If you look at the subsectors of tech, you’ll find goldmines moving faster than a Miami nightclub.

And you don’t need that specific brand’s experience to get in.

Say a company runs Ping Identity. You’ve never touched it. But you’ve been deep in Entra. That still transfers. IAM frameworks are IAM frameworks. The concepts don’t change, just the interface.

Spend any time in enterprise and you already know it’s usually a Microsoft shop. That’s just how big businesses are built. So that’s where I’ve learned to lean.

Don’t waste your experience.

If Microsoft is what you know, double down. Entra, Azure, the whole ecosystem. My specialty is IAM, so that’s where I built my frameworks — and those frameworks follow me everywhere.

There’s another reason I keep coming back to Azure specifically. Be honest: we all get distracted. A shiny new tech stack shows up and suddenly you’re watching tutorials on something you have no business learning right now.

But if you’re going to flirt with something, at least stay in the same ecosystem. Wander into Azure Engineering or Cloud Engineering and your identity domain only gets harder to ignore. Those cloud skills are portable too. AWS, GCP — if an interview ever calls for it, you can spin up a lab, watch a video, and follow along. You’ll get the why even when the tooling looks different.

Try to master two platforms at once and you’ll just repeat the same beginner labs on both. Never going deep enough on either to actually grow.

The next job won’t be won by the specific technologies on your resume. It’ll be won by how well you can explain the framework underneath and show it transfers.

That’s how it works for me. I learn through Entra. I don’t work for Microsoft — or do I? 👀 I’ll keep some things close to the chest.

If you want proof of where one platform like Entra can take you — and which companies actually pay for it — I wrote about it here:

→ Edition #2: 3 IAM Companies Hiring for Entra-Adjacent Skills​

Yours truly,
CyberAndChill