There’s no digital transformation without a staff transformation. The people skills that helped bring successful enterprises to where they are today won’t be the skills that will make them successful tomorrow. Fortunately, Leadership Suite readers are well aware at how important it is for the success of their organizations to close the gaps between the skills their employees have today and the skills they need to carry the enterprise forward.
According to the Upskilling 2020: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report from the DevOps Institute, based on 1,300 respondents, more than 50% of enterprises find challenges with all aspects associated with managing the people, processes and technologies that make DevOps possible.
The report found 58% of enterprises have a tough time actually finding those with the right DevOps skills and 48% said it’s difficult to retain skilled DevOps professionals.
With that in mind, it’s no surprise the report found DevOps salaries on the rise. According to the Robert Half Technology 2020 Salary Guide, salaries for experienced DevOps engineers can reach beyond $179,250. Survey respondents said that the skillsets necessary for DevOps practitioners skillsets should be multifaceted, including process skills and knowledge (69% of respondents), automation skills (67%) and interpersonal skills (61%). The 2019 survey found automation skills to be the top skill, followed by process skills and knowledge.
The survey contends that successful DevOps professionals will have expertise that consists of both breadth and depth of knowledge, along with tangible and intangible skills that help them both dive into the details of a situation while also understanding the big picture. The 2020 Upskilling survey cited three highly sought horizontal skill categories: automation, functional knowledge and technical skills.
A second grouping of skills—process and framework skills—is a vertical skillset which focuses on flow and understanding of different practices and methods such as scrum, agile development and value stream mapping. Another vertical skill category focuses on human skills such as collaboration and interpersonal skills.
“People, process and technology have always been the trifecta needed to execute DevOps successfully,” stated Shawn Ahmed, senior vice president and general manager of the Software Delivery Automation business at CloudBees. “As we strive to enhance the culture needed to predictably deliver better software faster at CloudBees, it’s been important for us to identify which skills are considered ‘must-haves,’ which are ‘nice-to-haves’ and which are ‘not important’ across teams, roles and regions.”
“As the report underscores, upskilling is now more important than ever to enable meaningful collaboration between all teams to truly deliver software at an elite level,” said Ahmed.
The survey also found that adoption for Agile is at 81%, DevOps 75% and ITIL is at 25%. Organizations that employ SRE rose to 15% this year from 10% in 2018.
