Are you an architect in the IT world—a cloud architect, enterprise architect, or even a network architect—looking to dramatically boost your salary and career trajectory? The “Go Cloud Architects” YouTube channel recently shared invaluable insights that helped one architect double their salary and secure repeated promotions. These aren’t just tips; they’re foundational principles that can transform your professional path.

Let’s dive into the five key pieces of advice that can enhance your capabilities, increase your salary, and get you promoted:

1. Focus on the Transformation, Not Just the Technology

It’s easy to get caught up in the allure of new tech—the routers, switches, and shiny gadgets. However, the most crucial shift in perspective is to focus on the outcome and the business transformation. Instead of starting with technology, work backward from where the business wants to be. Consider the people, processes, and technology required to achieve that end goal.

Why does this matter? Most architects who focus solely on technology without considering business processes and people often design solutions that fail to provide real business value—up to 70-80% of the time. By innovating based on business needs, your architectures will deliver tangible results.

2. Cultivate Strong Relationships with Stakeholders

Good relationships with stakeholders are the secret to architecture success. Stakeholders are anyone with a stake in the business, including leadership, business unit managers, and key departmental leaders who possess valuable industry knowledge.

Their importance cannot be overstated:

  • Buy-in is essential: If stakeholders don’t agree or don’t buy into your proposed architecture, it won’t be adopted, which can negatively impact your long-term salary and career.
  • Expert insights: Stakeholders are experts on the business’s challenges, pain points, and needs. Collaborating with them for input and feedback leads to better, results-driven architectures that optimize business performance. The goal is always to make the client’s business better, whatever problem they are trying to solve.

3. Be a Master of Something

Cloud architecture and enterprise architecture roles demand a broad understanding of many things—business, networking, data centers, compute, storage, AI, and more. You need to be a “jack of all trades” and know how various technologies fit together.

However, to truly stand out, you must also be a “master of one”. Becoming an expert in a specific area—be it an industry (like healthcare) or a particular type of technology and its business application—will make you a far greater asset. For instance, someone with deep knowledge of the healthcare delivery system can provide more value to a healthcare client than someone with just a general tech background. Find something you’re passionate about and become a thought leader in that niche.

4. Increase Your Business Acumen

This piece of advice might not be immediately obvious, but it can have the biggest impact on your skills and salary. Business acumen, or business knowledge, is crucial because clients bring architects in to solve their business challenges. The better you understand business, the better equipped you’ll be to solve those challenges effectively.

Enhanced business acumen leads to:

  • Greater client results: Your clients will achieve better outcomes.
  • Increased relevance: You’ll be more relevant when discussing architectures with clients.
  • More successful deals: You’ll sell more architectures and close more deals.
  • Strategic perception: You’ll be seen as a strategist, not just a “techie,” which is key for salary enhancement.

Investing in your business education, perhaps even pursuing an MBA, can have a tremendous impact.

5. Enhance Your Leadership Skills

Early in an architecture career, it’s common to think of architecture as an individual endeavor or a small team effort. However, to truly go far and tackle massive, high-impact architectures (the kind the CEO knows about), you need strong leadership skills.

Developing leadership skills allows you to lead larger teams—from 15 to 50 specialists—which enables you to be far more effective and deliver much bigger things. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”. Leading a big team of specialty architects and specialists is the key to ensuring your work drives significant business value and digital transformation.

By embracing these five pieces of advice—focusing on transformation, building stakeholder relationships, mastering a niche, boosting business acumen, and developing leadership—you can significantly enhance your career as an architect, leading to greater impact, promotions, and a higher salary.

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