The #1 priority of any aspiring DevOps engineer should be to build tech skills.

Once you start working as a DevOps engineer, your daily work will continuously refine your technical skills. But, when you don't have that work environment - say you are looking for your first DevOps job - what can you do to hone your DevOps skills?

Well... here is not one but five ways to improve your tech skills for your first ever DevOps job.

#1: Certifications

Many cloud service providers and organizations developing DevOps tools offer certification exams.

Taking up these certification exams is one good way of building your DevOps skills while you are looking for a DevOps job.

A certification alone does not qualify you for a job. But, a certification exam serves as a guidelines for you to study. Also, passing a certification exam demonstrates your commitment to learning.

Cloud certifications are well-recognized in the industry. Some organizations seek certified candidates to fill certain DevOps roles. Including the certifications in your resume help you get through the first screening test or the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) scan.

Also, showcasing earned certifications in your LinkedIn profile can increase your visibility to recruiters.

When taking up certification exams, experienced DevOps engineers use crash courses and exam dumps. And that's OK for them. All they want is to get through the exam quickly and add a certification badge to their profile.

But, as an aspiring DevOps engineer that should not be your approach. When taking up certification exams your goal should be to learn and develop your skills.

While the certification badge will attest your ability, the knowledge and skillset you develop will serve you to get through interviews and get started with your work once you land your dream job.

#2: Freelancing

Freelancing - while searching for a full-time DevOps job - can help you build skills while earning some money.

You can find clients for DevOps work in freelance platforms, via your network or by reaching out.

Whatever the way you find freelance work you will be able to learn some new skills. Also, you will get to work on production environments and will get exposed to the real world DevOps problems.

You can add freelance experience to your resume too. If you got several significant freelance projects under your belt, the chances are the recruiters will treat that akin to experience of a full-time job.

#3: Personal projects

I love personal DevOps projects. They help you explore new tools and learn new stuff.

You don't need dedicated hardware for personal projects. You can create a robust home lab right on your laptop with tools like Multipass.

When doing a project, always document as much as you can. Draw architectural diagrams where applicable. Save all configurations into a Git repo. Write a how-to guide so you or someone else can follow it later.

You can include links to those docs (Git repos, etc) in your resume to showcase your experiences.

#4: Contribute to open source projects

Many DevOps tools are open-source.

You can contribute to these tools by developing new features or fixing bugs. You can also contribute to them via writing documentation, how-to guides, tutorials etc.

This work can immensely enhance your Dev and DevOps skills. And it will be well-recognized in your job interview.

Contributing to open-source also means giving to the community. In return, you will be recognized by the community. It can help you build new relationships.

Who knows! May be one of those relationships can land you on your dream job too.

#5: Create a new open-source DevOps tool

You can be the author of an open-source project by creating a new DevOps tool.

But before starting out with this endeavor, you need an idea for a tool that's worth building. You cannot create ideas in a vacuum.

Most good ideas come when you are trying to solve real-world problems. If you are working in a DevOps role, you would be battling with real-world problems daily. If you are not, personal projects are your friend. Engage with some personal projects and keep a sharp lookout for a problem or an improvement that existing tools cannot fulfill.

That would be a good opportunity to create a new tool.

When you are building your new tool make sure to write code according to best practices. Also, create good documentations so others also can contribute to your code.

Claiming to the the author of a DevOps tools can add quite a bit of credit to yourself. And it sure can demonstrate your technical prowess.

In your resume, you can also title yourself as "open-source author".

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Alright. It's time to get to work.

You don't have to do all above to get your first DevOps job. But if you can do more than three, you will get ahead of 90% of the candidates who are aiming for their first DevOps job.

Before winding up, you cannot master everything about DevOps before actually getting a job. What you need to do is to build certain level of skills so you can get a job and then successfully kickstart your career.

Good luck!