Today, we published a report titled “Identifying The Developer Gap,” which divulges a looming shortage of developers with cloud skills. This “Developer Gap” presages difficulties not only for IT but for businesses in general — particularly as software continues to “eat the world.”
Although we are still in the early stages of this “developer gap,” the findings indicate companies who are late to the game will struggle to find the highly-skilled developers required to keep up with an industry becoming more fragmented and complex, and as the pace of change continues to accelerate. You can read the full report here.
In particular, the report highlights three findings from the research:
- There is a looming shortage of developers driven by non-tech companies’ need for developers. A majority (64%) of companies see the gap and are starting to feel its impact. As companies start their cloud journeys, including the use of more cloud-native architectures, broader use of containers and multi-cloud environments, they will feel the shortage more acutely. Most respondents (57%) state that this shortage has already impacted their ability to hire skilled people.
- Discrete technologies are in the greatest demand. Companies are prioritizing specialized skills such as mobile application development, language-specific coding and deployment on specific IAAS, while fundamental skills–such as continuous delivery, continuous integration and test-driven development–are notably the least in demand. The most in-demand skills are database (47%) and specific coding languages (Javascript, C++, Go, etc.) (46%) while only 40% of respondents classified continuous integration as a needed skill. These are closely followed by deploying on a specific infrastructure (38%) like Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform, and mobile application development (38%).
- Training is the preferred solution to address the skills shortage. Companies are looking to training to address these challenges, predominantly choosing to train existing employees over hiring new developers or outsourcing. The majority of companies (62%) express confidence in the abilities of their developers to “keep current” with their IT knowledge and skills. On an individual level, however, only 47% of developers express confidence in their own ability to keep current.
Have you felt a gap on your team with regard to skilled developers? Are you an enterprise wanting to know how you can address the gap and work towards finding a solution? Want to know more about the findings?
Join us tomorrow, November 3 at 11am PST/2pm EST for a Twitter chat to discuss these questions and ask your own. Cloud Foundry Foundation’s VP of Industry Strategy, Abby Kearns and Chief Technology Officer, Chip Childers will be there along with members of the community. Be sure to join the conversation by following the hashtag #DeveloperGap and head to: www.crowdchat.net/developergap.
If you have specific questions that you would like to ask, please tweet at @CloudFoundry and include the hashtag #DeveloperGap in your tweets and answers.
Happy tweeting!
