I passed the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam and want to transition from 11 years of field engineering into a work-from-home role in cloud administration, Tier 2 or Tier 3 cloud support, or infrastructure management in the Philippines. My experience includes hands-on infrastructure work, troubleshooting, hardware, physical networks, and client support. I also passed the CCNA about 10 years ago and still have a solid foundation in subnetting, routing, and switching, although I never held a dedicated network engineering position. Should I focus next on AZ-104, broaden into AWS, or consider security and AI certifications? I'd also appreciate advice on translating my field experience into a cloud-focused résumé and identifying realistic entry-to-mid-level remote job titles with MSPs, BPOs, or international employers.
3 Answers
Your field experience is more valuable if you translate it into outcomes instead of listing only hardware tasks. Highlight incident troubleshooting, uptime, customer escalation, network implementation, documentation, migrations, and any scripting or monitoring you used. Search for roles such as cloud support engineer, Azure support associate, infrastructure support engineer, systems administrator, NOC engineer, or junior cloud administrator. Be realistic about starting at a junior or support level—even experienced engineers can feel overwhelmed when moving into cloud because there are so many services and design decisions to learn.
Pick one lane before collecting more fundamentals. Based on your infrastructure and networking background, Azure administration is probably the strongest fit. If your past work involved servers and enterprise support, follow the Azure administrator path; if it was mainly NOC operations, a networking or security route may make more sense. AI certifications are more useful for people coming from development or data backgrounds, so they probably shouldn’t be your priority right now.
AZ-900 is useful for learning the terminology and confirming that Azure is a direction you want to pursue, but it usually won’t carry much weight for roles above help desk. AZ-104 would be the most logical next step because it covers the practical administration skills employers expect. Build labs while studying so you can demonstrate work with identities, virtual machines, storage, networking, monitoring, backups, and access control.
That makes sense. I’ll focus on AZ-104 and create practical lab projects that connect my networking and infrastructure experience to Azure administration.