Here's a Smart Way to Fix the DevOps Skills Gap Quickly and Efficiently

Advances in technology, computing, and processes are continually happening, making it hard for some DevOps teams to keep up. This creates a DevOps skills gap, where the skills of your team members aren’t sufficient to cover the needs of your business. Sadly, upskilling takes a lot of time, energy, and extra costs from organizations. Add to this an insufficient talent pool of DevOps hires, and you have a wide skills gap. Bridging the gap (to ultimately close it) becomes a priority. 

The must-have skills of today don’t always reflect the skills of tomorrow. As such, requiring a wider set of skills for every team member plus the flexibility to adapt has become increasingly important. The best thing to do to future-proof your business is to support the DevOps team, increase time-to-value, and accelerate productivity.

To close the DevOps skills gap, the necessary first step for organizations is to understand why certain skills are in demand. These in-demand skills take into account multiple factors and can change from one year to the next. Looking at this year’s DevOps Institute Upskilling Report, we see that automation is at the top of the list, with human skills ranked second and technical skills ranked third. Once you understand the “why”, you can then apply the “how” by investing in the right tools to help developers and instill a culture of collaboration and learning. 

With automation being the main skill to focus on, it’s no surprise that automating processes can help your company close the skills gap, allowing you to focus on core goals. Environment as a Service (EaaS), driven completely by automation and self-service, is the perfect solution. DevOps teams will no longer feel overwhelmed since you have an automated, cost-effective creation of environments, providing visibility at every step of the process. This increases productivity, as you don’t have to hire or train additional people (another contributing factor to a widening skills gap) or sacrifice resources. 

Additionally, with an EaaS solution, you minimize rework, saving you additional time and money. You also have more training and education opportunities to encourage team members to acquire any skills they may be lacking. An EaaS makes the entire process more streamlined. Take a look at our article on the Benefits of Environment as a Service for a more in-depth look into how EaaS is the smartest solution for you. 

A successful business is constantly learning how to use new tools and always developing new skills. A successful business also understands that the best investment you can make is in your people. Keeping this in mind, below are three ways to reduce the DevOps skills gap by following these steps:

Since in-demand skills can change from year to year, companies should invest in tools that don’t constantly require learning new techniques to operate and can automate tasks whenever possible. Automation and the proper solutions also diminish the need for certain skills. 

EaaS is an obvious choice here. With the automation capabilities of an EaaS, you can offer your team tools that would otherwise take a dedicated team years to build, ultimately removing the need for skills related to creating environments. Additionally, you can lessen learning curves by supplying robust, user-friendly options. Therefore, your team members can more easily adapt to new technologies, overcome skills gaps, and simplify upskilling efforts.   

Monitoring networks and configuring hundreds of computer systems is not an easy feat. But good SysAdmin tools, like Sysinternals Suite and Mosh, are a bedrock for dev teams, allowing them to test, troubleshoot, and communicate. Take a look at the must-have 22 SysAdmin tools to have in your tool-kit.  

You must improve your collaboration culture, otherwise, the skills gap will be hard to bridge, regardless of how many tools you invest in. You can take a look at our piece on How to Build a High Velocity Development Team to get an idea of how to adapt to problems to proactively and collaboratively come to a solution. Implicate the entire team in decision-making processes, and remember that the main focus of any business is its people.

Four ways to improve collaboration include:

Encourage and support your team to complete training courses, attend conferences, invest in their expertise, and offer a culture of mentorship. People are willing to learn from each other quickly, and as long as team members feel encouraged to invest in themselves and their knowledge, they’ll be fully invested in the project and the team as a whole. 

You’ll first need to assess what skills your team members currently possess and then provide the proper tools and training required to keep members up to date with the newest techniques and technologies. 

There are multiple ways to close the skills gap through a learning culture: 

A DevOps skills gap can be a business killer, but it doesn't have to be! Investing in tools, collaborating, and promoting a learning culture is vital to bridging the skills gap, but how you implement these changes is what matters. That’s why an EaaS solution is the smartest choice in the right direction because you no longer have to choose between your product and people. 

Bunnyshell is an Environment as a Service platform offering you reliable solutions for automation, infrastructure and application management, and more. Bunnyshell supports the technologies your team needs today and the ones they want to use tomorrow.