As part of its mission to advance the human elements of DevOps, DevOps Institute has released its 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report. The year-over-year data builds on the inaugural 2019 project but it’s more insightful and more regional than last year. DevOps Institute is grateful to the 1,300 respondents this past year who took the time to share their insights that allowed us to present this important research to the community.
One thing that is abundantly clear is that human transformation is the single most critical success factor to enable DevOps practices and patterns for enterprise IT organizations. Traditional upskilling and talent development approaches won’t soon be enough for large enterprises to remain competitive. This is because the increasing demand for IT professionals with core human skills is escalating to a point that business leaders have not yet seen in their lifetime. If there is but one call to action from the report this year is that we must update our humans through new skill sets as often—and with the same focus—as our technology.
Thoughts on Skills
What we continue to see is a well-recognized gap between the skills needed for digital transformation and the skills available in new and existing talent. According to 58% of the Upskilling report respondents, finding skilled DevOps individuals is a huge challenge, whereas 48% of respondents say the retention of skilled DevOps individuals is a challenge.
Unfortunately, the term “skill” is so broadly generic, which fuels the belief that there is a single stack of competencies that will guarantee enterprise success. That’s simply not true. The modern IT professional has to possess a set of skills across at least four categories: process, function, automation and core/human skills. Within each category, individuals must know which skills are considered must-have, nice-to-have or not as important—which leads to the question: How do you know? Seeking the answer to that question is the genesis of DevOps Institute’s Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report project.
Additional Takeaways from the 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report
- The DevOps journey is difficult for at least 50% of respondents since it changes the traditional structure of IT.
- The DevOps human must have a hybrid set of skills since process skills and knowledge (69%), automation skills (67%) and human skills (61%) are the top three must-have skill categories in 2020.
- Upskilling needs attention now since only 31% of respondents had a formal upskilling program while 38% do not, 21% said they were working on standing up a program.
- Agile, DevOps and ITIL are getting strong competition from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) which grew by 5% from 2019. Value Stream Management and Systems Thinking are also gaining traction.
To learn more, download the Upskilling 2020: Enterprise Skills Report. The data is very granular and can serve as a waypoint for individuals and enterprises trying to plan their upskilling initiatives.