Tom Morgan: 0:34

It's time for another ACP and Alex is with me in the studio and we're in the UK and in the UK, autumn has arrived with something of a bump. Hello Alex, how's it going?

Alex Baker: 0:46

Yeah, good. Yeah. Cold. Bit of a shocker, isn't it? It suddenly dropped about 10 degrees, which is which is, yes, it's summer's over, no more barbecues. Sad times.

Tom Morgan: 0:55

on with the jumpers and the woolly slippers but we're not going to talk about the weather today. We are going to talk about Amazon Connect as we always do. But this week we're going to talk about learning and development as it pertains to Amazon Connect, which is an interesting one because. Like lots of these cloud services, these evergreen services, Amazon Connect is continually changing adding new features, changing features, sometimes deprecating features, and so staying on top of everything can be a real challenge. As can getting to grips with something for the first time. So we're going to talk about these kind of how you, how you stay on top of this stuff, but also how you start. Like if you're, you know, you might know loads of stuff for AWS, but Amazon Connect is quite a separate thing, isn't it really? It's, yeah, it's, it's different to some of the other, I always think of it slightly differently to some of the other workloads in AWS. you think. It's more of a product than it is a,

Alex Baker: 1:45

tool. Yeah, and you could, you could quite easily, know an awful lot about AWS, but never have had the need to do anything around connect. And one of the things I found when doing some of the, the wider AWS certification material, for example, solutions architect associate, it's full of a whole multitude of really useful information about loads and loads of different AWS services, all the core ones like S3, like easy to like Lambda. There's very little about connect in there. So if, if you're really looking for that specialist niche in connect, that's probably not a good place to start. Whereas if you're looking for that more foundational knowledge across AWS, absolutely. And, you know, would overall recommend it as just a sort of good foundational level of knowledge.

Tom Morgan: 2:34

of good foundational level of knowledge. You know, you're responsible for recruiting or managing and bang teams of different people and AWS certificate does not necessarily confer expertise and connect, right?

Alex Baker: 2:52

and maybe, maybe we're sort of jumping on a bit here, but one of the reasons that we thought we might talk a bit about learning and development around Connect is that Amazon Have released a couple of learning plans in AWS skill builder Really specific to connect and actually one of them the amazon connect communication specialist learning plan It has an accompanying Assessment and and badge so not quite a full Certification, not like your associate level or, or the, or the, the cloud practitioner, for example, it's not a sort of fully proctored exam, but it does have a test. I thought the actually the depth of knowledge that you needed to pass the test was, was pretty high. It seemed like it was a good overview and background really into that connect space and a good test of your knowledge at the end.

Tom Morgan: 3:45

end. Oh, that's good. So actually, yes, to extend what I said, there is now a place actually for those managers to look at to be like, okay, if they have this, they know their stuff. If they don't, let's ask some questions. Yeah, that's

Alex Baker: 3:57

that's interesting. Yeah. And I suppose also back to the point that some of the other AWS certifications, things like cloud practitioner, things like the, the associate level certs, they'll always give you some degree of, of certainty that somebody knows enough about. about the services to pass the exam. But arguably they, they don't necessarily show that kind of in depth experience of having worked with a particular service day in day

Tom Morgan: 4:27

yeah, which is always, yeah, some of that experience is hard one, isn't it? Like, it's just time on the ground and,

Alex Baker: 4:34

I've, I've found it, I found it myself in my own studies that You know, you want to get, let's say the, the solution architect associate, you'll end up going through a whole load of, of really interesting course material. Actually, if you don't, if you don't use it from day to day, so for example, things like things like EC2, we use it a little bit, but I'm certainly not working with it a lot. Day in, day out that does make up quite a large proportion of the, the solution architect type study paths, whereas if you, you, you really sort of focused on contact center this, the new learning plan is, is going to be your, your go to, I

Tom Morgan: 5:13

to be your go to, I think. If they want to start their sort of connect learning journey, you know, they don't know anything about connect or they maybe they know what they've done from the sort of standard AWS exams. There's like solution architect exams, but they want to take it to the next step.

Alex Baker: 5:30

Yeah, I would say so. And I mean, just taking it, taking a look through some of the structure of the courses you are starting. And with that communication specialist learning plan, we'll come on to the other one that they've released in a little while. There's some, some real introductory stuff. There are some, some prerequisites as well. So it, it, it suggests that you do. Some of the cloud practitioner essentials. So if you're totally new to clouds, that would be helpful. But like, like you say, if you know about AWS and you want to learn more about connect, you can probably skip those prerequisites, dive into the connect learning plan, and you're immediately into a sort of an introduction around Amazon connect fundamentals of, of a connect instance, how to, how to set them up and then some of the, some of the fundamentals around the. Periphery parts of the service for instance contact lens if you wanted to turn that on

Tom Morgan: 6:24

wanted to turn that on. Yeah,

Alex Baker: 6:36

Yeah, it's a good question. I would say it is, it's pretty well rounded. What I would say is that when I, because I, I did, I went through the course and I did the assessment, there were some bits that kind of, I felt like I knew with my, my previous knowledge of the product and I skipped over a bit. So maybe it's not the, the. the best evaluation of it from a sort of beginner's perspective, but yeah.

Tom Morgan: 7:01

evaluate things when you already know the

Alex Baker: 7:02

Yeah, but, but no, I, I think, you know, you've got, you start off small with the introduction, that's a pretty short module just to, to cover off, you know, the, what is Amazon Connect? Why might you want to use it? But then you, you're straight into Yeah, the instance fundamentals and navigating your way around the console. So it's sort of a few minutes on the basics, but then you get, get to dive deeper into the product and start to, to work with it pretty soon after.

Tom Morgan: 7:29

And you mentioned contact lens that sort of makes it sound like it's fairly up to date as well. Does it cover some of the new AI stuff, do you know, or is that come out since?

Alex Baker: 7:39

Lens, there is, there's some mention of it. I don't think it goes into too much detail around the, the sort of gen AI additions. Having said that, yes, it is, it's a pretty up to date course. But I there's, there's, there's quite a bit in there around a broad subject of, Connect components, if you like. So you've got things like contact lens. You've got a bit about the agent application. You've got quite a bit around call flows and routing. So queues, routing profiles. There's also some stuff around things like custom profiles. And you, you do talk about whilst it's not actually Amazon connect itself, you talk about things like Lex where you can start to build conversational. Journeys as well.

Tom Morgan: 8:26

We were talking before we started recording about like some of the things we're going to talk about and i'm going to jump way kind of towards the end just for a second and hopefully it'll make sense because some of the other things we were talking about looking at are like sort of paid training platforms and stuff to kind of supplement your knowledge but i was just thinking just now as you're kind of answering that question about the ai side of things and it'll be interesting because actually i think using something that's in skill builder The AWS have created is probably your, your most likely bet to get the most up to date information about some of the new AI stuff, right? Because that's always the problem with these training platforms and training materials that it can be out of date and it doesn't move at the same pace as features get added, right? And so you are reliant on somebody up keeping that information up to date. Now, if it's a paid training provider or it's a community effort or anything like that, you're reliant on those people having the time in the world to do it. That's still the case with AWS SkillBuilder, but I feel like AWS are actually quite incentivized to keep up to date on that stuff, because they want you to use the AI stuff as well, right? Because it's, let's not, let's be honest about it, like it's, it's money. Using it is consumptive. So actually the more people use this AI stuff, it's good for AWS as well. So they are quite motivated actually to keep the SkillBuilder stuff up

Alex Baker: 9:42

up. Yeah, they want to drive revenue to the platform at the end of the day. Yes, agreed. Yeah, I mean, it's a good point about the paid for providers. There are I haven't used any of them personally, but there are a few with the big names, such as Udemy, where you can learn about Amazon Connect. Yeah, I wonder, like you, like you say, how or whether those course creators are going to have to sort of, now they've got a bit of competition from the Skill Builder course, whether they're going to have to sort of make some updates to their courses to keep really current and make it, make it worth the additional spend.

Tom Morgan: 10:17

Yeah, but it's, it's definitely, even if I, yes, even if you're, even if you've got one of those or you've used one of those in the past, it's worth checking out this skill builder course that's new. Yeah, for all those reasons, I think as well.

Alex Baker: 10:27

it's worth checking out this Skill Builder course. It's new, and yeah, for all those reasons I think as well. We get a lot of stuff for free. Whereas, as I understand it, the skill builder has introduced more sort of paid for plans of late. So it's worth just checking that out and doing a bit of a comparison between, you know, if you already have a subscription to, to a Udemy or an A Cloud Guru, whether you can leverage that subscription and kind of find some, some similar information within your paid for subscription.

Tom Morgan: 11:04

Got it. Got it. And this, this new course is 18 hours of material. I think you said that as well

Alex Baker: 11:08

Yeah, it is. Yeah, there's, there's quite a lot, quite a lot to it. Yes, definitely. So we, we've got, and I mentioned that there was another one that's even more recently been released. So you've got the Amazon Connect communication specialist one that we mentioned, which is, The one I would go for. If you're starting out in connect, it gives you that good grounding of the product and some of the wraparound services. Then there is the connect developer learning plan.

Tom Morgan: 11:35

you're talking. Now you're talking. Now I'm

Alex Baker: 11:37

Tom's eyes have lit up. This one, it has a couple of other prerequisites mentioned. So actually it's got the same cloud practitioner and AWS technical essentials mentioned as the communication specialist one, but it also mentions developer associate. Now I'm not sure if the, if that's the, yeah. So potentially the, the fully. Certified AWS developer associate. So, so that's, that's interesting that that's a recommendation from that one. You know, that's

Tom Morgan: 12:09

quite a,

Alex Baker: 12:10

I guess, a higher benchmark as a, as a point to entry. Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 12:14

It is almost like this learning plan. He is aimed at like, I hesitate to use the word, but like professional developers, like experienced developers is probably a better term not, not at all to take away from, like, the kind of the low code or, you know, that kind of that stuff as well, because I mean, that stuff's amazing. But yes, maybe it's more for, maybe it just speaks to the coverage that the things they're going to talk about in that course are, are more that kind of thing. I'm

Alex Baker: 12:42

and looking at the some of the recommended job role experience that is that is put against each of these. So for the communication specialist one it's, it's Perhaps aimed at those people that are coming from more of a contact center backgrounds of saying two to five years of experience in contact center technologies, maybe some experience in CTI integration, which we've with, with CRM, it mentions, which

Tom Morgan: 13:07

makes

Alex Baker: 13:08

about on another podcast in the past and things like that real kind of in depth understanding of call flows. So maybe somebody that's looked after the, the telephony and the contact center for a company. And are embarking on a transformation to Amazon connect. Maybe that's the kind of persona that they're going for there. Whereas looking at the, the developer one, it is straight in there mentioning two plus years of full stack software development using nodes, JavaScript, Python, JSON, so yes, like you say, maybe more aimed at that, the kind of developer background, I'd say. My background is. firmly more in the, the, the contact center background originally. And I've always found doing various certifications and stuff that the, the sort of hardcore coding and development is slightly more tricky for, for me to, to get to grips with.

Tom Morgan: 14:00

Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting that there's a developer learning plan at all. It says quite a lot, actually, about the how important they think it is. And we know this is, you know, as a partner company, we know the value of getting the integration right and how important You know, the right development in the right place can really make a difference. But yeah, it's interesting to see that of all the things, you know, they could create a learning plan over, they've decided to, to create one for, specifically for Amazon Connect developers. I think that's interesting.

Alex Baker: 14:30

Yeah. I was taking a look at a look at the structure a bit more. So you've got it still includes the Amazon Connect introduction and some of the console fundamentals and that kind of thing, but then you've got a bit more around. You've sort of got for intermediate call flow section, and then you've got sections around Amazon Connect development fundamentals. So looking into using APIs and SDKs and the command line interface,

Tom Morgan: 14:57

interface.

Alex Baker: 14:59

talking more about the Amazon Connect APIs and what you can do with them. So yeah, it does look, you know, it's maybe a Maybe a steeper learning curve. So you start with the introduction and then you're straight into more about APIs. You've got things around event bridge there. So streaming as well. So some of the, like you said, some of the stuff that you'll find maybe a little bit later on into your connect journey becomes really important to get the most out of the product and start to customize it and make it your own.

Tom Morgan: 15:29

Yes, and there's just a kind of, in case people didn't know, there's development opportunities, I suppose, on the back end of Connect, but also on the front end as well, right, and how that data is presented. To people and yeah, reported on and as well as kind of changing how connect works through integrations and different solutions and then yeah, all the sort of add on things as well that you can do around like call recording and all the things you can do with that flows and all sorts of things. Right? Yeah,

Alex Baker: 15:58

as well that there's a section around infrastructure as code. So yeah, I know we've got, we've got a few team members that are absolutely passionate about having everything deployed via infrastructure as code which if certainly if you're coming at it from a, like a Cisco background or something where that's not as familiar to you, that, that may, it may be a bit kind of daunting a prospect, but I think it has, it has a lot of benefits in, in being able to make sure you're deploying everything in a more regimented way and making sure everything's the same between development and production

Tom Morgan: 16:35

Yeah, definitely. It's that's been very useful for us. Is that in the development learning plan or in the non development

Alex Baker: 16:40

the non development learning plan? That is

Tom Morgan: 16:43

Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, so very interesting to see some of that stuff in for sure. Okay, that's cool. Well, I've got something I can go and do then as well, as well as you. So that's good. Because I haven't done the developer learning plan. So I perhaps I should see what it's

Alex Baker: 16:58

I haven't either, so definitely worth a look. And I wonder as well if they'll follow up with a similar badge for the developer learning plan, because

Tom Morgan: 17:05

nice. We like badges too.

Alex Baker: 17:07

Yeah, absolutely. They always look good on LinkedIn and

Tom Morgan: 17:10

Yeah, yeah.

Alex Baker: 17:11

But the communication specialist learning plan was only followed up Maybe a few weeks or a couple of months later with the badge. So I wonder if they'll do the same with the, the developer one. It would be nice you know, because there's that that greater depth of, of knowledge required. It's, it's nice to be able to, to prove that you, you know, your stuff, I guess.

Tom Morgan: 17:32

Yeah, that's cool. So, so those are kind of good, two good new things that you can do to get up to speed quickly in the Amazon Connect world. What about what else have we got? So like, is there, is there like a formal certification? Apart from that badge, is there like, is there any kind of formal certification that, that you can have to sort of say Because obviously you've got AWS at 70 as well. Is, that the only, that one that you get for sort of the non developer one that we just talked about? You get a certification with that or is it a badge or are they slightly different?

Alex Baker: 18:06

It's a badge and you get a certificate of

Tom Morgan: 18:09

completion. Okay. What

Alex Baker: 18:11

What it is not is a sort of full AWS certification in the same vein as you've got the The foundation level certification. So for example, cloud practitioner and there's a fairly new AI foundation level certification just released as well. Then you've got the associate level certifications. So solutions architect, professional sorry, solutions architect, associate developer, associate. And, and then as I was leading onto there, you've got the professional level certs as well. So really kind of. Testing your in depth knowledge and there are also some specialty certifications as well. Things like the, the data and networking specialty.

Tom Morgan: 18:54

The data and networking specialty. I believe all of them.

Alex Baker: 19:01

believe all of them. You can do certainly. all the way through to professional you can do as remote exams now.

Tom Morgan: 19:08

now. They are like, yet. I guess

Alex Baker: 19:14

Yeah. So that's, I guess one of the main differences, the, the badge, it was, it was self cert, you can do it in your own time, you can come back to it and have multiple attempts at it. The, the proctored formal certifications, you have to. Like you say, you have to install a certain client. So it's the Pearson Vue proctored exam. People who have done maybe Cisco certifications in the past will probably be familiar with Pearson Vue. You have to download that, that software on your machine. And like you say it, then you're actively monitored by, by a real person to make sure that you're not doing anything to cheat, you have a specific amount of time. So. 90 minutes, a couple of hours up to, I think it's around three hours for the professional certs. So yes, that they are, I would say that the level of, the level of pressure is probably a bit higher with those. And you, you do have the, you have the opportunity to, to fail if you don't get over, over the pass point and then you can't come back to it. before something like two weeks to, to, to a month.

Tom Morgan: 20:20

Right, okay. Yeah.

Alex Baker: 20:22

little bit more formal.

Tom Morgan: 20:23

okay, fine. And there, there doesn't exist a Amazon Connect variant of those, right? They're just, they're just the AWS.

Alex Baker: 20:30

connect, no connect formal certification. I, I, I was kind of having done the, the communication specialist badge thinking that maybe, you know, there's enough, enough stuff in there and it was There were quite a lot of questions in the test. I can see how it could be, you know, easily a foundational level exam if, if they wanted to do that.

Tom Morgan: 20:52

foundational exam if Well,

Alex Baker: 20:59

Well, it's, it's like what we said earlier on. I think a certification, it's a good indication that you've, spent some time and invested in your development. You've been through probably quite a lot of course material. You know, there's 18 hours worth in the, in the communication specialist plan. When you get to the, the associate or professional level certifications, you're probably talking upwards of 40 hours worth of just just course material. You've then got to do things like taking practice exams to make sure you're ready for it. I think it does show a certain level of investment in yourself and being serious about a subject that you're spending that much time to go through it and, you know, take the pressure of the exam.

Tom Morgan: 21:44

know, take the pressure of the exam.

Alex Baker: 21:54

And the one caveat on that point is that the certification doesn't sort of prove

Tom Morgan: 21:59

No, it doesn't, that's true. Yeah, that's true as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, it's not, it's not the whole answer, right? Yeah,

Alex Baker: 22:05

I mean, you know, having passed one or two of the certifications, I still wouldn't profess to be. And a real expert in, you know, some of the core services that you you talk about in the exam, just because I don't use them day in day out. Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 22:20

Yes. Yeah, that's true. And one of the other things we should mention as well is that it's not just getting up to speed. It's staying up to speed as things change. And, and keeping on top of changes and, and if you're looking after instances for, you know, even just one instance for your organization. You've got a bit of a leg up there because you see these things changing over time. And so you can kind of stay on top of them as, as things get, you know, But, but even if you don't, then there's no, there's nothing stopping you making your own instance, right? This is, we've talked about this before, the value of Connect being consumptive in that way that you can sign up, you know, with just a credit card. It's not expensive to make a few calls a month. Or even if you call the day you know, with one or two agents and you can set budgets and you can do all those things, but actually it's a really valuable way of trying out things.

Alex Baker: 23:13

This was, and I'm sure I've said this in the past on another podcast, but that was the real eye opener for me coming to connect from a legacy type platform where you, you know, you, you had to, you had to invest a lot in terms of

Tom Morgan: 23:28

those days of

Alex Baker: 23:30

Yeah, yeah,

Tom Morgan: 23:31

Yeah.

Alex Baker: 23:31

Actual, actual real kit that you had to install and, or buy in the first place. Yeah, it was an eye opener coming to Connect and just being able to put your credit card details in and spin up a contact center. And yes, there are a few things that you may have to be careful of and make sure that if you're trying something out, make sure you switch it off again. Had a colleague in the past who'd sort of spun up a an RDS. Database instance and then not removed it. And, you know, within a few hours, it sort of spun up a 60 bill. You've got to watch out for that kind of thing. Cause some services can get expensive quite quickly connect though. Luckily, like you say, if you're, you're making a tiny amount of calls. It's, it's not going to get very expensive. You can play around with it. You can keep current with the, some of the new feature releases. We always mention the release notes on this when we go through some of the new features that have come out. That's always worth keeping an eye on. And then things like YouTube. Amazon have actually got a dedicated Amazon Connect section on YouTube now. So that's well worth a look. There are definitely some good sources of keeping current on the product.

Tom Morgan: 24:45

is true as well. Even if you already look after like a big enterprise instance somewhere. Like I was talking to someone the other day who, about some of the newer in, in connect and they said, Oh, haven't looked at that because like, we're not going to turn that on because we're big and compliancy and stuff. But they hadn't looked at it and it's like, well, you could go and spin up your own instance anyway, in order to look at it to keep your skills current, because one day they are going to look at it and you know, you might not be working there forever and you don't want to. You don't want to do that thing where you jump from one company to another and have that big gap to try and make up because where you were is like lagging behind a little bit.

Alex Baker: 25:22

Really valid point. I'm mentioning the communication specialist one again. You know, there's, there's sections in there about chat, for example. We know some of our customers, they haven't implemented chat either, not via Amazon Connect or just not, not yet in Amazon Connect. But yeah, there's a whole, a whole big area of knowledge there that you could look at the training plan and think, Oh, that's not applicable to me, but it's probably got some really useful stuff in there. And you could have a play with it in your own instance easily enough and just get to grips with the fundamentals of it.

Tom Morgan: 25:54

Yeah, absolutely. And, and there's also in person kind of training as well, isn't there? Like Amazon run events and they do things like reinvent, which we talked about last week. Or the week before, I can't remember. So it's, it's blurs into the the, the, the logistics of recording and then publishing. But yes, so there's obviously reinvent but then more locally. Absolutely.

Alex Baker: 26:18

Yeah we, we popped along to one of the AWS was the, the AWS partner summit in London that Tom and I went to earlier in the year. And then the, the next day following the partner summit, there's the main AWS summit and there are, there were connect sessions throughout both of those days. So they're well worth having a look at, you know, and it's because they're local. It's not the, the sort of full on, expense and whole week out if you're going to reinvent.

Tom Morgan: 26:45

reinvent,

Alex Baker: 26:46

But you do get some really interesting talks and and sessions with people from my WS

Tom Morgan: 26:53

Yeah, definitely. Also

Alex Baker: 26:54

customer case studies as well.

Tom Morgan: 26:56

And are they more, are they AWS Summit events or are they more focused to Connect?

Alex Baker: 27:02

The one that we went to the AWS summit in London is more, more general, but it will, they will usually have a main keynote or a couple of keynotes and then there'll be certain tracks that you can follow. So if you're interested in connect, you can. Take the, the connect track. Whereas if you're interested in, in, you know, databases, then there are sessions that probably clash with the connect ones. So you've got to make some choices about what you

Tom Morgan: 27:26

Yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't remember. It felt like lots of Kinect content, but I couldn't remember why. And I think that's exactly what you said. We were just on the Kinect track and yeah, yeah, there were just lots of other things happening.

Alex Baker: 27:36

actually, it's quite a good strategy. If you want to get the most out of it, have us know. Not just you. If you go with a colleague as well, if you want to get the most out of the Connect track, we did find that there were some, some of the sessions on Connect did clash with each other. So you had to have a couple of you there to cover everything. Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 27:51

And also listening to us is a good way to keep up to date with at least something, some things that are happening, you know, and yeah, we're going to try and try and kind of cover the industry as well. So it's not, not just what's coming out of Amazon Connect, but some of the partners as well. Yeah. In the ecosystem, this has been really, really interesting and I think we could carry on talking about it all day, but it's time to bring this episode to an end, if only so I can go and do some training myself. Thank you very much, Alex, for your insights about the learning and development opportunities that we have around Amazon Connect and thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss it. Whilst you're there, we'd love it if you would rate and review us. And as a new podcast, if you have colleagues that you think would benefit from this content, please let them know. To find out more about how Cloud Interact can help you on your contact center journey, visit cloudinteract. io. We're wrapping this call up now, and we'll connect with you next time.