From warehouse floor to cloud engineer: the route in when reading is the tax

School and I did not get on. Undiagnosed dyslexia meant I left with grades that closed every 'normal' door into IT. I spent six years driving a forklift, and my evenings building increasingly ridiculous homelab setups on eBay hardware because it was the one thing that felt effortless.

Every entry route seemed to be a reading exam in disguise. Certification textbooks were walls of text. Job ads demanded degrees for helpdesk roles. Application forms wanted 500-word answers about 'a time I demonstrated initiative' - I could do initiative all day; writing about it took a week.

I failed the CompTIA A+ once, purely on time. I knew the material cold.

• Video-first learning. YouTube, then structured video courses. Same material as the books, none of the tax.
• Exam accommodations exist. Extra time on CompTIA and later AWS exams - you need a diagnosis letter, and it is worth the hassle. Passed the retake comfortably.
• The homelab as a CV. An apprenticeship scheme let me bring a laptop to the interview. I showed them my lab: VLANs, a small Proxmox cluster, monitoring. They stopped asking about A-levels.
• A manager who judged output. My first boss cared what got fixed, not how the notes were spelled.

If the front door is a reading test, find the side door: apprenticeships, demos, referrals from communities like this one. Get the diagnosis paperwork even if it feels late - accommodations turn unfair exams into fair ones. Your lab is your portfolio; build in public.