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From call centre to cloud engineer in 12 months

How Sibu Khoza went from answering phones to running AWS infrastructure for a Sandton fintech — and what she’d tell anyone considering the same leap.

TM
Thabile Mhlanga
Head of Career Services · Apr 28, 2026 · 6 min read
From call centre to cloud engineer in 12 months

Sibu Khoza was 26 when she walked into our Johannesburg open day. She’d spent four years in a call centre, was good at her job, and was bored out of her mind.

Step one: pick the right programme, not the popular one

Sibu’s instinct was to enrol in our most-applied-to bootcamp — full-stack web development. We talked her out of it. The market for junior full-stack devs is saturated; the market for cloud and DevOps juniors is not.

“I almost didn’t take that advice. The job titles I’d seen on LinkedIn were all ‘developer’. Cloud engineer felt scary and abstract. But the salary data didn’t lie.”

— Sibu Khoza, Cloud Engineer at Quoin Fintech

Step two: treat the bootcamp like a job

She kept her call-centre shifts (evenings) and studied days. Every day. No skipping. She took the projects seriously, even the ones that felt like busywork.

Step three: ship a real thing

For her capstone, Sibu built an automated cost-monitoring dashboard for a small AWS account. Nothing flashy. It worked, it solved a real problem, and she could explain every line of Terraform she’d written.

What she’d tell you

One: pick the niche that has demand, not the one that has Instagram appeal. Two: assume the bootcamp is the easy part. Three: apply for jobs while you’re still studying.

She got hired in week 38.

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