Two cloud certifications from rival providers, Microsoft Azure against Google Cloud. Both are preferred-heavy, meaning employers want them but rarely mandate them, so neither is a hard gate. The honest differentiator is the underlying occupation: Azure administration work is projected to decline slightly, while GCP maps to growing network-architect roles that pay more in our data.
Because both are preferred rather than required, the deciding factors are pay and trajectory, not whether employers demand them. AZ-104 maps to systems administration, which the BLS projects to decline 4%, with a posting median around $118,000. GCP maps to network-architect roles growing 12%, with a posting median around $152,650. GCP looks stronger on both in our sample. The one thing raw counts understate is Azure's enormous enterprise footprint, so Azure skills appear in far more total listings even where our matched sample favored GCP.