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Author: Eveline Oehrlich

  • THE UPSKILLING IT 2022 SURVEY IS NOW OPEN

    THE UPSKILLING IT 2022 SURVEY IS NOW OPEN

    IT SKILLS IN FOCUS

    By Eveline Oehrlich, DevOps Institute

    According to McKinsey, nine out of 10 global executives and leaders are saying that their organizations are facing a skill gap or expect to develop additional skill gaps in the next three to five years. During the past few years, IT organizations, in particular, have already been facing skill gaps. The desire to accelerate technical innovations and digital transformation only makes it harder to identify and narrow current and future skill gaps. IDC predicts 75% of organizations will have a comprehensive digital experience implementation roadmap by 2023, up from 27% today. While 2023 is still a few years away, it is essential that IT organizations prepare for what skills are necessary, how to manage their talent supply and look at the underlying skills of people that must support this digital journey.

    DevOps Institute research team and sponsors, Palo Alto Network, Cycloid, and The Linux Foundation, are excited to announce the launch of the Upskilling IT 2022 Survey. The survey takes approximately 25 minutes to complete, and we’d love to hear from you. Your answers will allow us to better understand which IT skills are essential for the future, ensuring that organizations are able to accelerate their digital journey.

    The Upskilling IT 2022 Survey, by DevOps Institute with its yearly sponsors, is the only and longest running research of its kind. The results provide an unbiased view into what skills are essential across a variety of IT and other skill domains.

    Like the past three research reports, our goal following this year’s survey is to share a detailed analysis to help various leaders and roles, in order to help them determine what skills they should hire, retrain or upskill for, following the publication of the Upskilling IT 2022 Report in the first quarter of 2022.

    Don’t let IT Skill gaps be a competitive liability for today or in the future

    The survey is open for everyone, regardless of the size of your organization, or your organization’s industry. This year we have expanded the focus beyond DevOps and are homing in on cognitive and human skills.

    Some of the key topics we look to deep dive into this year include:

    1. Exploring where the biggest skill gaps currently exist and within which roles, such as leaders, developers or operations.
    2. How skill gaps are identified across the IT industry.
    3. How upskilling is done, funded and executed.

    While each person has their own unique experience, expertise, examples of execution or outcomes and various tolerances for exploration, for the fourth year, we are setting out to explore what the must-have skills are within different skill domains. This year we are focusing on the skills needed within modern IT organizations today and in the future.

    There are a variety of roles that are involved in recruiting, hiring or working within IT organizations. We are setting out to highlight and understand which must-have, nice-to-have and optional skills are essential within key skill domains. The skill domains include Automation, Human skills, Technical skills, Functional skills and knowledge, Process skills and framework knowledge, Business skills and leadership skills. We are targeting the community of IT leaders, developers, practitioners, team leaders, consultants, human resources and other individuals who are familiar with modern IT best practices, such as DevOps. We are targeting all industry verticals and all company sizes. Our survey questions are developed with input from a variety of team members and experts, and our goal is to achieve a sample size of 4,000 individual responses across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

    Help us shape the future of IT and DevOps and make your voice heard by completing the survey now.

    The survey will remain open until January 31, 2022. We look forward to hearing from you.

    Take the survey now:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Upskilling2022Blog

  • How the DevOps Skill Journey Fosters a Learning Culture

    How the DevOps Skill Journey Fosters a Learning Culture

    Human skills, among others, have always been important; now more than ever. Empathy, diversity, creativity, personal commitment have been put to the test. The increase in remote work tends to challenge individuals in unique ways, and these human skills are becoming critical.

    Top 5 Skill Domains for 2021

    This year, 69% of respondents to the Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report told DevOps Institute they consider human skills a “must-have or very important” skill for the DevOps human, among other priorities, around skill domains as seen below:

    It is no surprise that challenges around the DevOps journey continue around people, process and technology with all respondents giving them equal weight (33%).

    To continue thriving within DevOps or to initiate a DevOps journey, individuals, leaders and organizations should take action in developing skills across these areas. Right?

    Why, then, are only 39% of respondents reporting they have a formal upskilling program? What is the challenge for the other 61%? Recognizing the importance of these skill domains is one thing – doing something about it seems quite another. Why is so little done about upskilling?

    Can these skills be taught? Well, maybe, or maybe not.

    Research has shown that knowledge and skills can be developed by most people, while abilities, personal capabilities and characteristics are rather innate. Furthermore, existing human capabilities are constructs that facilitate individual learning, adaptability and development and maintain their value even when drastic environmental changes occur.

    When we asked how organizations are prioritizing human skills during our research, we found that the human capability or domain is among the top five must-have skill domains. We also found that organizations have adopted both the concept of the learning organization and safety culture as two important constructs for DevOps.

    3 Things to Understand about Human or “Soft” Skills

    1. The human skill or domain is fundamentally different. While technical skills – such as container orchestration, CI/CD automation technologies and cloud infrastructures – can be developed through training (and these skills can be certified), the human skill domain is somewhat different. First, some human skills are shaped through experience and practice in both our personal and work life. For example, collaboration and communication skills are shaped during projects and can be adjusted according to the culture of the organization. Other skills, such as curiosity, might have been developed during early life stages or are somewhat innate.
    2. Take inventory of your top human skills. Our survey respondents offered great insight on the top must-have human skills within DevOps. Every situation, however, is different, but take a look at these and do a self-check on your human skills.
    3. Human skill development requires coaching and continuous feedback. No matter what methodologies organizations leverage, one key aspect is that individuals and leaders alike should have a coach or mentor who provides guidance and support. And, just as important is continuous feedback around an individual’s personal development. Today’s human resources teams might be able to assist. If not, network with others which might already model the skills needed and that can provide support and guidance.

    Must-Have Human Skills According to the C-Suite

    The graph below shows executives, management and individual contributors all have similar priorities when it comes to human skills. (Blue is executives and management, and orange are individual contributors)

    C-suite Human Skills

    There are some differences in opinion when it comes to multitasking, customer skills, thought leadership, business understanding, creativity, diversity and inclusion, empathy, personal value, communication, interpersonal skills, sharing and knowledge transfer.

    How does one identify an individual’s potential for soft skills and other skill development? Unfortunately, this is not an exact science. One possibility is to understand what DevOps capabilities are needed, first, and then perform a skills inventory check. Then, the question becomes, how can you encourage individuals to develop their skills?

    The Skill Journey Toward a Learning Organization

    A learning organization is composed of individuals and leaders all interested in increasing their capabilities and improving their skills to achieve results they care about. Learning how to do something is extremely rewarding, and, at the same time, achieves specific organizational goals if the learning is aligned to the needed capabilities.

    First, assessing what DevOps capabilities are missing, paired with a skill path for the DevOps team members, is a win-win.

    DevOps human skills

    5 Tips for Your DevOps Journey

    1. Make continuous learning part of the DevOps journey. Continuous learning and education must be a fundamental best practice within your DevOps journey. A first step is always education, providing learning resources and allowing engineers and individuals to participate with and learn from others in the community.
    2. Don’t hide the experts. Another critical step is determining if subject matter experts are being sheltered or siloed away. Instead, learn how to embed those people within teams, so they can spread their subject matter expertise by osmosis to others on the team.
    3. Growth of skills requires time and budget. According to Jayne Groll, “Enterprises should take intentional steps to support the growth of their DevOps humans.” Some may assume that engineers learn organically, but in truth, engineers need time and budgeted resources to develop new skills, hone existing skills, experiment and improve their capabilities. This could be in the form of time to attend a virtual conference, go to a training class, practice in a sandbox and/or doing peer-to-peer mentoring. Just take a look at site reliability engineers, for example, which are tasked with spending half of their time “making tomorrow better than today” by reducing toil through automation. DevOps engineers should be allotted a similar amount of time to do the same.
    4. Adopt a buddy system. The adoption of a coach or buddy system to further aid individual learning and growth is an excellent idea; pair less-skilled DevOps humans and engineers with highly skilled and experienced ones, and watch growth happen. This helps growth on both sides – both for the experienced buddy and the less-experienced person, in learning and teaching.
    5. Equip your leaders. Leaders are expected to know how to do things, right? To have all the answers? Well, not really. Some research has shown that the largest group of leaders today are “accidental leaders,” and 60% of frontline leaders say they have never received any training for their new role. Leaders need to learn and upskill, as well.

    The challenges of the past year showcased the importance of human skills in transformational efforts. Without the spirit, willingness, collaboration, cooperation and competencies of IT professionals around the world, many enterprises would not have been able to adapt to rapidly changing business models in a pandemic-fueled economy. As we continue into this next decade, organizations should plan to invest in upskilling their humans as much (or even more) than their technology.