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SALT LAKE CITY — It’s a weird time to be a software developer or engineer. On the one hand, your skills are in demand. On the other, for people with in-demand skills, there sure are a lot of devs and engineers out of work right now.
And some parts of the world are trying to build up their tech talent pool. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, a joint effort to train at least 20,000 technologists in cloud native computing over the next decade was announced by Andela, a marketplace for global remote tech talent, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
“If you look at our data, when we’re crunching numbers of the amount of people that were certified and trained in our Kubernetes, the African region was, by far, the lowest on the list, and we’re like, what’s going on? How can we fix this?” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF, in this On the Road edition of The New Stack Makers.
“CNCF is a global organization. In order for cloud native to be global and ubiquitous, we have to be everywhere.”
Andela, which works in more than 135 countries, was founded in Nigeria, so the new program marks a return to its roots, said Ross O’Neill, senior manager of learning at the company, who joined this Makers discussion.
“We’re around 10 years old, and every subsequent year since our founding, we’ve been invested in learning and upskilling opportunities for talent in Africa,” O’Neill said. “And we’ve worked with lots of different organizations, from Google, AWS, Nvidia, Salesforce, across many different technologies. And this is just a build-on from that legacy.”
Also, he noted, it’s good business: “Ninety percent of the roles that get created by our companies request Kubernetes [skills]— and so it’s not just coming out of nowhere.”
The developer workforce is growing all the time — 26.3 million people worldwide call themselves developers, according to Evans Global corporation figures (some sources say more), and that number has increased by 20% over the last five years.
However, one reason why so many technologists are out of work right now is a skills mismatch, Aniszczyk suggested.
“We’re here at KubeCon, and if you walk over to the job board that we have, there’s tons of jobs posting, people dying to hire cloud native talent,” he said. But, he added, “The rise in adoption of cloud usage all over the world has kind of caused a need for companies to find engineers that understand cloud skills. And I feel there’s just still a shortage of those folks out there.”
The CNCF, he said, gets “pinged all the time” by companies saying, “Hey, we need more Kubernetes engineers,’ or ‘We need folks that understand modern observability systems.’”
He thinks there might be a misalignment between the computer science theory that universities teach and the information about using open source software and cloud native infrastructure that employers now seek.
Right now, he sees more focus on learning AI skills to help developers and engineers remain relevant in the job market. “It’s a nature of technology. Things shift fast and you have to learn new skills.
“I have a lot of friends that were old school, let’s call it Windows sys admins,” Aniszczyk said. “They’re now trying to learn a bit of Linux, a little bit of Kubernetes. And if you don’t earn those new skills that are in demand, it’s going to be hard for you to find jobs.”
He sees the Andela partnership as the beginning of an increased effort to meet the talent needs of CNCF’s member organizations, including more training opportunities in observability and security.
Platform engineering is another area where the market is hungry for talent. At KubeCon, CNCF announced a series of new certifications in platform engineering. (In August, Platformengineering.org also launched a new training course in the practice.)
O’Neill believes the partnership heralds new opportunities for the global talent pool. “We’re hoping that we’ll be back here in five years’ time. And seeing an exponential growth.”
Check out the full episode for more, including what other skills Aniszczyk and O’Neill say are in high demand now.
