This article draws on perspectives originally published at TechBeacon and quotes from the DevOps Institute’s Upskilling 2020: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, along with commentary from industry practitioners. Original source: techbeacon.com
Why Disruption Is a Good Time to Upskill
Workplace disruption rarely feels like a career opportunity, but for DevOps professionals it can be exactly that. When teams shift to remote work, delivery pipelines are stress-tested, automation gaps become visible, and the value of a well-rounded DevOps engineer becomes undeniable to leadership. Rather than waiting for conditions to normalise, this is the right moment to take honest stock of your skills, identify gaps, and start filling them.
There was already a recognised skills and talent shortage in the DevOps field before 2020. That gap has not closed; if anything, accelerated digital transformation has widened it. Organisations that were slow to adopt DevOps practices have been forced to move faster, which increases demand for engineers who can both implement the tooling and guide the cultural change.
What the Upskilling 2020 Report Found
The DevOps Institute released its Upskilling 2020: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report based on a survey of 1,260 individuals asked to identify the skills they consider critical to DevOps and digital transformation. The central concept in the report is what the Institute calls the DevOps human: a practitioner who balances people skills, process knowledge, and technology expertise rather than excelling in only one dimension.
Jayne Groll, co-founder and CEO of the DevOps Institute, framed the challenge this way:
“While organisations are transforming toward digital operating models, challenges of speed and scale of technological advances, IT budgets, and a huge skill gap are causing a slowdown of this fourth Industrial Revolution.”
— Jayne Groll, DevOps Institute
Groll also noted that upskilling and retraining “must be high on every organisation’s agenda” — and that many organisations are actively encouraging staff to use periods of reduced project velocity to learn.
Demand for DevOps Engineers Remains Strong
Christian Mendiola, a recruitment consultant specialising in cloud computing, DevOps, and site reliability engineering (SRE) for financial services companies, observed that the DevOps job market held up better than most during periods of broader hiring slowdowns:
“Companies still need DevOps engineers in this climate. It is one of the few markets we’ve found that has been less impacted by the decrease in hiring.”
— Christian Mendiola, Huxley (SThree)
Sectors with particularly acute needs include finance, healthcare, and ad tech. Mendiola noted that industry-specific experience is less important to hiring managers than strong technology and communication skills — a point worth remembering if you are considering a sector change.
The candidate profile that stands out most, according to Mendiola, is someone who has helped build a DevOps methodology from scratch or matured one from its early stages. This demonstrates both theoretical understanding and practical execution — and shows that the candidate is more than an individual contributor.
The Technical Skills Employers Are Looking For
Jim Mercer, research director for DevOps at IDC, pointed to a clear rise in demand for specific technical competencies, especially those that support remote, automated, and highly reliable workflows:
“Prior to COVID-19, DevOps professionals were in strong demand. In the midst of the crisis, DevOps professionals are still in strong demand, but the demand for effective remote working and coding, automation, and SRE skills is higher given the ‘new normal.'”
— Jim Mercer, IDC
Mercer recommends prioritising the following technical skill areas:
- Agile software development techniques — understanding iterative delivery and cross-functional collaboration
- Developer-driven testing — shifting quality left so defects are caught early
- Highly automated test environments — reducing manual toil and enabling fast feedback loops
- CI/CD pipelines — designing, maintaining, and improving continuous integration and delivery workflows
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — provisioning and managing infrastructure through version-controlled configuration
- Configuration management — tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef
- Monitoring, alerting, and logging — building observability into systems from the start
- Code review and coverage practices — maintaining quality gates in delivery pipelines
- Containers and orchestration — hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes in particular
- SRE principles — error budgets, SLOs, SLIs, and reliability engineering mindset
This is a broad list, which is intentional. The most competitive DevOps engineers are not one-trick specialists in a single tool; they understand how these technologies connect across the software delivery lifecycle.
Human Skills Are Not Optional
Technical depth alone will not differentiate you. Eveline Oehrlich, independent research director at the DevOps Institute and co-author of the Upskilling 2020 report, argues that human skills are finally being taken seriously across all DevOps roles and geographies:
“The human skills are finally being recognised as important across all roles and regions. They must be mentioned over and over again.”
— Eveline Oehrlich, DevOps Institute
In the context of DevOps, human skills include:
- Empathy — understanding the pressures faced by developers, operations staff, and business stakeholders
- Communication — translating technical concepts clearly for non-technical audiences and vice versa
- Collaboration — working across organisational silos to remove bottlenecks
- Creativity and problem-solving — finding pragmatic solutions when standard playbooks don’t apply
- Interpersonal skills — building trust with teammates and stakeholders
Oehrlich’s framing of the ideal DevOps professional is worth quoting directly:
“The future of DevOps sits atop a hybrid individual — someone who can work across a variety of functional subject areas, leveraging experts and incorporating key topics of automation and process or framework methodologies to deliver value at speed and quality for the customer.”
— Eveline Oehrlich, DevOps Institute
She adds that the highest-demand, highest-paid DevOps professionals are collaborative, flexible, creative, results-oriented, and generous with their knowledge: “A person who only wants to show how smart they are is not going to be successful in DevOps, but a person who is smart and shares his or her smarts is great.”
Mendiola echoes this on the recruitment side: DevOps professionals cannot rely on a business analyst to act as a communication bridge. They need to speak directly and clearly to both technical colleagues and non-technical stakeholders.
How to Stand Out: The Four E’s and Four Strengths
What, concretely, distinguishes top DevOps candidates from the crowd? Oehrlich points to the four E’s:
- Experience — a real track record of DevOps work across meaningful projects
- Expertise — deep, demonstrable skill in at least one or more core areas
- Exploration — a habit of learning, experimenting, and staying current with evolving practices
- Execution — the ability to ship, not just plan or advise
IDC’s Mercer offers a complementary list of four strengths that hiring managers value most:
- Proven experience driving DevOps adoption — not just participating in it, but actively pushing it forward
- Strong people skills — being a good teammate who raises the capability of those around you, not just yourself
- Cross-disciplinary leadership — the ability to partner across teams and functions to produce high-impact results
- Analytical and creative problem-solving — generating practical solutions to novel or ambiguous problems
Specialise, Don’t Just Generalise
One final and important piece of advice from Mendiola: avoid the trap of trying to know a little about everything while excelling at nothing.
“As in any profession, the key to standing out is to specialise.”
— Christian Mendiola, Huxley
This does not mean ignoring breadth — a narrow specialist who cannot collaborate across boundaries will hit a ceiling quickly. It means building genuine depth in one or two areas (say, Kubernetes operations and observability, or CI/CD pipeline design and security automation) while maintaining enough breadth to communicate credibly with adjacent roles.
Practical Next Steps for DevOps Upskilling
If you are ready to act on this guidance, here is a starting framework:
- Audit your current skills against the technical list above. Identify two or three genuine gaps.
- Choose a specialisation direction — for example, platform engineering, SRE, security automation, or observability.
- Build hands-on projects. Lab environments, open-source contributions, and internal tooling improvements all count.
- Pursue recognised certifications where they add signal — for example, the DevOps Institute’s DOFD or DASA DevOps certifications, or cloud-provider DevOps-focused credentials.
- Practice communication deliberately. Write internal documentation, give brown-bag presentations, or contribute to technical blogs.
- Seek out DevOps-immature environments. Building a CI/CD pipeline where none existed is far more impressive on a résumé than maintaining one someone else built.
The DevOps talent gap is real and persistent. Engineers who invest in a balanced combination of technical depth, process knowledge, and human skills will find that the market rewards that investment consistently.