I hazily remember an author talking about a mis-spent afternoon on their holiday which went into family history. If they just sat through a presentation about investing in a time share, they'd get a boat. 4 hours of hard sell later, they did indeed receive a voucher for a boat - an inflatable dinghy.

"Would you fill in our survey?" gets a very different response from me than, "Would you fill in our 1-minute, 2-question survey?" I think it's the limits that make all the difference.

I was due to facilitate an AWS course, which got rescheduled, and from one of the students who had booked in, got a very polite, specific LinkedIn message:

I understand just gaining the certifications and completing hands on practice labs won't be enough to get an entry level position in AWS. I just wanted to ask your expert opinion what other qualifications I should be also doing to help bolster my CV?

I replied:

You're absolutely right that labs plus certifications isn't enough. Typically I like to see what people have actually built. An easy way is a project on GitHub.

A friend posted a job advert with this paragraph in:

Please also provide materials from work you’ve done. It could be personal Github code, sample code from commercial work, open-source contributions, or a case study and description of your role in a project — anything that helps us see what you’ve done and what you’ve been responsible for in previous roles. We’ll enjoy discussing those in more depth as we get to know you.

It was therefore really gratifying to hear from the same person a year later that they'd put the hard work in, and it had paid off:

I passed the cloud practitioner and solutions architect exams and also completed the AWS re/Start program. I have been offered a job to work as a DevSecOps engineer

Have you cold emailed someone in your industry and received a good response?