OpenStack Foundation Launches Training Marketplace

While a growing number of organizations are building or considering clouds based on the open source OpenStack platform, many shops are having a hard time finding developers and IT pros with adequate skills to build, configure and manage them. The shortage is due to the fact that there are few places for IT professionals to pick up these skills.

The OpenStack Foundation this week moved to alleviate that by making more training available. The foundation on Monday launched its Training Marketplace, aimed at letting those who provide OpenStack training make their courses available to admins and developers.

The first to make their training available in the new marketplace are OpenStack contributors Aptira, hastexo, The Linux Foundation, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Piston, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and SwiftStack.

Demand for OpenStack-related jobs has doubled in the past year, said Mark Collier, the OpenStack Foundation's COO. "We're creating high-quality jobs and a lot of them are high-paying, and the way to fill those jobs is with a lot more training," Collier said. "This is one of the things people asked the Foundation to prioritize."

Collier emphasized that while the marketplace is designed to help IT professionals find training, it's not a certification program -- that's something that he hopes to roll out in the future. Most of the classes in the marketplace are those given on-site today, Collier said, though he anticipates a growing number of online courses will appear in the future.

The marketplace lists providers alphabetically and shows the course titles, locations and dates for each one. At this point, most just have up to three classes listed that are scheduled to take place between October and December. 

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/19/2013 at 1:07 PM