Three lessons from the 2021 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report

For three years now, the DevOps Institute has surveyed hundreds of IT professionals from around the globe to find out which skills are “must-have,” “nice-to-have,” and “optional.” The recently published 2021 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report goes even further by shedding light on how DevOps changed when a pandemic forced us all to change how we work (spoiler alert: it sped up the need for digital transformation). I encourage you to read the full report here to get all the stats and insights from the DevOps Institute team. But first, here’s a preview of just three of the many lessons this report provides.

No one framework or best practice model prevails

Even when an organization says they practice DevOps, they usually have some Agile, Lean, or ITIL practices mixed in. DevOps looks different at every organization and is cultural as much as it is technical. Those looking for a career in IT need to be flexible in their processes and willing to learn new tooling. Managers at DevOps-focused organizations need to be open to their team members using the tools and processes that best suits their preferred way of working. An enterprise-level value stream management tool like HCL Accelerate can help organizations achieve this. By aggregating the data from all of an organization’s disjointed DevOps tools and normalizing it into reports and insights, HCL Accelerate allows flexibility in methodologies across the pipeline.

Value stream management keeps rising in importance

We’re not the only ones who love value stream management – 39% of Upskilling survey respondents said that VSM skills are a must-have within the process and framework skill domain. Why? Because just like security, proving value to the customer is shifting left through the software delivery pipeline. With a value stream management platform that gives you an interactive model of your software delivery lifecycle from end-to-end, you can make more informed decisions on where to pivot towards further value improvement.

DevOps is an evolution, not something which can just be implemented

DevOps is kind of like yoga (hear me out) – it’s a practice, not perfection. “Doing DevOps” doesn’t simply mean getting the dev and ops teams working together. It’s the persistent adjustment of culture to align different disciplines to the same goal. Successful DevOps transformation takes involvement from all stakeholders across all levels in an organization. In the Upskilling survey, 68% of respondents said that DevOps was their primary framework within their IT environment, but many said they also apply Design Thinking, SRE, or Agile at Scale. The other operating models can actually complement DevOps and help an organization along it’s DevOps journey, as long as the right culture is in place.

There are so many great insights and interesting statistics in the 2021 Upskilling: DevOps Enterprise Skills Report that can help you whether you’re searching for a job, looking for new employees, or want to skill up in your current role. Download your copy here.