Top 6 Skills Recruiters Look for While Hiring a DevOps Professional and How You Can Master Them

Key DevOps skills recruiters seek and how to excel in them

New Delhi (India), April 22: In recent years, DevOps has become a highly popular and in-demand career field. According to Indeed, there are around 1,800 DevOps jobs posted per day in the US, and LinkedIn reports that DevOps is one of the most in-demand skills in the job market.

As per the latest data available, the average number of job applicants per month for DevOps-related roles is around 2,000, with the number increasing in large metropolitan areas. 

This shows that there is significant competition for these positions, which can make it challenging to break into the field.

If an applicant doesn’t have the right skills, they may find it challenging to get a job in the field. 

They may face difficulty in getting callbacks from potential employers or missing out on job opportunities altogether.

Feeling like they’re applying everywhere but not getting any callbacks can be frustrating and demotivating. 

However, it’s important to remember that the job market is highly competitive, and employers often have specific requirements for their job openings.

What are the key skills every DevOps recruiter looks for?

Recruiters look for DevOps professionals who have a combination of 3 technical skills and 3 soft skills. IAMOPS, a leading DevOps provider in the market, helps us understand what recruiters look for in DevOps candidates. 

Technical skills:

It is important for DevOps professionals to have solid technical skills because they work in a highly technical and complex environment. They need to develop and implement automation solutions, manage cloud infrastructure, implement CI/CD pipelines, and troubleshoot complex technical problems.

Here are the top 3 technical skills the IAMOPS recruiting team search for when reviewing applicants:

1. Networking and operating system fundamentals
2. Networking: 

Networking is the process of connecting computers, devices, and other     resources together so that they can communicate and share information. 

Networking is critical to ensure that applications can communicate with each other. Understanding networking fundamentals like IP addressing, routing, and DNS is essential for designing and maintaining a secure and reliable infrastructure.

• Operating system fundamentals: Operating systems are the software that manages the hardware resources of a computer or server. 

Understanding the fundamentals of operating systems like Linux and Windows is essential for DevOps professionals because they need to be able to manage and configure the infrastructure that supports the software development and deployment process. 

This includes understanding how to install and configure the operating system, manage users and groups, and configure system services.

• Cloud-Computing skills

Cloud computing is a core domain of expertise of the DevOps professional.

• Since cloud computing provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure for developing, testing, and deploying software applications, it is one of the main technologies they use on a daily day basis.
• By leveraging cloud resources, DevOps teams can automate the software development and deployment process, reduce costs, and improve the speed and quality of software delivery.
• Cloud infrastructure is the norm, and DevOps professionals are expected to have experience in using AWS, Azure or GCP cloud platforms. This includes using containerization and microservices to build and deploy applications, as well as leveraging cloud-native tools like Kubernetes and serverless computing.
• Automation skills

Automation plays a crucial role in DevOps because it helps teams to reduce the time and effort required to deploy software changes and manage infrastructure. 

Automation skills for infrastructure management

DevOps teams use various technologies for infrastructure automation to provision and configure infrastructure resources. Here are some of the most used technologies for infrastructure automation in DevOps:

• IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible automate the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure resources. These tools allow DevOps teams to define infrastructure as code, making it easier to deploy and manage infrastructure resources consistently and at scale. 
• Configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible automate the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure and applications. 
• Automation skills for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD)

DevOps teams rely heavily on Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices to automate the software delivery process. CI/CD pipelines involve a series of automated steps, such as code testing, building, and deployment, which are designed to ensure that software changes are delivered quickly and reliably.

There are several technologies that DevOps teams use for automating CI/CD pipelines. Here are some of the most popular ones:

• CI tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, and CircleCI automate the building, testing, and integration of code changes. These tools monitor version control systems for changes and trigger the build process automatically. 
• Containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes enable DevOps teams to package applications and dependencies into portable containers, making it easier to deploy and manage applications across different environments.
• CD tools such as AWS CodePipeline, GitLab CI/CD, and Azure DevOps automate the deployment and delivery of code changes to production. These tools enable DevOps teams to deploy changes to production quickly and reliably, with minimal manual intervention.

Soft skills:

DevOps professionals need to have soft skills in addition to technical skills because they work in a collaborative and cross-functional environment.

Here are the complimentary 3 soft skills the IAMOPS recruiting team search for when reviewing applicants:

• Team players

DevOps practitioners need to be team players because they work with a variety of stakeholders, including Developers, CTOs, R&D team leaders, QA, business teams etc. 

In addition to organization-wide stakeholders listed above, DevOps also work with other DevOps in their own DevOps team, including DevOps Solution Architects, DevOps project managers, DevOps automation engineers, DevOps SRE and more. 

IAMOPS recommends working in teams of at least three DevOps team members. The motivation is to expand the range of expertise and increase the probability that someone will always be available for urgent cases.

Therefore, DevOps aspirants need to be able to collaborate with their teammates as well as outside. 

• Thoroughness, Accuracy Accountability

DevOps practitioners need to be thorough and accurate because they work in an environment where small errors or mistakes can have significant impacts on software delivery, operations, and business outcomes.

When issues arise in the infrastructure that supports software development and deployment, DevOps must be accountable for resolving them.

It is their responsibility to identify the cause of the problem and develop a solution to fix it quickly and effectively.

• Communication

As a DevOps professional, effective communication with developers is critical for successful collaboration and project outcomes. Since DevOps professionals work closely with developers, they need to have good communication skills to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that issues are addressed quickly and effectively.

One key aspect of effective communication is using English appropriately since it is the most commonly used language in the technology industry. DevOps professionals need to be able to read, write, and speak English clearly and confidently to ensure that they can clearly communicate with developers and other stakeholders.

How can you kick-start your career in DevOps?

Applicants can take a few steps to improve their chances of getting hired in the DevOps field:

1. Upskill: Applicants can take online courses or certifications to improve their DevOps technical skills and make themselves more marketable to potential employers.
2. Build a portfolio: Applicants can build a portfolio of their work and showcase their DevOps projects to potential employers. This can demonstrate their expertise and experience in the field.
3. Consider internships: Applicants can consider DevOps internships to gain hands-on experience in the DevOps field, which can help improve their job prospects.

DevOps careers at IAMOPS

IAMOPS, a thriving DevOps enterprise based in Tel Aviv, Israel, provides DevOps services, SRE 24/7, QA Automation, and System Security Engineers services. 

Their mission is to bridge the innovation gap between Indian and Israeli engineers and address the shortage of technical talents in Israel. As a result, they have expanded their hiring to India.

IAMOPS has already facilitated the employment of 52 Indian engineers in prestigious positions, helping them overcome various challenges and gain global exposure.

By collaborating with over 100 Israeli developers, Indian DevOps professionals are working together in a seamless manner, making significant strides in their field.

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