OpenStack Skills Remain in Very High Demand in the Job Market

In the technology job market, hot trends can grow so fast that the pool of job seekers with skills related to the trends can look more like a puddle. That's currently the case with the OpenStack cloud computing platform. Enterprises and smaller businesses are deploying OpenStack, but there just aren't enough good job candidates with OpenStack and cloud skills.

"OpenStack talent is a rarified discipline," Josh McKenty, who helped develop the platform, recently told CRN, adding, "to be good with OpenStack, you need to be a systems engineer, a great programmer but also really comfortable working with hardware."  The good news is that there are more ways to sharpen OpenStack skills, and gain valuable certification. Here are the latest details.

Late last year, The OpenStack Foundation launched a Training Marketplace designed to make it easier to discover training courses offered by providers in the OpenStack community.  “The goal of the Foundation is to eliminate barriers to OpenStack adoption, create more OpenStack experts and ensure that OpenStack has a positive impact on the careers of our community members,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, in a statement. “We want to grow the community, accelerate the availability of training programs worldwide and help close the OpenStack job gap." 

Aptira, hastexo, The Linux Foundation, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Piston, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and SwiftStack are just some of the companies to have courses available in the OpenStack Foundation Training Marketplace.

Mirantis announced an interesting training program late last year.  The company has also announced that more than 200 companies and organizations around the world have turned to the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on multiple platforms. 

Meanwhile, Rackspace has an entire curriculum of courses built around OpenStack.  The company has been conducting on-demand e-learning training courses and offers a number of new classroom courses.

Silicon Angle has produced an extremely exhaustive roundup of online and offline resources for learning OpenStack skills. It includes discussion of OpenStack bootcamps from MorphLabs and Mirantis, Red Hat OpenStack training, Piston training, and more. 

The OpenStack Foundation has put some numbers on the expected growth for OpenStack-related jobs and added more about its Training Marketplace:

"OpenStack expertise continues to pay off, with OpenStack jobs consistently paying higher wages and employers doubling the number of job postings over the past year. The ecosystem has quickly responded to help developers and operators gain these valuable skills....Future demand for OpenStack skills is only expected to grow, with the BSA Global Cloud Scorecard predicting that 14 million cloud jobs will be created by 2015."

And, don't forget that you can obtain valuable certification for OpenStack skills from some of the organizations mentioned in this post. Red Hat, for example, has announced its Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and expanded training in support of its OpenStack technology. You can find out more about it in this post.