Get hands-on experience by coding five real-world projects. Learn to build a route planner using OpenStreetMap data, write a process monitor for your computer, and implement your own smart pointers. Finally, showcase all your newfound skills by building a multithreaded traffic simulator and coding your own C++ application.
Architecting software systems is a skill that is in huge demand, but it is not a readily available skill. To understand why this skill is rare to find, let's go through a few lines from Martin Fowler's blog on architecture.
He says: Architecture is about the important stuff. Whatever that is. It means that the heart of thinking architecturally about software is to decide what is important, (i.e. what is architectural), and then expend energy on keeping those architectural elements in good condition. For a developer to become an architect, they need to be able to recognize what elements are important, recognizing what elements are likely to result in serious problems should they not be controlled.
It takes a number of years for a developer to learn enough to become an architect. This learning largely depends on the kind of opportunities that you get in your career. Often these opportunities are limited to specific areas of work only. However, to be an architect, you must possess extensive technical knowledge of as many areas as possible. You must understand all the complexities and challenges in different parts of a system. You need the ability to make upfront decisions by understanding various trade-offs. You should be able to foresee or anticipate critical problems that a system can face during its evolution.
This is where the 'Developer To Architect' course can be very useful for you. It assumes that you already have great development skills, and it builds from there. It extensively covers architecting non-functional properties of a system, handling of large-scale deployments, and internal working of popular open-source products for building software solutions.