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Overview

📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - Reinvent your career: From developer to cloud leader (DEV101)

In this video, Fernando Pena, Head of Cloud Services and AWS Community Builder, shares strategies for reinventing your tech career. He discusses how 94% of tech professionals consider career changes, driven by rapidly evolving technologies like AI and cloud. Drawing from his journey from SAP developer to cloud leadership, he emphasizes building a T-shaped career—maintaining deep expertise while developing broad skills. He addresses common concerns like starting over, salary impacts, and age barriers. The key to successful transitions is building a bridge through certifications, personal branding, and especially community involvement through AWS User Groups, Community Builders program, and attending events like re:Invent to establish trust and create networking opportunities.

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Main Part

The Reality of Career Transitions in Tech: From SAP Developer to Head of Cloud Services

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for being here. It’s really nice seeing you guys to talk about an important topic: reinventing your career. This is not about my career specifically, but I will use my career a little bit to show some examples of how you can reinvent or change your career. I would like to start with a simple question. Who here in the last few years has thought about changing to a new role, even inside tech or not, or maybe moving? I believe it’s common, right? Yeah, thank you. A recent study shows that at least 94% of people in tech would like to change their role at some point in life, right? And 40% of these people think that they will change at least three times, and most are motivated nowadays because of the rapidly evolving technology with all the AI, cloud, and all the tech that we have.

We’ve been seeing a lot of jobs or job roles in the past few years, like data scientists and engineers. That was something new a few years ago, but now we have a lot of emerging new positions, right? So AI ethics, AI behavior analysts, prompt engineer, context engineer. All of that is kind of new and fancy, and people maybe would like to change. It’s completely natural, and people will move because technology is moving and they would like to move too, right? So transition in tech is really common. People from infrastructure would like to move to development, or maybe from data to AI, or maybe you are a developer and you’d like to start your own company, right? That’s a different move. So even in tech, that’s not really, really easy.

And who am I? I’m Fernando Pena. I’m Head of Cloud Services at my company, and I am an AWS Community Builder for the fifth year now, and I’m the leader of the AWS User Group in Miami. But of course, I wasn’t born like that. My career did not start like that. My career started in 2004 when I started in just support, technical support and development, and then I went to the SAP world as a developer, as a specialist, and after that, Solutions Architect. In 2019, I started changing a little bit, and I started learning more about chatbots before all the generative AI, when we were still using NLP at that time, right? And that’s when I started learning more about cloud and AWS specifically.

And at that moment, I was a speaker for the first time in a big conference in Brazil, and I started creating more content about SAP and AWS. So at that moment, my career was changing a little bit from the SAP and corporate world to cloud and more technology world at this point. And in 2021 was when I joined the AWS Community Builder program, which was basically a game changer in my career at that time. It gave me visibility, networking, and everything that I needed when I was arriving to a new position or talking about a new technology at this moment.

And at this point, my boss just came to me and said, "Hey, if you believe in cloud, you should create a division and make it happen," and I said, "Why not? I can try, right?" I knew nothing about business at that time, strategy, marketing, whatever, but I got this challenge and I started this division, and that’s when I became the Head of Cloud. So in 2023, I had to start everything again. I moved to the United States from Brazil. You need to start from scratch: networking, making new friends, and you need new contacts. That was exactly when I started helping the Miami User Group. And 2025, I became the Miami User Group leader. That was the beginning of this year, and then I’m here being a speaker, right? So that was a huge movement in my career, even inside tech, and what really helped me was exactly the community, right?

So it’s not easy moving from one position to another. There are a lot of common questions that maybe you have, or thoughts that you have. First of all, it’s like, "Am I capable?" Because you have maybe 10 years of experience in one area, one technology, maybe you don’t think you’re capable to move, right? That’s a really common thought. Another one is, "Do I have to start from scratch again?" So I’m a principal developer, I’m a senior developer. Should I have to be an intern again and start everything from scratch? I don’t think so, but I’ll explain better.

And what about my paycheck? It’s a fair question, right? Maybe you have enough money and you don’t have to think about it, but if you have bills, if you have a family, that’s the first thing, that’s the first thought, because you need to understand if you can keep doing what you’re doing.

Or maybe you say, I’m in my 40s and I’m not young enough, right? Well, that’s not a question. It’s about me, but I am young. I’m pretty sure, at least in my mind I’m young. So again, you have a great job, but you got stuck in it. You would like to move, you’d like to start a new technology, you want to study more about AI, but you don’t have visibility. You need to change, so you need to move, right? That’s what you want to do.

And moving is never easy. And if you do the wrong movement, maybe it can be risky. You need to do it the right way, right? So what you need to do is you have your position and you would like to move to your target, that’s your new role, but there’s a gap and you need to fill this gap. So how can you fill this gap? Maybe you can jump. Good luck, but I’m not sure if it’s the best solution. You should build a bridge. It takes time, but it will take you to your goal, at least safer in a smooth way in your career.

Building Your Bridge: T-Shaped Careers and the Power of Community Involvement

And how can you build this bridge? In my personal opinion, I think you should build a T-shaped career. Maybe most of you already heard about the T-shape, but I’ll explain a little bit. In a T-shaped career, you have your area of expertise, your deep knowledge, but at the same time, you should develop other skills, your technical skills, your soft skills at the same time, because if you want to go for a leadership role or if you want to go to a different area of expertise, you kind of construct that when you are working in your area of expertise, right?

So for example, you can learn AI and ML and you can learn leadership, even being a developer, or you’d like to learn more about data, problem solving, infrastructure, or work in collaboration. Soft skills are awesome for your career. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to change or not, but if you’d like to move, if you’re a developer and want to go to data or AI, you should start learning when you still are employed and you still have your job and you can take advantage, right?

So again, how do you make this move, build this bridge with your T-shaped career? That was not AI generated images because it’s ridiculous, but it’s just to exemplify this move, right? This is how you fill the gap that you have between your current position and your next position. And besides that, you need to build authority and establish trust because if you would like to start, if you don’t like to start from scratch again, people need to trust you, they need to believe you. That’s how you need to show yourself and create this trust for yourself, right?

So certifications are a very good point. Certifications are essential, but they are not enough, right? You need to develop a personal brand. You need to talk to people. You need to create a network. So certifications, you need more, right? Certifications are good, but you need to create visibility for that, right? So you build a personal brand, but what’s the key for your success is the community. That’s what I would like to talk about and exactly what I mentioned with my career when I say that the AWS Community Builders program changed my career was exactly because they can help you with networking, building your brand, right? So get involved.

The user groups are excellent if you would like to make more friends, improve your networking, know more people from the same technology that can help you view for a job or getting a new job, leading a new company, introduce you to more people. That’s excellent, right? The Community Builders program is a program that you can create content, create visibility, create this kind of authority because people will start trusting you because they see that you are really building and helping others to learn. So that’s another great program.

Another good thing, and you guys are already doing this exactly here is attending events. Attending events are really important to connect with people, more important than the talks and all the content that we have here.

Making new connections at events like this is really awesome. That’s one of the best points of this kind of event. So AWS re:Invent, AWS re:Inforce, and even the global summits that you have in different kinds of cities are really, really important.

I would like to wrap up everything, but again, a lot of people are moving to different roles and different technologies. That’s really natural, so don’t be afraid. You’re not alone. That’s a really natural thing to do, especially now with all the technology evolving. Build a T-shaped career because it takes time. You need to create trust and you need to create a brand, so you need to move smoothly to a new position. As soon as you start learning new things and create this visibility, it’s best for you.

Get involved with the community and get involved with community builders. Here at the expo we have a community desk where you can get more information about the user groups that may exist nearby where you live, and being part of that is really, really cool. That’s my point for this kind of move and career.

Of course, I would like to connect with you if you want. You have all my social media here, LinkedIn, YouTube. I’m always creating content and connecting with people. If you have any questions, I’m here. Thank you so much.

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