The Cloud Foundry Foundation was built on the mindset that open source is a positive sum game — meaning we want everyone to win, including developers, our members and end users. In the last year, we went on a mission to discover what winning looks like for the folks in our ecosystem. The answer? Doing what we can to help solve a significant talent shortage. We responded by creating the world’s largest cloud-native developer training and certification initiative — The Cloud Foundry Certified Developer program.
How did we decide Certification was the best possible outcome for all parties? In our research, we came across a truly astounding finding: 64 percent of IT pros believe there is now or will soon be a shortage in developers with cloud skills. This gap really got us thinking — what could we do to give developers these highly desirable skills and make them invaluable to the companies in dire need of developers trained on cloud? As a nucleus for collaboration in our ecosystem, it made sense for the Foundation to spearhead a training and certification program that is two-fold in its benefits: it augments the professional expertise of developers and gives them the skills they need to get the job they want, while deepening the pool of cloud-skilled employees for the companies that critically need them for their digital transformation.
I highly recommend reading our most recent white paper “What Developers Really Want” for a full picture — but I’ll tell you something that won’t be a surprise to you if you’re an enterprise developer. It certainly wasn’t a surprise to me, as someone who’s been in this industry for two decades. Developers crave both freedom and creativity, and you’ll do what you can to afford yourselves those opportunities. The developers in our focus groups told us they want to focus on solving interesting problems, not on the mundane processes that arise on the journey from ideation to execution. What do you need to streamline these processes? Faster tools — like Cloud Foundry — which expedite your development process and give you back the time you want to spend on projects you really care about. Isn’t shipping great software much more rewarding than configuring VMs?
But it’s not just the freedom and creativity you crave — it’s the assurance that you can remain relevant and stay on top of cutting edge technologies in our field. Becoming a Cloud Foundry Certified Developer means you get to cut your teeth on a tool designed for developers, by developers, to streamline your process and you get to update your skill set so you can be at the forefront of digital transformation. Best of all, this isn’t a single vendor certification. The skills you will prove apply across the entire Cloud Foundry vendor ecosystem — and according to Forbes, Cloud Foundry is the #3 most lucrative skill in the tech industry, based on findings from a recent Dice.com report.
In the spirit of open source, we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to train on Cloud Foundry, which is why we are offering the free introductory Massive Open Online Course. We also have a more in-depth eLearning Cloud Foundry course for developers, which will be available on June 13. You can pre-register online for the course and the Certification exam, which you’ll need to pass to become a Cloud Foundry Certified Developer. You can also take the exam online, or you can take it in-person at our Cloud Foundry Summit in Silicon Valley this June — which I really hope you’ll attend, as it’s the best event out there for enterprise developers.
The Cloud Foundry community is all about ensuring a positive sum game for everyone involved. We believe that our training and certification programs will reward developers for taking the time to learn or update their skills by making you the most desirable job candidate in a rapidly evolving industry. The program also benefits the companies working to retrain and attract the talent they need to meet their digital transformation goals. We are still in the early stages of a massive shift in how industries use software more strategically, and the Cloud Foundry community believes that we can all succeed together.
