I want to be a Solutions Architect, but haven't had a full-time job in the field or real-world experience. I'm building a website that's fully-contained in the cloud to apply what I'm learning from certification material and to give myself the opportunity to prove I have the knowledge and hands-on skills working with the services I will use in a full-time role.
As my abilities become more advanced, I'll add more complex features to this project. Currently, it consists of a static website that documents micro-tasks I have completed to get the website up and running. The homepage is complete, but I'll update it as I make changes, and I'm now working on a contact page that will use AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon SES to send all inquiries from the form to my email address.
I truly believe you can only learn by doing. Over the course of this project, even in my short time up to this point, I've come across issues I've had to research and troubleshoot that were never mentioned in any of the certification material I've used. Theory and simple labs don't adequately prepare anyone for a job, and without actual experience certifications are not worth very much in my opinion.