The Linux Foundation this week made an addition to its professional certificate program that trains IT professionals on the fundamentals of best DevOps practices.
Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president and general manager for training and certification at The Linux Foundation, said the goal is to increase the number of IT professionals that have been exposed to DevOps fundamentals at a time when demand for DevOps expertise is surging. A survey published by The Linux Foundation finds 65% of organizations are currently looking for more IT personnel with open source DevOps skills.
The Introduction to DevOps: Practices and Tools program combines three existing online training courses into a more structured program. Those existing courses are Introduction to DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering; Introduction to Jenkins and Introduction to Serverless on Kubernetes. Each course will continue to be available to audit at no cost.
However, the $547 certificate fee provides unlimited access to the courses for one year, including all content and labs, as well as a verifiable certificate upon completion of all three courses.
Longer-term, Seepersad said The Linux Foundation hopes to work with vendors that offer more advanced DevOps certifications. Ideally, recipients of a Linux Foundation certificate would receive some credit toward achieving other DevOps certifications or digital badges, he noted.
Seepersad said DevOps training for IT professionals is now as much about staying relevant as it is about potentially commanding a higher salary. As IT organizations accelerate digital business transformation initiatives in response to the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a renewed sense of DevOps urgency, he noted.
Regardless of experience levels, human resources professionals have always preferred job candidates who have attained professional certificates. The Linux Foundation survey found more than half of hiring managers (52%) said they are more likely to hire someone with a certification.
IT professionals who have demonstrated DevOps experience can, of course, still land jobs, but the job interviews they get tend to be the result of personal contacts. Obviously, professional certificates don’t guarantee a job will be offered but they do tend increase the number of interviews extended. Naturally, there is, of course, no guarantee that anyone who can pass a certificate exam is going to ultimately have a successful career. Nevertheless, every DevOps journey needs to start with the fundamentals.
In the meantime, there are plenty of IT professionals that previously worked in vertical industry segments that were hit especially hard by the COVID 19 pandemic. As many of those IT professionals look to migrate to vertical industry segments that are more vibrant, the need for a DevOps certificate becomes more apparent as competition for open positions during the worst economic slumps of modern times intensifies.
The most important thing to remember is the certificate itself is only the first step toward achieving the hands-on DevOps experience that really matters.