Joe McKendrick recently wrote in ZDNet how IT roles are being impacted by the growing demand for skills related to emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning and cloud-based services. While coding skills remain in high demand, companies today are looking for more from their technology managers and professionals. As a result, there’s an increasing need for IT pros with skills in project planning, business use case analysis, architecture and design.
Given the exponential growth in Kubernetes adoption in recent years, the natural inclination would be that Kubernetes skills are among the most in-demand for IT professionals today. However, soaring Kubernetes adoption has also led to the emergence of more fully-managed Kubernetes solutions from hyperscalers, edge computing platforms, and managed service providers.
The maturation of these managed solutions has abstracted much of the low-level operations work, where the skills required to effectively run Kubernetes clusters have become more specialized among specific tooling, such as Helm, Prometheus Operators, CI/CD tools, and so on.
While a solid understanding of Kubernetes is still important, Section Co-Founder & CTO Daniel Bartholomew shared with McKendrick that:
“Containerization – the dev side of DevOps – is critical. Being able to build and integrate microservices into DevOps lifecycles with critical components like automatic feature rollouts with zero downtime and container health checks is a skill that has more versatility across organizations who are using Kubernetes in production today. At the same time, the demand for security specialists continues to grow, particularly those with experience hardening Kubernetes environments. These roles require a broad knowledge of security and systems coupled with a deep understanding of containers and Kubernetes.”
You can read the rest of McKendrick’s article here. University students in computer science related fields of study interested in connecting and enriching their skills as they enter the workforce should be sure to check out Section’s Engineering Education Program.
