News

Survey: Cloud Skills Vital to Enterprise DevOps

• By David Ramel
• 03/23/2020

The DevOps Institute has published a report on enterprise DevOps skills, finding that along with bedrock CI/CD talent, knowledge of cloud platforms and cloud environments is vital.

The organization's emphasis on worker skills is obvious from its self description as a global association committed to advancing the human elements of DevOps by equipping people with Skills, Knowledge, Ideas and Learning (SKIL).

While CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) is almost synonymous with DevOps and thus was the No. 1 response from 1,260 professionals asked about must-have technical skills, following close behind was knowledge of the top cloud platforms -- AWS, Azure, GCP -- and cloud environments.

"Understanding cloud platforms, being somewhat competent in the topics around APIs and possessing analytical skills are all must-have skills necessary in transforming organizations towards the digital business," the report said.

The DevOps Institute also asked respondents about the impact of moving to the cloud, with the top answer being: "Significant impact, I am retraining to learn new tools and/or processes to work with cloud technologies."

Along with CI/CD being the No. 1 must-have technical skill, other key takeaways of the report as presented by the DevOps Institute include:

• IT operations is the top must-have functional skill.
• The DevOps Journey is still a challenge for more than half of respondents but enterprise adoption has risen to 24 percent.
• DevOps Engineering is the most popular title for recruiting DevOps specialists.
• One of the top four must-have skill categories is human skills.
• Skills in SRE, value stream mapping and experience with performance tuning and management have increased their must-have votes.

Another key takeaway from the report relates to changes over time from the institute's same study conducted last year, namely finding that in 2020:

• The category of process skills and knowledge moved into first place ahead of automation skills in 2019.
• DevOps adoption, Agile and SRE have all gained in their percentage for must-have skills.
• External recruiting is still the predominant hiring model.
• The DevOps Engineer role title has almost doubled in popularity.
• Governance, risk and compliance/audit has increased its must-have skill vote by 4 percent.
• CI/CD toolchain knowledge is a must-have skill.
• Interpersonal skills has risen from last year's third spot in must-have to this year's second spot.
• Collaboration and cooperation is still the top must-have human skill.

The " 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report" can be downloaded upon providing registration information by going here.