, an Electrical and Electronics Engineer by degree, father of a 6 years old son, and a Cloud/DevOps Architect by profession having 10+ years of IT Industry experience hailing from Chennai.
A solution architect being part of Cloud and DevOps Center of Excellence teams where the primary focus is on providing various migration approaches, solutions, strategies to customers who want to migrate their business applications and infrastructure into Cloud platforms.
I am an ardent learner and always aspire to upskill myself with the technologies that are in trend. From an Electrical Engineering background working in the Information Technology industry, which mostly comprises Programming and computing terms, it was initially very hard to grasp things.
I started with virtualization and then enhanced it into cloud computing overtime. However, at a point in time, I realized there are several other skills and technologies I need to learn, among which Blockchain AI/ML are a few of those I picked based on my analysis and recommendations.
I had a brief idea about AI/ML; however, coming from a non-programming background, I was clueless about what roadmap I should follow to start my journey in AI/ML. This bothered me, and I was looking for some structured platform to kick start the journey.
I have heard about Great Learning from many of my colleagues and friends and a few fresh graduates who have done their management courses with Great Learning. Initially, I felt it wouldn’t suit my schedules and timelines as I am fully employed with an organization and committed to the deliverables.
As a lifesaver, I was nominated by my organization themselves for the PGP AIML program with Great Learning due to the aspirations I have shown through my journey with the organization. This has come as a big boon to my career transition and enhancement. In addition, the online program gets more convenient to manage both the professional assignments and learning together. I feel more comfortable with the online medium than the physical class, which helps me to manage my life schedule effectively.
The mentoring sessions are a value add to the pre-recorded sessions, and as these sessions are planned over the weekends, it is more convenient to listen to the mentors and digest the topics and concepts and revise them over the weekend, followed by a quiz to complete. This helps with a proper roadmap to follow and learn the right way.
The most important benefit of the mentoring sessions is that it is interactive, and groups are formed with fewer people so that it becomes easier to interact with more focus and get clarity on concepts and queries on the spot. More real-time scenarios are being discussed, which again adds more value to the topics that are being taught.
As stated previously, the quality of the mentoring sessions is very effective, and with the best-curated content, it becomes more interesting to learn.
It is always good to have a mentor in important phases of our personal and professional life. My mentor makes me feel comfortable and explains the contents in a manner that is more simple to understand by relating to real-world scenarios. The confidence given during the complex topics enables us not to lose hope in learning the toughest things.
The major accomplishment is that now I can research and relate the newly learned skills with the current skills and technologies I am working on. For example, I was least bothered or interested in Azure AI services that are offered by Microsoft, whereas I was heavily involved with other Azure services. I felt AI service needed more knowledge, so I used to avoid experimenting with it, but now after enrolling in this program and with the knowledge I gained, I have confidently initiated several proposals and offerings on the AI services with different cloud provider solutions. This increases my footprint, and also I can relate the learnings with real-time scenarios.
My only advice to the starters is that you don’t lose hope at any point in your learning, especially when you are going through complex topics. Try to overcome those by utilizing all the available resources from the GL program and seeking more clarity when needed by the mentors.
See what you can learn, what you can grasp from the learning, and out of these, what you can apply to your current work and transition your career far ahead than many in the industry.
