Mike Wheeler Media's Mission
Our mission is to Train, Inspire and Equip YOU for a Cloud Career. This matters because you will find new found freedoms and options for your career, once you attain relevant skills in tomorrow’s marketplace. You will have leverage and find yourself in the enviable position of being on the right side of the supply vs. demand ratio. That is because there is an ever-widening gap between supply vs. demand of cloud professionals.
I have been on the wrong side of the supply vs. demand equation in other job markets. And the decrease in leverage meant a pronounced decrease in pay and options. Remote opportunities were scarce, and whatever projects I could get were precarious, at best.
This was when I worked as a Technical Writer and Trainer. Whenever the economy took a downturn in 2008, I saw the rates I could command cut in half. I also found that the Tech Writing jobs weren’t nearly as plentiful before. (Go here to read more of my personal story.)
I knew I had to make a change. That was when I discovered Salesforce. I set out with a determination to get certified and get hired into a Salesforce job. This was before Trailhead, and there were no readily available video courses.
I had to do what I had done for years as a Technical Writer and Trainer…figure it out.
The platform “clicked” for me, and I recognized the power of Salesforce to not only build enterprise-level apps with clicks instead of code, but also the power to launch my own Cloud Career. For the first time in my adult life, the ability to create apps was within my grasp. It was attainable.
So I studied, wherever I could find a spare moment. This was with the backdrop of having six kids at home at the time, while holding down two Tech Writer jobs, just to make ends meet.
I studied and prepared for a few months for my first certification exam, and had invested well over a hundred hours of focused study. I scheduled my exam with high hopes.
Much to my dismay, I failed my first certification exam.
I was crushed, for a moment. As I drove back home from the testing location, I reflected on what I had just experienced. I started remembering things from the exam.
I decided to record a voice memo to myself while I drove, reciting everything I could recall from the exam.
Once I arrived home, I revisited the Exam Guide and the bullet points of topics triggered my memory for further things that were on the exam.
I now call this process a brain dump, and it was instrumental to my future success.
I took my voice memo and notes and put together a list of topics I needed to study further.
Nine days later, I attempted the exam again….and passed.
I was elated. I grew extremely emotional and broke down crying. It took me a couple of minutes to compose myself enough to call my wife with the news.
I knew at that moment, my life had changed. I knew that I could actually be a cloud professional.
Within a month, I was hired for my first cloud job, making $80/hr.
Our lives had changed. That’s why I was so emotional when I had passed, because I knew the demand that was out there.
That was back in 2012, and an odd thing has happened over the past 9+ years since that time...
The demand for cloud talent has only intensified, year over year.
What I have observed in the marketplace, which holds true now that we are in a remote-first world (finally), is that the demand for cloud talent has outpaced humanity’s ability to supply it…and that gap only widens with each passing day. This is why all cloud companies are racing towards AI and automation.
Why does this pursuit of a cloud career matter for YOU???
Because it is imminently attainable. You can gain relevant skills that make you highly marketable and swing the leverage in your favor.
For me, this fundamental shift of going from zero relevance in the marketplace to becoming highly sought after with incessant phone calls and emails from recruiters and hiring managers, opened my eyes. This is what inspired me to want to help others to take advantage of this same opportunity.
I began sharing my story with friends and family. I found myself answering the same questions over and over. I realized that I needed to record what I had learned and give that information, because I couldn’t clone myself or scale those 1-on-1 conversations.
I also looked for good training resources to help others pass their first Salesforce certification. All I could find out there cost thousands of dollars. Although I was far from an expert, I decided to put together a course for the Salesforce Administrator Certification Exam in late 2015.
I leveraged my past 15 years’ experience as a Technical Writer and Trainer to put it together. I also relied heavily on my videographer/film editor son, Aaron Wheeler, to clean things up and raise the production quality.
I released my first free introductory course on February 21, 2016. We followed that up with my first paid course on March 30, 2016. The Complete Salesforce Administrator Certification Course struck a chord. Over the years, tens of thousands of students worked their way through that first course and attained their Salesforce Administrator Certification.
Over the coming years, I produced over thirty courses, primarily related to Salesforce certifications, but a few courses related to other cloud technologies. I have published these courses on a myriad of platforms and have had the honor of teaching hundreds of thousands of students now.
In 2019, I launched my own learning platform, Mike Wheeler Media+, which is a comprehensive library containing all of my courses. This gives me greater control and ability to keep my content current. I also have the freedom to cross reference my courses giving you a greater opportunity to fully learn the concepts I teach. That is why all future courses I create will be released exclusively on MWM+.
The 2020 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have only catapulted a cloud career into a much higher level of importance. What once was considered rare; a remote job opportunity, has now become essential.
And companies will not go back as aggressively to the archaic brick-and-mortar mindset. They simply can’t, in order to remain competitive, cut costs, and attract the best talent. Cloud companies such as Salesforce, were born in the cloud. Remote work is baked into their DNA, so acquiring these skills in this remote-first age is critical to future-proofing your career.
What companies have come to realize is that their workforce can indeed be more productive, effective and attain a better work-life balance in a remote setting. I call it a load-balanced life. There’s something freeing in knowing that you can go from a business meeting to lunch with your family just down the hall. And I have yet to hear anyone say they miss their old commute!
Mike Wheeler Media was launched with a primary focus on helping the masses launch a Salesforce career. But with this new remote-first world, I see that although Salesforce is one of the most attainable paths to a cloud career, there are many cloud platforms and companies that can facilitate that goal.
Since I spent 15 years honing the skills to learn software quickly and put together training material that is readily accessible, assuming no prior knowledge, I see that I can now provide training not only on Salesforce, but across a wider variety of cloud solutions. I have been humbled by the feedback and reviews from my students, which has led to our broadened mission of Training, Inspiring and Equipping YOU for a Cloud Career.
Mike Wheeler Media is committed to empower anyone to improve their life and spend more time with their family, friends, hobbies and dreams. This is done by acquiring these readily attainable cloud skills.
Why not you? Why not now?
Let’s do this!