Andela Reveals First IT Graduates From CNCF Training Initiative
Andela today revealed that the first cohort of 5,600 IT professionals in Africa that it trained using coursework developed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation Education to manage Kubernetes clusters have graduated.
Kabiru Ibrahim, talent learning manager at Andela, said the next step for the participants in the online Kubernetes African Developer Training Program will be if they so choose to either attain a Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certificate from the CNCF or take the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam. A total of 1,157 have already gone on to achieve official KCNA certification.
The goal now is to train 10,000 more IT professionals next year followed by 15,000 the year after, with an eye toward training 20,000 – 30,000 African technologists by 2027, he added.
At a time when demand for IT professionals with Kubernetes expertise continues to outstrip the available pool of talent, Africa is emerging as a source of IT professionals who are looking to advance their IT careers, noted Ibrahim. In total, nearly 9,000 IT professionals located in Africa applied to the Kubernetes African Developer Training Program, he noted. The applicants and learners hailed from 46 African countries with the majority coming from Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.
Most of those IT professionals already work for organizations based in Africa, but many are also working for global organizations that have hired IT teams based in Africa as well, said Ibrahim.
Andela invested in the training initiative to increase the size of the pool of IT professionals with Kubernetes expertise that organizations can hire or contract via its marketplace. In total, 150,000 technology professionals participate in a global marketplace spanning more than 135 countries. Organizations that have sourced talent via the Andela marketplace include GitHub, Mastercard and Mindshare.
It’s not clear how many organizations are willing to hire or contract IT professionals outside of the borders of the countries they operate in, but in an era when it is becoming more challenging to obtain visas for IT professionals, the Andela marketplace provides an alternative approach to sourcing IT talent.
Each IT professional will, of course, need to determine the value of attaining a certificate. While they don’t guarantee an IT professional will get hired, they do help human resources professionals identify potential hiring candidates. Regardless of what type of certificate is attained, the challenge, of course, is maintaining them as technologies continue to evolve, especially in the age of artificial intelligence and, in some cases, supersede them. In that sense, being an IT professional is, almost by definition, a lifetime commitment to learning. The issue, as always, is that not every organization is willing to fund the cost of that training, much less provide the time required to study for a certification, which is one reason many of the best IT professionals tend to opt to prefer to work for organizations that make keeping the skills of their IT teams current a priority.
