I failed the same exam twice before I ever mentored anyone. That is exactly why I do it now.
Five years ago, I did not know what a virtual machine was.
I did not know what Kubernetes was. I did not know what happened behind the screen when I typed a URL into a browser. What I knew was that I was in banking, doing work that asked nothing of the part of me that was most alive, and that a quiet, stubborn question would not leave me alone: is this really it?
I am now a Cloud Platform Engineer at Bedrock Streaming in Germany, an AWS Community Builder, and a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador. And as of this month, I am a mentor on MentorCruise, a platform that accepts fewer than 5% of applicants.
I want to tell you why that acceptance matters to me. Not because of the badge. Because of who I was before I earned the right to wear it.
The bathroom stall
Twelve days into my first DevOps role, my first real ticket came in. It was written in German. I read it three times and understood almost none of it.
I walked to the third-floor bathroom, pressed my forehead against the cool tile, and asked myself the most honest question of my career: what am I doing here?
I tell you this not because it is a heroic story. It is a bathroom-stall story. And I have come to believe that most transformation begins exactly there, in the private, unflattering moment where you finally ask the question you have been avoiding. Not on a stage. Not in a LinkedIn post. On the tile.
If you have had your own version of that moment, I am not here to tell you it was weakness. I am here to tell you it was the beginning.
Two hours to avoid forty seconds
Early on, I spent two hours stuck on a Terraform pipeline.
I was not stuck because the problem was hard. I was stuck because a voice in my head told me that asking for help would be evidence that I did not belong. So I sat with it. Two hours. Eventually I messaged a colleague. He looked at it for forty seconds and fixed it.
Two hours of my time, spent hiding, to avoid forty seconds of his.
That ratio, your time hiding versus someone else's time helping, is the ratio of a career with no guide. I lived inside that ratio for years. It is the single most expensive thing I have ever paid for, and I paid for it in the currency I could least afford: time.
Mentorship is simply someone shortening that ratio for you on purpose.
The exam I failed twice — and my brother who passed first
I failed the AWS Solutions Architect exam. Then I failed it again.
The first time I relied on guesswork. The second time I studied harder and still could not connect the concepts deeply enough. So I tried something that made no logical sense: I decided to teach it to my younger brother, Fabrice, an accountant who knew nothing about the cloud. I taught him everything I had.
He sat the exam. He passed. Before me.
I will never forget standing in that moment, part horror and part revelation. My brother passed on knowledge I had given him, knowledge I could not yet apply to myself. Something broke open. I went back, wiped the slate clean, started from zero, and on the third attempt, I passed.
But the real lesson was not about the exam. It was this: when I teach, people move faster than I did. That discovery is the entire reason I mentor. I made the mistakes so the person in front of me does not have to. I lost the time so they can keep it.
Getting fired was the best thing that happened to me
Before the cloud, I was in tech sales at a software company, explaining platforms to CTOs while my mind lived in the back end, wondering how any of it was actually built.
My curiosity outgrew my job description, and eventually they noticed. I was let go. On my last day I asked the woman handling my exit what I should do with my life. She said, "You will figure it out." I cried the whole way home.
She was right, though nobody was going to figure it out for me. But here is what she could not tell me, because she did not know it: figuring it out alone takes years. Figuring it out with a guide takes months. I spent years wandering in the dark. That is the exact distance a mentor is meant to collapse.
Why I said yes to this
The technical half of breaking into tech is the easier half.
The harder half is believing you belong in the room, and knowing which slice of this enormous landscape actually gets you hired, so you stop drowning in tutorials that lead nowhere. That is what I mentor on. The real skills: AWS, Kubernetes, DevOps, the things I use in production every week. And the inner game that makes those skills stick when the voice in your head says Not someone like you.
I keep the number of people I take small, and I keep it capped, because presence is the whole point. I would rather go all the way with a few than be thinly available to everyone. I have watched what happens when the right person gets structure at the right moment; one of my mentees became an AWS Community Builder himself in six months, and it is the closest thing to a miracle I get to witness in this work.
God has a way of turning the hardest seasons into the exact thing that lets you serve someone else. The bathroom stall was not the end of my story. It turned out to be the training.
If this is you
If you are staring at a job description thinking that it is not for someone like me, I promise you it can be. I have walked the entire distance from that thought to this title, and I did it as an African woman, in my second language, in a country that was not mine, raising three children.
You do not need to be fearless. You need a path, and someone who has already made the mistakes waiting for you on it.
My mentorship is open. If you are a career-changer serious about moving into cloud and DevOps, come and find me and let's shorten your ratio.
Endah Bongo-Awah is a Cloud Platform Engineer at Bedrock Streaming, an AWS Community Builder, and a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador. She is the founder of Mentorship Matters Africa and mentors career-changers into tech through both skills and mindset.
