CNCF Survey Surfaces Cloud-Native Training Conundrum
A global survey of 135 contributors published this week by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found more than half worked for organizations that don’t pay for training (53%), with slightly less (52%) also noting their organization doesn’t give them the time to pursue certification and training.
About 81% of respondents said cost prevented them from completing certifications in the past two years, while 43% cited time as a limiting factor. Cost and time were the top two constraints for training, selected by 62% and 36% respectively.
Christophe Sautier, cloud-native training and certifications lead for the CNCF, said the survey results suggested there is still much work to be done to close a skills gap that prevents many organizations from embracing modern IT platforms.
Overall, the survey found 86% of respondents said completing new training and certifications or mentorships advanced their technical skills, and 76% also noted it helped their work confidence. More than a third (36%) reported that they received higher pay as a result of completing a new training or certification. Of those who made more money, 53% received increases of more than 11%.
Not surprisingly, three-quarters of the survey respondents (75%) wanted their companies to pay more, or at least some, of their training and certification costs. The issue is that many organizations expect IT professionals to acquire the training required to stay relevant on their own. That creates a vicious cycle because unless an organization has enough IT professionals with the skills required to manage a new platform, they continue to employ legacy platforms that are typically more expensive to run and less secure.
To address this issue, the CNCF has been expanding its certification program to increase the overall size of the cloud-native community. The CNCF, today, for example, added an Istio Certified Associate (ICA) certification as part of an effort to increase the number of IT professionals capable of managing cloud-native application environments that include a stack of open source software running on top of a Kubernetes cluster, said Sautier.
Over time, abstractions that make complex IT platforms more accessible to IT professionals of varying skill levels inevitably emerge. The challenge is the time between when an IT platform first emerges and those higher levels of abstractions become generally available can be considerable.
Unfortunately, there’s a tendency for organizations to specify skill sets for IT professionals that are unreasonable. A job posting might, for example, require five years of hands-on experience managing Kubernetes clusters when those have only recently been deployed in production environments at scale. In addition to not investing in training, far too many organizations are looking to hire IT professionals with advanced skills that will be hard to find and retain unless salaries are extremely competitive.
One way or another, market forces will determine the inevitable outcome of any skills shortage. It would be much easier if everyone involved came to that conclusion sooner rather than later.
