5 Takeaways to Optimize Your Upskilling Strategy

Amidst the chaos of rapid change, it’s critical that we pause to reflect back on where we’ve come from to build a foundation for where we want to go.
At Skillsoft, our market-leading consulting customers have earned more than 150,000 DevOps badges since February 1st 2021. This alone is an incredible testament to the rising importance of DevOps skills, but the really interesting insights come when we dig into the specific courses being taken, and the badges they have earned. These companies are at the forefront of the DevOps movement and exploring their learning trends tells us a lot about where the industry is headed – and the work our teams need to do to stay relevant.
DevOps Foundations and DevOps Tools dominate early learning cycles, but more nuanced topics are quickly gaining adoption demonstrating the depth of expertise required to operate in a DevOps environment across all customer industries.
Badges earned February 1st 2021 – June 24th 2021 across all Skillsoft learners including consulting companies
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It’s not an accident that 20 of the top 50 courses are related to SRE. SRE is not an entirely new concept, but it is a growing area of focus. SRE was developed to bridge the gap between the primary job functions of an IT operation & administration team and the developers who write code.
The SRE is an important function on the DevOps team that is difficult to staff because it requires at least some knowledge of both development and IT operations; skillsets that are often hard to find in a single resource. The need to develop these multi-functional employees has become more urgent as infrastructure is increasingly moving to the cloud. As a result, we see SRE learners earning multiple badges more often than in other disciplines.
Category | % of learners earning badges in category |
---|---|
Automation | 81% |
CI/CD | 78% |
Containers | 63% |
DevOps Foundations | 74% |
DevOps Tools | 80% |
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) | 135% |
Testing | 79% |
Two of the top five badge earning courses are focused on testing demonstrating the essential role it plays in DevOps operations. (Top 5 DevOps badge earning courses February 1st – June 24th 2021)
It comes as no surprise to see testing a central focus. The more agile we become, the more essential an automated and disciplined testing process becomes to avoid disruptions to our operation. We can’t move fast, if we lack confidence in the updates being made. A broader understanding of testing principles are essential skills the most productive DevOps teams are making.
As a result, cross-functional DevOps teams need all their members to skill up with both generalized and specific security training. Yet, we aren’t yet seeing security be a priority for learners.
Security doesn’t make the top 10 and appears only once on the Top 50 list of badges earned, with only "DevOps Security Considerations: DevSecOps Principles" appearing.
Those organizations that want to get a leg up on optimization and closing security vulnerabilities will make closing this gap a priority.
At Skillsoft we’ve made it a priority to simplify the process of upskilling your DevOps team. Our robust library of courses, practice labs, and resources will help your team objectively master new skills and put them into practice.
Want to explore the full DevOps course library?