DevOps is among the top five skills for which we receive requests from organizations who come to us for help in their recruitment process. Organizations are adopting DevOps to enhance their productivity and reduce the turnaround time in delivery of their projects.
Amazon defines DevOps as “the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.”
The increasing use of DevOps by organizations also increased the interest of candidates looking for a lucrative career opportunity. More and more people are now trying to migrate themselves towards DevOps. To make it easier for candidates trying to establish their career in DevOps, we are summarizing top skills that recruiters look for in an ideal candidate.
System Administration
DevOps helps organizations deliver high-end applications and services at a much quicker pace than traditional processes. This requires extensive data management and infrastructure capability. Therefore, an ideal DevOps resource needs to have knowledge of system administration. A few years of experience advanced server management role in Linux/ Windows (any of both of them) is an important requirement for senior DevOps roles.
Programming and Scripting Skills
It doesn’t matter if the desired role requires coding skills or not. But an ideal DevOps resource must have programming skills in traditionally popular languages like JavaScript, Python, Perl, or Ruby. Having command over Shell scripting is a required skill. DevOps is all about enhancing productivity and reducing the turnaround time, automation of processes is the key to excel in a DevOps environment. Programming and scripting skills help a DevOps engineer perform these crucial tasks.
Knowledge of DevOps Tools and Technology
As defined above, DevOps is a combination of various tools to achieve organizational goals. There are different tools used at different stages of development, testing, and deployment in a DevOps environment. So knowledge of Git, Jenkins, Nagios, Ansible, Selenium, Chef, etc. is mandatory. Several organizations like Amazon and Adobe have their own set of processes and tools for DevOps, so if you are targeting something on that line, you need to learn specific skills required for the job.
Proficiency With Cloud Computing
Cloud is no longer the future. It is present and it’ll be future. Every development activity, data management, and storage involves cloud. Nothing is happening in a local environment. So, having proficiency in working in the cloud computing environment and experience of managing different cloud functions makes you an ideal choice for a DevOps role.
Ability To Learn
“Each role within the DevOps structure is collaborative, fast-paced, and experimental” – Ana Opris
Quick learning ability is a mandatory skill for any profession. No matter what career path you are aiming for yourself, you need to integrate this skill to learn anything new coming your way quickly to stay competitive. Since DevOps is not a technology but a combination of practices and tools; one needs to have cross-department, and cross-functional knowledge to be a part of the DevOps paradigm. So, as a recruiter engaged in DevOps hiring, Optizm finds this as the most important skill.
Flexibility
DevOps is a dynamic paradigm. DevOps engineers are supposed to have multiple skillsets ranging from coding to security, infrastructure knowledge, system admin etc. to name a few. To be able to deliver in such a dynamic role, one needs to have the flexibility to adopt the change and equip them for the job.
People Management
This is a soft skill. Since DevOps create a collaborative environment for the execution of various processes. One needs to interact with cross-department teams and resources at multiple levels of hierarchy and skill set. So having interpersonal skills and people management ability paves the way for accelerated growth.
As a recruitment firm engaged in recruiting top talent in IT, Optizm Global receives numerous requests for skilled resources in several hot technologies and positions from across the globe. The inputs in this blog are based on the practical experience and we’d love to hear more from you. So, if you feel we missed something or if you have more skills to add to this list. Please do share your feedback with us.
