There’s no end to the claims that the DevOps and digital transformation skills are in short supply, but what skills are we talking about, exactly? According to a new survey of more than 1,600 technology and business leaders, the highest demand candidates are the ones who can bring technical skills to the table that can facilitate automation but at the same time balance them out with soft skills like collaboration and coperation, problem solving, and interpersonal skills.
Conducted by the DevOps Institute, the survey broke down digital transformation and DevOps skills based on those identified by respondents as “must-have” versus “nice-to-have.” At the top of the must-have list were automation skills, which were named by 57 percent of respondents. Likewise, no organization wants to automate bad and inefficient processes, so it was nearly equally expected that process skills ranked high among respondents. Around 55 percent of participants named these skills as must-haves, which included knowledge of areas like software development life cycle, process flow and analysis, Agile, test-driven deployment concepts and methods, and system thinking. Similarly, 53 percent of respondents named soft skills as must-haves–when breaking these down the most common soft-skill requirement for DevOps was unsurprisingly collaboration and cooperation.
Meanwhile, while a fair number of organizations named them as must-haves, some of the most common nice-to-have skils were around functional knowledge and business skills. Business skills included communication, negotiation, strategic thinking, and leadership abilities. Whereas functional skills most commonly trended toward knowledge about IT ops, IT infrastructure, and security
Where do enterprises look for those with the talent they need? A slight majority, 55 percent said they look first from within when seeking DevOps staff. They will, they said, only look outside the organization after they’ve exhausted the internal search.
Interestingly, there was a near equal split between those respondents hiring who seek soft skills first compared to those who seek technical skills first.
“About 30 percent of our survey respondents said they look for soft skills first, as they believe they can always train or educate on the process and technical skills,” the report explained. “And 32 percent looked first for technical skills to get benefits from the new hire.”
All of these trends go to show that industry leaders are increasingly understanding that digital transformation requires better partnership between IT and the business–which will need to be driven by a better rounded corps of technology professionals.
