How to get cloud experience without a cloud job

The honest problem

Job adverts asking for experience for an entry-level role are a genuine frustration, and there is no way to argue them out of existence. What you can do instead is build the experience the advert is really asking for — proof you can actually use the platform, not proof you have been paid to. Our guide on certifications versus experience, and which matters more, covers the wider trade-off between the two; this article is about the experience half specifically, and how to generate it yourself.

Practical ways to build experience

None of these require anyone to hire you first:

• Build real projects on a free-tier account — but set a billing alert before you start, so a mistake in configuration doesn’t turn into an unexpected bill. Our guide on building a cloud home lab walks through a structured way to do this.
• Document everything publicly on GitHub, with write-ups explaining what you built and why, not just the code itself — a project without an explanation is much harder for someone else to evaluate. Our guide on AWS portfolio projects that get you hired covers what makes a project actually convincing.
• Contribute to open-source cloud or infrastructure-as-code projects — even small, well-scoped contributions demonstrate real collaboration and real tooling skill, and the contribution history is publicly verifiable.
• Automate something genuinely useful for a community group, charity or small business that would otherwise do it manually — real requirements and a real (if informal) stakeholder make the project count for more than a tutorial exercise.
• Work through structured hands-on labs and challenges that go beyond following a tutorial step by step — the value is in solving a problem you haven’t seen the answer to yet.
• Pair a certification with the practical work rather than treating it as separate — it gives your self-directed learning a syllabus and a way to check you have covered real ground, not just the parts that were interesting.

What counts — and presenting it honestly

Be direct about what this evidence is and isn’t. Personal projects are not employment, and an interviewer will weigh them differently from a paid role — that is fair, and pretending otherwise on a CV tends to backfire once someone asks a follow-up question. What personal projects are is real, verifiable platform experience: you genuinely used the services, made genuine mistakes and fixed them, and can genuinely discuss the trade-offs you made. Describe them on a CV and in interviews exactly as what they are — self-directed projects, with links to the code and write-ups — and let the quality of the work do the persuading rather than the wording around it.

The internal-move option

If you already have a job that sits anywhere near IT — support, QA, data entry, systems administration, even a technically-adjacent operations role — look for cloud-adjacent tasks you can volunteer for internally. Offering to help automate a manual process, set up basic monitoring, or assist on a migration project gives you genuine, employer-verifiable experience without needing to change jobs first, and it often opens a more direct internal path into a cloud role than applying externally would.