 Hi, this is Arun Bharati and today we have with us Clyde Superseed, SVP and GM of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation. Clyde, first of all, is glad to have you here. Thanks for having me, Swapna. Can you tell us a bit about what is the primary goal of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation? Sure. It's an interesting thing, right? Because if you look at the history of open source, the first wave of folks were very DIYers, right? They would jump in, they would read the docs, they would get on IRC channels. And there was a little bit of a sense that that was how you, that was the sort of true way in which you get into open source is by figuring it out yourself. But of course, that's never been true for software in general, right? I mean, people always get trained on commercial products. They have whole companies, have whole market enablement arms. And so one of the things that we identified a few years ago is that there was this gap between amazing quality open source products that were changing how computing gets done and then the talent development side of things, right? How do we create on-ramps for talent in an age of open source where you don't necessarily have the same market to market commercial organizations making sure that people get trained and up to speed technically on the new software products. And so that's a piece where we're really trying to fill is that entry-level talent gap. Right. Also, I have seen that there is no dearth of all this training but mostly there is specific to a specific vendor and their product. So when it comes to vendor neutral technologies, core technologies, that is where there is a huge kind of void where you cannot find. I think that's what Linux Foundation is doing there if I'm not wrong. Correct, right? It's for the core technologies, right? And so we always say, look, you need a starting point that's most useful to most people is vendor neutral understanding of the core technologies and at the entry level, right? We really try to focus on entry-level talent because we recognize that the commercial ecosystems are really valuable, right? When you get up into the intermediate and advanced layers, by definition, you're working with specific tool sets and it's appropriate for you to move into that more tool-specific types of training. But when you're getting started, you really need that broadest possible foundation because you don't know if you're going to be working in an Azure shop. You don't know if you're going to be in a GCP shop. You don't know which distro you're going to be using. And so, you know, the broader the footprint that we can give people to start with, the better, right? And that's kind of where we focus is entry-level vendor neutral talent so that people are best prepared for the maximum number of career opportunities. And what kind of demand is there for especially entry-level? As you also said, you know, the way we learned was, you know, we just learned everything ourselves, you know, on the Internet. Fine from here, there are really a lot of books, download stuff, get CDs. So, but in today's world where everybody's connected, so what kind of demand is there for this very basic entry-level, you know, for especially in the open source of space? Yeah, you know, I'll give you a good example, Swapnow. We just this past week actually announced the one millionth enrollment in our free Intro to Linux course on edX, which, you know, kind of blows my mind and we were able to get out on the Internet and find one million people from 222 different countries who wanted to learn the fundamentals of Linux and what it is and what it can do. I think that really shines a good light on just how broad the base is and I think importantly, how global the base is, right? There's a lot of, there's a lot better on-ramps into a technology career if you're in North America or if you're in Western Europe, right? There's a more mature ecosystem with different entry points and when you look globally, there are a lot fewer of those and so that part of our mission is to say, this is not a isolated technical challenge for, you know, for the US or for France or for Germany. This is a global technical challenge and we're seeing that demand, right? The second highest number of enrollments, you know, free and Linux course is from India and so that there's a broad, deep move to this and the example I've taken to giving recently is with the pandemic of 2020, my favorite local Chinese restaurant, which is a small mom and pop operation shut down and when they came back online, they came back online with a website and an online ordering system and I asked, I said, how did you guys get that set up? And she said, oh, you know, we had to go hire somebody, right? We had to go figure out how to make a mom and pop strip more Chinese food business into a web-enabled business and it gives an example of the breadth to which, you know, that old saw is increasingly true that every business is now a technology business. One more thing that people do not give credit or recognize is that despite these tough times, open source technologies, the way they have democratized because building your own stack is so hard, so expensive at the same time, if you want to start a business having your own data center, so cloud and open source, you gave example and same is the case with my Indian store because of the social distancing or we did not want to go out. Now, they never did that, but suddenly everything was available online. You can just go online, place the order and they would deliver to the home. What enabled them to move quickly was all these, you know, democratization that has happened here and at the same time, there is enough talent pool that, you know, you guys help create who can actually handle that kind of work because suddenly there is a surge. So, but when we do look at all these technologies, you know, we hear buzzwords like Kubernetes and all those things, they are intimidating. So, for somebody who is kind of new, who wants to get into that, but they have no experience in any of these technologies, any of these industries, how should they get it started? That's a great point Swapna and actually that exact challenge is why we recently announced the creation of a new entry level exam for what we call IT associates and it's born of this recognition that, you know, for those of us in tech, yeah, getting started seems like a fairly obvious thing, right? You know, you learn the basic operating system, you get familiar with the cloud technologies and you start thinking about the problems of stability and scale and security. If you're on the outside looking in and you have never learned the stuff, you don't know anybody in your community or your family who doesn't, it is a very tall ask to say, hey, go start by getting certified in Linux or go start by getting a Azure certification or an AWS certification. It's just too much to ask for folks, right? So we've come intermediate step to help people build a confidence that this is something that they can do even if they don't have a support system and a network and a sort of role models around them. And so we developed this program to say, can we create a, you know, a pre-professional certification exam that demonstrates that somebody has understood the fundamental concepts in terms of, you know, the new cloud infrastructure and the microservice infrastructure the cloud native infrastructure. Without forcing them to get to the finish line of, hey, I'm a Cobbett and cloud administrator, right? It's too much to ask folks to get in one go. It's too much in terms of the time. It's too much in terms of the level of effort without giving them some midpoint to say, okay, I feel confident that I can do this. I have the aptitude. I've been able to demonstrate that I can learn some of the basics and that really is the audience that we're targeting with this is folks who are coming from the outside, who understand the potential and they can see themselves doing it. But we have to give them somewhere to hang their hat to say, okay, it's going to be fine. It's a lot, it's a lot to learn, but I've shown that I can do it, right? I've shown the competence. I've shown the aptitude. And potentially I've shown enough to start getting some, you know, a look from a potential employer or for a potential internship, but some entry rung in the ladle. And that's really what we're going after is a recognition of it can be a daunting task to try to get somebody all the way up to technical competence and that a stepping stone, a pre-professional stepping stone could really help make IT seem like a more realistic career option for a lot of folks. If you look at open source work, we all know a lot of core developer maintainers. They have no formal training. You know, somewhere was a doctor and suddenly they became maintainer of a major open source project. But when we look at this whole serving the enterprise space, why do we need formal training when, you know, you can just go online and learn everything on your own? It's true. It reminds me of the last time I went to the doctor and he had a cartoon printed out on the wall that said that your Google search is not as good as my medical degree. This is not a technology problem. The explosion of information on the internet has made it possible to access a lot of knowledge and a lot of information. What it doesn't do is make it easy and structured. And so they are always going to be folks just like we have been historically who can go between the documentation and the discussion boards and the YouTube videos. They can figure it out for themselves. And our perspective is that's great. Those people probably don't need our help, but they're probably in the single digits if you think of the percentages of people. Most folks need more structure. They need more guidance. They need labs that they can get through to have a solution. If they get stuck, they can go say, ah, that's just, I forgot to open that port. And so the training really, it's not that training brings any dramatic new, you know, content to the table. What it does is it creates a structured path to help people go through a structured set of exercises and the availability of help if you get stuck, right? So we have discussion boards and different forums for providing that help. It's not that you couldn't do it by scouring the web. It's that the vast majority of people that takes an already daunting topic and makes it just impossible, right? We've got to put the breadcrumbs down to help people find it. And that's where we focus is saying, this information exists, but it doesn't exist in a way that most people can digest it and can wrap their head around and stay committed to a path of getting from here to there, right? The training program, that's what it does. It helps people find a path to get where they want to go without having to invent the path by themselves. Right. Also, the reason you need a structured training is you're going to serve a particular industry. You are not just learning something, because there is a big difference in learning about something versus serving a specific industry. There are a lot of challenges. There are a lot of set of procedures. So yes, it does play a very big role. You can learn everything yourself, but you should go through that specific training to prepare yourself for the job. Now, if you look at Linux Foundation, there's a lot of work in this training space. Can you kind of just give a few examples of the work that you're doing to kind of help the talent gap because Linux Foundation also comes up with the report every year where we see there is such a huge gap between supply and demand of talent. Correct. And we're actually going to publish our newest version, the 2020 version of that report, the open source jobs report shortly. And I'll give you sort of a sneak preview. Even with the pandemic going on, more than 50% of the respondents said that they're going to be hiring entry-level talent. And it's really because there's only so many times you can go to LinkedIn and try to poach somebody. Companies have realized that it's a zero-sum game. You're going to have to build and grow talent in-house, especially if you're taking legacy loads and trying to make them cloud-native and move them into the cloud. And getting brand-new people is not necessarily going to be the best way to make that happen. And so as LF, what we're doing is trying to say, you need a portfolio of solutions to try to help fill that gap in the market, right? So we do things like the intro to Linux course I was talking about, which is available for free on the web. Anybody can go sign up for it. You don't have to pay a dime. We have new exams, like this entry-level certification exam. We've got instructor-led training for folks who want that. We've got affordable email options for folks who want that. We've recently put together some boot camp type programs to train people to have that extra layer of instructor support. And so we recognize that there's no one silver bullet, right? It's a portfolio of different actions to try to figure out different people are in different places. How do we create solutions for them to find a path to get where they want to go that have the right level of intensity, the right level of support, and importantly, the right level of availability and the right affordability, because that in reality is a barrier for a lot of folks, right? Not everybody can drop $10,000 on a coding boot camp. That also made me think that how do you also help individuals to kind of meet their own educational goal, because as you said, sometimes you need so many resources there. Yeah, you know, so the structured training programs help, right? Because it helps folks see that this is a sequence in which they can learn and grow. It's also helpful for them to just get into the discussion boards that we provide and be able to engage not just with the instructors, but with the other people in the programs to figure out these are the challenges we're all facing. You know, I'm not alone in this. Other people are stuck in similar places. And so helping folks, you know, just like we were talking about with the new certified IT associate, helping folks see that they're not alone and helping them get help and making it easy for them to access that help is an important part of just making it accessible. I mean, ultimately what we want is create a pathway where people can succeed, right? Where it's not the barrier to entries come down. And a lot of that is around the community, the affordability, the accessibility, and coming from a place, you know, where we are fortunate in the foundation that, you know, where a nonprofit folks get that we're not trying to appease shareholders unless we really are a mission driven organization. And I think that also helps, that helps give people the confidence that the agenda here really is to expand the talent pool. It really is to try to help folks, you know. Great, I think the mantra for my team has been great code alone can't change the world, right? You still need people in there implementing systems, implementing solutions, providing support. And so the open source revolution does need a talent revolution to help sustain it. Now, we did touch upon these points at a different point, but do you need to have some specific qualification or you should be in a specific location or you should be of certain age to join these training programs? No, you know, we really do make this, as my training director likes to joke, you know, we try to go down to the what is the file level, right? It really does start. And if you look at our Intro to Linux course, for instance, it really starts by saying, what's an OS, what's a file, how do you install it? And, you know, the beauty of doing the stuff as self-paced learning is it allows people to skip ahead, right? If you know it already, usually look at the outline and you can figure out, oh, okay. Chapter seven is where my journey needs to start, right? So it allows people to opt in to a training program and find their level. But it also allows people who truly are new to this to find an accessible path in. Awesome. Clyde, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this training and solution. And I look forward to talk to you again. Thank you. Same here. Thank you for having me, Swapnil.