Qualification offensive

Cloud Foundry Foundation, provider of the industry-standard cloud application platform, announced the launch of the world's largest cloudnative application developer certification initiative in the face of a worsening developer shortage.

The Cloud Foundry Certified Developer program is offered in conjunction with partner Linux Foundation. No other organization in the world has provided more training and certification for open source developers.

The exact launch date for the program will be announced at the Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley, which will take place next June.

Companies around the world are looking for qualified developers. According to the latest Bitkom study on the labor market for IT specialists from fall 2016, there were 51,000 vacancies for IT specialists in Germany at the time.

In the U.S. alone, there are 250,000 job openings for software developers and 500,000 unfilled positions that require technical skills. Forecasts call for this number to double to 1,000,000 within the next ten years.

The new Cloud Foundry certification offers developers looking for their first job or to climb the next rung on the career ladder the opportunity to stand out from competitors.

The "Cloud Foundry Developer Certification", which is performance- and community-based and independent of third-party distributions, is the best way for developers to demonstrate cloud skills and expert knowledge.

Organizations need to ensure that their developers can be highly productive in a Cloud Foundry environment. Cloud Foundry developer certification and courses will be available online, making training and certification possible from anywhere in the world.

"As an industry, we need to do everything possible to be supportive of customers who want to future-proof themselves through digital transformation."

says Björn Goerke, President SAP Cloud Platform at SAP.

"At SAP, we consider developers to be at the forefront of cloud-driven innovation and digital transformation. That's why we support Cloud Foundry's central effort to expand the pool of cloud developers."

The certification ensures that an applicant has practical experience with Cloud Foundry across distributions, including the 2017 certified platforms Huawei FusionStage, IBM Bluemix Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, SAP Cloud Platform, and Swisscom Application Cloud.

The training material can also be licensed, allowing Cloud Foundry Foundation members to offer the content through their own employee and customer training channels.

The Cloud Foundry Certified Developer program is based on a report released by the Cloud Foundry Foundation in November 2016. Nearly 900 IT decision-makers worldwide were surveyed.

It turns out that the ability of enterprises to embrace digital transformation is at risk due to increasing cloud skill deficits.

Further, the report reveals that companies have doubled the number of engineers to be trained internally, rather than outsourcing engineering overseas or hiring talented candidates to address the skills shortage, because:

Digital competence is increasingly becoming the core competence of modern companies. The Cloud Foundry certification for developers is designed to address these shortcomings. Every developer can choose their preferred course type and acquire a sustainable, marketable skillset.