Having insufficient IT resources is one of the major challenges that IT organizations are facing today, and companies will need to implement upskilling programs in order to combat this. 

According to DevOps Institute’s 2022 Upskilling IT report, 40% of those surveyed said that the resource skill shortage is one of their top three challenges. While 52% said that they have formal upskilling in place, 27% are just starting to develop one.

The findings also showed that upskilling is a professional and organizational imperative, with the top five must-have skill capabilities for upskilling being process framework skills, human skills, technical skills, automation skills, and leadership skills. 

In addition, almost 60% of respondents said that they plan to recruit for operations engineering, while 40% are planning for team leaders and 30% for site reliability engineers. 

Security and cybersecurity were also found to be the most important technical skills, according to the report. Ninety-two percent of respondents cited this skill as critical or important and over 93% reported that being familiar with some form of DevSecOps is crucial. 

“Strong human skills like collaboration, communication, and social adeptness remain essential to the DevOps journey,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute. “In 2022, upskilling is as much an individual endeavor as it is an organizational responsibility. IT professionals ultimately control and manage their own upskilling journeys – and recruiting trends show that building critical skill sets is a worthy personal investment. The Upskilling IT Report offers deep insights into which skill capabilities are the most important to pursue today – including essential human skills.”

The survey looked at 2,476 respondents in 120 countries that offered over 58,000 data points. The research was conducted by DevOps Institute’s chief research officer, Eveline Oehrlich, with participation from Platinum Sponsors GitLab and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Gold Sponsor Rancher, and supporters Cycloid, DDLS, The Linux Foundation, LLPA, LPI, Narada Code, NTUC Learning Hub, Service Desk Institute, and Taub Solutions.

To download the full report, see here.