 This is your host Satil Bharti and today we have with us once again Clyde C. Prasad, SVP and general manager of training and certification at the Linux Foundation. So first of all, tell us about this open source jobs portal. As you know, this is a multi-year effort on our part. And so we've been doing this for seven or eight years now. And it's really important for us to be able to have hard data when we talk about this to complement the anecdotes, right? It's quite easy to get carried away with the anecdotal things that we hear. And what this report allows us to do is sort of plant off refirmly in terms of what is the market actually telling us at scale, right? From hundreds of people from across different geographies. And so what this report allows us to do really three primary things. One, it informs us as an organization, where should we be putting our focus on training and certification? Where are the gaps in the market today? Where are the gaps likely to be? And so it helps us shape our decision making about where to put our focus. Because a big part, the strategic reason behind the training and certification group at the Linux Foundation is to ensure that we're not just putting great code out, but that we're creating the right talent pool, especially at that entry level. So that code can then get deployed, used in production, and able to help people on their career journey. So the first group, we use it internally to create focus in the right areas. Secondly, for individuals, right? Individuals who are looking to start or to grow their IT career, they're looking for some signals. And again, to get away from the anecdote, they're looking to try to figure out where should I go next, right? So we're in an era now of continuous learning, where the things that served you well two years ago won't necessarily serve you well for the next year to come. So people are constantly asking themselves the question, where do I need to go next? And this helps in that regard. And lastly, the employers want to know where are the skills coming from? Where are the gaps going to be? And what are the strategies they need to use to fill those skill gaps in their organizations? This is particularly important post pandemic, right? And so I think a lot of people have now realized that hiring talent based on searching on LinkedIn is not a sustainable strategy for the long term. You've got to find other ways of finding talent. Some of it could be developing talent in-house, some of it could be reaching out to non-traditional markets. But it does serve that market as well, right? It helps them get their heads around what are some of the challenges, what are some of the pinch points, and what are some of the strategies to try to create new on-ramps for talent as these different open-source projects take their place center stage. What I find challenging when it comes to open-source job reports is and it could also be the scope of the report. And I can partially be a Linux foundation for that because if you look at CNC and other organizations, you folks are creating, not you folks, but the communities are creating so many new technologies that just to end, then new paradigms are also coming up. We talk about DevOps and DevSecOps, so the rules, what kind of skill sets needed is also changing very fast. So it's a big challenge. It's a big daunting task for you folks. So tell me about your methodology internally and how do you track all these changes so that people do get at least the actual situation that is going on in the market? So it is a little challenging, right? Because it is a longitudinal survey, we do it year after year. And one of the questions we have to ask ourselves every year is think about the phrasing of the question, think about the topics that we're covering and are we grouping things correctly? Are we articulating correctly? Three years ago, there wouldn't have been as much granularity when you think about DevOps and DevSecOps. So every year, we take a look at it and say, are we helping people understand the framework of what's out there in terms of open source with language that is going to be easy for them to recognize where it fits? And then that helps us when we interpret data, to be able to say, when people thought about cloud, this is what we know exactly what they were thinking about. When they think about DevOps, this is what they have in their mind because of course that's one of the challenges in survey methodology. Are they answering the question you thought you were asking? If you look at this report, I just said, pandemic also played a very big role in the industry. What are the technologies that are in most demand? And does it also, do you see because you have been doing this for so long that this is the natural organic trajectory of these technologies are coming out in demand or COVID changed something there too? You know, that was one of our big questions, right? Is what happened as a result of COVID, how big was the change and is the change permanent? So the piece that we've been trying to work through is looking exactly at that to say, what do we know now a year and a half into the pandemic? And I think there are two main things that we've seen. First, the shift to cloud has accelerated, which is perhaps not surprising, right? When people found themselves physically unable to go to their data center, it changed something in their mindset of, how do I operate in this new world where I'm going to be able to need to administer and run my systems without necessarily physically being able to go touch them in the way that I would have in a bare metal past. The second, which reinforces that, is this idea of remote work. So of course, we all became virtual organizations over the course of 2020, and there's some dialogue about what point people go back to offices. What we're seeing, I think pretty consistently, is you can't put that genie back in the bottle. Now that people have gotten used to working remotely and working productively remotely, that's going to continue to be part of the way that work happens going forward. And what that also does is intersect with the first trend about the shift to the cloud. And so we've got more people working remotely on more systems, and that plays to the strengths of where the cloud native ecosystem has gone, which is remotely hosted systems, running Linux as the OS with Kubernetes as the orchestration layer, and a suite of DevOps software practices and software for coordinating the deployment of these. And so I think the old model with bare metal servers with twice annual deployments, that's never coming back. So the real challenge in our view is, how do we take a huge install base of legacy apps and move them to cloud native? And that's going to be a question of time, that's going to be a question of budget. But just as importantly, it's going to be a question of talent and the availability of the staff to take those apps and move them into a cloud native architecture so they can be deployed on this next generation infrastructure. How easy or hard it is to find enough open source talent in today's world? So you've seen this in the report, right? Upwards of 90% of people saying that hiring open source talent is going to be a priority for them. And the increased investments that people are making in training, the increased investments they're making in certification, those are all signals that there is a shortage in the marketplace and that companies are starting to try to find more creative ways to develop that talent. And of course, it's not surprising in a sense, right? So the traditional college degree program isn't really geared towards creating software developers who are natively open source, who are cloud native in their orientation. And so this idea that the talent pool to be able to create, deploy, and maintain cloud native apps was never going to be something that fell out in the sky. It was always going to have to be a journey. It was always going to have to be an investment. And in many cases, an investment in your existing talent, right? So the same folks who've been running your legacy apps are going to be the same folks you're going to have to rely on to convert those into a cloud native format and get those up and running in a Kubernetes powered cloud hosting environment. Because you're not going to be able to hire your way out of this challenge, right? You're going to have to do an all of the above strategy where hire when you can cross train and upscale the people that you have and then reach out to some of these non-traditional communities as sources of talent. Because otherwise we're all going to end up trying to fight over the same few people, which is great if you're an experienced cloud engineer, kudos, right? You're probably getting multiple LinkedIn invitations every day. But that's not a sustainable path to the future. We've got to find other ways of bringing people in because the market and the data is telling us that there isn't sufficient supply out there for this huge new wave of demand. I mean, we have been seeing that, there is a lot of folks because they have experienced remote working. They don't have to relocate to a particular region to find that specific job. And they also are becoming more picky who they work with, which can also create a lot of challenges for employers to not in terms of recruiting new talent, but also keep the folks that they have. So what advice do you have? Because I feel that they also need a cultural shift in the way they deal with their employees. Just the way we have to drop the legacy model of building infrastructure. We have to adopt the cloud native model for building infrastructure. We also have to embrace new ways how we interact with our employees. So what tips do you have for employers so that they can more efficiently retain and attain talent? One of the old jokes you used to hear was people saying, well, I'm worried about training my employees because what if I train and upskill them and they leave? And of course, they were taught, well, what if you don't train them and they stay? But that's actually increasingly true. If you have people at an organization and they see this opportunity from the shift to cloud native, and you support that with their skill set and involving their skill set and the expectations of them to be able to be competent in this transitional phase, that's probably the biggest single thing that you can do to create loyalty and to create engagement and to create this idea that people can see a career path into the future. Because if you send a signal that you're going to try to hire that next generation of talent in, what you're implicitly saying to your existing base is we expect you to become less and less relevant over time. So structurally, if your intent is to engage with folks and keep them engaged over the medium to long term, you've got to signal to them that you expect them to be contributors over the medium to long term. And the only way to get from here to there is to have structured ways of ensuring that folks have the opportunity to use these new tools, to train on these new tools, to certify on these new tools so that they keep their skills sharp and that change is just somewhat subtle change in mindset I think is really profound and it's something that employer after employer is telling us that they're doing, is they're doubling down on the investment and the fear and concern that if I train my people up and positioning them to go take that next job somewhere else is being superseded by the realization that the best shot you have of getting the talent that you need is to create that talent based on the folks that are there today. One of the beauties of open source is that you can just go check out the code, download it locally and start pay, put something on the cloud and start running it. You don't have to kind of go through any official training but when you are working in the production environment, you do need to know what you're doing. I feel that training and certification, they do play a role. First of all, from the perspective of the employee that, hey, I do know what I'm doing and employer that, hey, you know what? This person knows the job. Plus, as you also mentioned, the way talent pool is getting a right person is becoming challenging. It does play. So if I ask you, first of all, if you did ask any questions in this survey to understand how important is training and certification when people hire an engineer? And second is that why people should care about it? Yeah, it's a good question. Thanks, Shlopnam. It's a bit of, it had become a bit of a truism in IT for people to look down their nose at certification exams. And I think it was a large part because the legacy type exams which were largely multiple choice had become very compromised by the growth of the internet and the speed with which exam questions got exposed. And so people won't really be interested on their skills because they were coming into the exam knowing the answers. What we've seen more recently, and this shows up in the report with a much bigger appetite. The percentage of employers interested in certifications has gone up significantly, as you can see in the report. And we attribute that to the fact that the push has been on performance-based certifications. So not picking answers out of lineups but having live systems where you have tasks to complete. So my confidence level that you have the skills that I'm looking for goes way up if your certification was a live system performance-based because what I see is even if you had some pre-knowledge of what was in the exam, the fact that you could do those tasks under the time pressure of a clock running down under the observation pressure of a proctor watching you tells me that you actually have the skills. So even in the most restrictive sense, if you assume that the person had a pretty good idea of which skills were being tested, the fact that you have those skills and you can demonstrate them on a live system under time and observation pressure is actually still telling me something meaningful about the investment you've made in your skill set. And so we see this increased acceptance of certifications as a valid marker to get somebody even in the door for an interview and being able to have confidence that there are a certain baseline level of skills both from an efficiency of recruiting perspective and importantly, because most companies are dealing with a shortage of skills, if you think about Kubernetes as a classic example, they don't have enough Kubernetes engineers on staff to run their system. So having those people have to spend multiple hours on every candidate trying to see if they know the skills or not is a double whammy. They've taken the few people that they have and they've taken them out of circulation to try to check on the new people coming in. And so these performance based certs are addressing a bit of a gap in the market where it gives the employers more confidence to bring that person in for an interview simultaneously reducing the overhead on the technical people who are trying to do the interviewing. And that's important, right? Because we're in a talent shortage environment right now and so the contribution that a certification can make if it's performance based to increasing that confidence to reach out and find those candidates, especially if they're from a non-traditional diversity type background, it's making a meaningful impact in people's ability to find and hire talent from more than just the usual sources. Thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about the latest report. Share your insights on what companies are doing and also what they should be doing to not only retain the talent pool but also attract more. So thanks for those insights. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show but we should not wait till the next report. We should talk before that. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Stop now.