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It pays to be a certified Google Cloud architect, according to Skillsoft’s annual survey of high-paying IT credentials. Just Bing it, it’s true!
Finishing just behind the top-earning AWS Certified Security certification, Google’s “Google Cloud – Professional Cloud Architect” badge gave its holders on average a salary of $190,204. The median pay is a slight decrease from last year’s average salary of $200,960.
Google gains. Google Cloud has been gaining momentum, according to Greg Fuller, VP of Codeacademy Enterprise at Skillsoft, especially as companies seek to diversify cloud infrastructures to avoid a single point of failure.
“Everyone’s looking for that multi-cloud approach, multi-cloud mindset. And Google Cloud is sitting there, but as that alternative that a lot of organizations are moving to, just for redundancy,” Fuller told IT Brew.
While Google still lags behind Microsoft and Amazon in cloud infrastructure market share, according to a Q1 report from Synergy Research Group, a summer earnings call from Alphabet revealed that Google Cloud’s Q2 revenue reached $10.3 billion—an increase from $8.03 billion one year ago.
Cloud 101. A Google Cloud Certified Practitioner exam costs $200, and pros must recertify after two years. A popular cross certification in 2024, according to Skillsoft’s list, included AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.
The Professional Cloud Architect certification tests candidates’ abilities to manage implementations of cloud infrastructure and design for security and compliance, according to Google’s bulletpoint list of skills.
John Pettit, CTO at Google partner Promevo, sees the cloud architect badge as a “general practice degree” for designing and configuring infrastructure. “It goes deep on setting up infrastructure, compute, networking, firewalls, and things like that, and it touches lightly on everything else,” he said, referring to fields covered in specialized Google certifications like security and data engineering.
Pettit and his team recently helped a consultancy looking to synthesize meeting notes and transcriptions into helpful summaries for briefing documents.
“Since we had a broader awareness of what you could do with different Google technologies, we’re able to kind of re-architect the solution a little bit, and bring some new technologies to their team that they weren’t aware of,” Pettit said, noting those “new technologies” included Vertex AI, Gemini, and Document AI.
“We know the right tools we can bring to the right problems. And that’s what the exam is really focused on.”
Skillsoft conducted its study from May to September 2024.