Acquiring and retaining top tech talent is one of the wisest investments—and biggest struggles—for almost every company out there. It’s a delicate balance to achieve in the best of times, as you want refined skill sets on your team but understand the amount of effort that goes into recruiting those experts, as well as the financial resourcing required to bring them onboard, even part-time. But without those skills in areas such as cloud-based environments, DevOps or digital transformation, business leaders also recognize their business will be without essential management or the ability to keep databases secure from virtual threats on numerous fronts.
And finding the best DevOps talent is not quite the straightforward process it once might’ve been.
A new hiring landscape
The pandemic is the most obvious and direct disruptive factor that has affected tech hiring practices over the past couple of years. Only now are many companies realizing the effects this unexpected dynamic has had on their teams and available skill sets.
As customers continue to prioritize cloud transformation, they realize it requires established best practices and strong leadership to manage their application modernization. But this means having the right people in the right place from the get-go. However, industry analysis and recent reports show some ongoing struggles in that area.
DevOps has certainly become the top role hiring managers are seeking to fill, with 65% looking to hire DevOps talent. Also, to encourage this recruitment effort, 74% of employers are offering to pay for employee tech certifications, which many employees are beginning to seek out in order to offer more valuable skills to their teams.(1)
Beyond this, companies are being more transparent about the impact of the pandemic and hiring gaps. According to a report by Linux (1):
- 25% of companies report delays in investments in new tools
- 21% report massive workloads increased with coworkers being laid off or furloughed
- 21% report pay cuts required to sustain operations during the COVID-19 crisis
- 19% had annual promotions delayed
- 14% report reduced hours of work
This provides necessary perspective to understand why companies can be struggling to fill in the tech skill gaps they need to keep their cloud-based and DevOps initiatives moving forward. While the picture painted here is difficult, it isn’t impossible to overcome—especially when companies partner with talent providers in a managed services capacity.
Focusing on the future
Companies are striving to find the best strategy to cope with a lack of top talent, post-COVID. Executives understand that the sooner these essential resources are replaced in some manner, the faster their organization can gain a competitive edge, making it a top priority. Yet the growing need doesn’t automatically supply the demand. In fact, talent seeking has become even more challenging, and those people who possess the desired skills are finding themselves pursued by companies who offer extra perks like higher salaries (despite budget cuts) and access to online training for more specialized skill-upping.
Qualified open-source talent is still in short supply: 93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding sufficient talent with open-source skills (1)
One approach is how organizations have started to rely on more online coursework to enhance the skills of their in-house teams, trying to circumvent actual hiring. Others are upping app development processes to boost revenue and secure more immediate market share with better performance and more optimize user experiences.
However, to sustain this growth still requires DevOps management, which remains lacking and so slows potential expansion and sustainability.
Solving the skills gap challenge
Partnering with a strategic advisor and skills provider is another primary approach companies are discovering to be highly effective in closing the gap, empowering their cloud-based initiatives and allowing them to keep their core teams focused on business-critical projects.
Taos, as an IBM Company and leader in multi-cloud and DevOps services, has begun to find ways to offer this sort of managed service for companies that are wanting to accelerate cloud adoption while also keeping their environments secure via modern agile delivery and management methodology. To that end, Taos has launched two new services, Taos Cloud Advisory Services and DevSecOps Now, both of which are geared toward helping companies balance their talent needs and growth priorities.
Taos Cloud Advisory Services is a suite of outcome-driven strategic consulting services that help customers optimize opportunities found within public cloud environments while reducing implementation risks. This service is founded on the Taos Navigator Methodology, a proven strategy that streamlines the digital transformation and cloud adoption journey for clients.
A central offering in this service suite is the Application Modernization Advisory Service, which provides expert guidance geared toward a customer’s unique needs and is designed to increase the adoption of containerized workloads. The proven and strategic blueprint found in this advisory service reduces risk found along the transformation journey while also positioning applications to be re-platformed through containerization and for monolithic applications that can be re-architected into a microservices architecture.
The second talent-focused offering is DevSecOps Now. Taos’ highly successful DevOps Now service inspired this new development with a security focus, letting a company bring in Taos’ security experts based on a simple and flexible monthly subscription service. DevSecOps Now is here to help eliminate security issues during app development, rather than the costly process of retrofitting security into production solutions once they’re implemented.
Taos security consultants come alongside the customer’s teams to enmesh themselves in the organization’s culture and better understand their values and priorities. This lets them integrate DevOps principles within ongoing operational workflows to harden their security posture in an agile manner in hyperscaler environments. Customers are able to engage extreme flexibility in choosing the best expertise and resources for their specific situation to help accelerate and automate security implementation in their environments.
Growing beyond the skills gap
It’s refreshing to know that even as the pandemic may have introduced numerous challenges that will have ripple effects for years to come, it has also inspired innovation and strategic solutions that can empower companies to grow despite an immediate lack of talent or available resources. By relying on service providers such as Taos and available tech experts, organizations can access all the insight and expertise necessary to empower their success and app modernization without having to sink vital resources into untested hires or disparate solutions.
Other benefits include scalability, as more talent can be allocated based on internal demand as well as whatever stage the company is in throughout the transformation process or cloud adoption journey. For any company looking to enjoy these and many other benefits without dealing with the risk of upfront cost investment or slower growth, these sorts of services are increasingly stepping into the gap and offering proven, powerful solutions that make the future far brighter and full of new opportunities.
Learn more: www.taos.com