As businesses worldwide become increasingly reliant on cloud infrastructure, a critical question has moved to the top of the strategic agenda: how do you build genuine, lasting cloud computing talent inside your organization?
The disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this shift, forcing companies to lean on cloud platforms to enable remote work at scale. What had been a gradual trend became an immediate operational necessity. That urgency has made the development of in-house cloud skills not just desirable, but essential.
The Problem With IT Outsourcing as a Cloud Strategy
Many organizations have historically responded to digital transformation pressures by outsourcing their IT departments, assuming that this makes them effectively “digital.” Fred Flack, Head of Talent Academy at CloudStratex, argues this is a fundamental mistake.
“Digital knowledge is leased,” Flack explains, “and any advantage they enjoy from it will disappear when they can no longer afford to pay, putting them right back at square one.”
True digital capability requires ownership. Organizations moving toward cloud-only operations have, in Flack’s view, a duty of responsibility to their employees — to keep them upskilled, or reskilled where necessary, rather than paying lip service to digital training programs.
Practically, this means two things: making targeted digital hires despite the competitive talent market, and engaging specialist IT training organizations that can qualify existing staff and help build an internal digital knowledge hub with a culture of continuous improvement.
Cloud Roles Are Becoming Software Development Roles
One of the clearest signals that cloud talent development needs to evolve is the changing nature of cloud engineering itself. As cloud environments grow more complex, the skill profile of a cloud practitioner increasingly overlaps with that of a software developer.
There is still a meaningful crossover with traditional IT: cloud engineers need to understand hardware, infrastructure, and troubleshooting. But the weight has shifted. Organizations recruiting for cloud roles are now, in many cases, looking for developer competencies.
Simon Utting, COO at Amito, puts it plainly: “With the cloud environment becoming increasingly complex feature-wise, staying ahead of competitors, maintaining platforms and scaling requires consistent automation. This brings us back to coding. Make sure your team is on a pathway of continually developing these skills.”
Utting also identifies Linux expertise as a specific gap, noting that the majority of his company’s client base runs on Linux and that qualified Linux talent is currently difficult to find. Security is another emerging priority: “Tying security into your cloud talent development is going to be huge in the next couple of years as cyber security becomes more sophisticated — your team needs to know how to respond to it effectively.”
Culture and Continuous Learning Matter More Than Certifications
Certifications have their place — they provide a common benchmark and a basis for conversations in interviews — but they are not the end goal. The organizations building the strongest cloud teams are those investing in learning culture, not just training programs.
Utting describes what he looks for when hiring: “Personally, I’m far more interested in curiosity, a desire to solve a problem, being self-starters — this talent goes much further as you develop it.”
Sean Farrington, SVP EMEA at Pluralsight, echoes this view, highlighting the operational challenge of maintaining cloud skills once people are in post. “Businesses need the ability to accurately map skill levels and proficiencies within teams and put in place tailored learning pathways to address knowledge gaps,” he says.
This requires rethinking how learning is delivered. Pluralsight’s own research found that 40% of IT professionals prefer learning online — through self-paced or instructor-led courses — over classroom-based formats. Farrington draws the practical conclusion: “The ability to upskill on demand and in bite-sized chunks is likely to keep cloud computing talent motivated, current and project-ready.”
Simon Ratcliffe, Principal Consultant at hybrid IT services provider Ensono, agrees. He argues that the organizational culture must catch up with the technology itself: “It is no longer enough to produce a list of technical requirements and pattern match applicants to skills. We must adopt a far more people-centric approach to recruitment and development right across the organisation. The speed, agility and freedom to fail provided by the cloud are worthless without an underlying culture that accepts this.”
Making the Cloud Career Path Visible and Appealing
There is an often-overlooked dimension to the cloud talent shortage: perception. Cloud engineering competes for attention against roles in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cyber security — areas that currently attract significant media coverage and are seen as more prestigious by many early-career technologists.
Farrington identifies this directly: “Half the battle with developing cloud computing talent is showing bright employees that there is a long, enriching career in the cloud. As technology leaders, we must show them that the cloud is the engine room for tomorrow’s innovation; helping build our smart cities by underpinning big data, AI, IoT or 5G applications.”
This is a legitimate leadership challenge. If cloud is positioned internally as infrastructure plumbing rather than as a foundation for innovation, it will continue to struggle to attract the best candidates.
Building a Talent Pool Designed for Constant Change
Because cloud technology evolves so rapidly, Ratcliffe argues that chasing specific technical skills is a losing strategy. The skills that are in demand today may be commoditized or obsolete within a few years.
Instead, he advocates for building a talent pool around diverse thinking and a genuine passion for continuous learning: “The days of a couple of technical courses a year for staff are long gone. Learning is constant, consistent, on the job and flexibility needs to be built into the culture to allow for this.”
The practical implication is that organizations need to stop treating cloud talent development as a periodic HR exercise and start treating it as an ongoing operational discipline — one that is embedded in how teams are structured, how work is done, and how success is measured.
Key Takeaways for Engineering and DevOps Leaders
- Don’t mistake outsourcing for digital capability. Leased digital knowledge creates dependency, not competitive advantage.
- Hire and develop for developer competencies. Automation, coding, and Linux skills are increasingly central to cloud roles.
- Embed security in cloud talent development from the outset, not as an afterthought.
- Build learning pathways that match how engineers actually learn — online, self-paced, and in manageable increments.
- Prioritize curiosity and learning agility over certification checklists when assessing candidates.
- Communicate the career opportunity in cloud clearly. Position it as foundational to AI, IoT, and smart infrastructure — not just as back-end infrastructure work.
- Make learning continuous and culturally normal, not an annual compliance activity.
Original reporting by Information Age. Quotes attributed to Simon Ratcliffe (Ensono), Fred Flack (CloudStratex), Simon Utting (Amito), and Sean Farrington (Pluralsight).