DevOps Certifications – Divya Wadhwani, Harness

This is texturing TV. Hey guys. Thanks the throw we're here with Divya Wadhwani who is director of education programs for harness and they have harnessed University specifically and we're talking about devops software development lifecycle and need for training in just where are we gonna find all the skills?

We need give you welcome the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

There are a lot of training programs out there. They all seem to be called the university for one reason or another. I don't know why but I guess my first question to you is what ultimately differentiates one training program from another there's a lot of choices out there.

So why should folks look to harness University versus anywhere else at the moment? So harness University provides really easy to access affordable resources to a really growing community of practitioners developers devops engineers and actually organizations wanting to learn about Innovations within the software delivery space and truly. What ties That in is is the best practices therein.

So harness University is your training and certification Hub that brings together those best practices in a variety of formats in live training, which is Workshop lab-based. We have more than you know, 70 plus courses in a self-based format hundreds of hours of webinars from experts in the space and truly addressing it from a role-based as well as product based perspective. So we are really trying to bring in those Best practices and innovations that we're seeing in the market in a very fast evolving field that truly differentiates us.

We see that there's a lot of demand for devops professionals. And we also see that there's a lot of it folks that are interested in devops best practices, but they're still the shortage of Supply. So from your perspective, what is the hurdle of what are the challenges that people face?

And what do we got to do to get them into the program? Yeah, no great question. We're seeing this a lot from the research that that we've we've seen, you know more than 80% of the organizations have a gap in at least one business area, you know with devops skills and developer skills and you know others in that software delivery space that coupled with the with the great resignation has has created gaps in addition to digital transformation initiatives that are really spearheading all of these organizations.

So that truly presented us with the challenge to create an offering that would address these it skills Gap so Hardness University brings to Bear a lot of different training opportunities and easy to access paths for all of the different roles in these organizations to take advantage of in addition. We've just launched a certification program that addresses entrance especially new folks that are trying to learn this space or folks that are trying to make a career change into software delivery. We're trying to reduce the barrier to entry with this certification program and and giving them a pathway to the success in this space.

I think a lot of individuals in this industry have a love-hate relationship with certifications. So what's your sense of? Why do we need a devops related certification these days?

What's the upside? So that's that's a great question. And we thought about this this a lot when we when we decided to launch very first certification here, which is the software delivery foundations associate certification.

And one of the the pieces we realized is everyone needed some grounding in the fundamentals of software delivery. Really? What is that software delivery life cycle?

What are the different roles that you have in that in that life cycle? What do they do in each part of that life cycle? What are the differences between continuous integration and continuous delivery?

What are the security practices that are relevant in that software delivery space. So we wanted something that would really provide folks those fundamentals and the fundamental knowledge that then sets them up for success in more advanced topics. The devops practices or the security practices and we feel like it's a great way for everyone to to understand, you know where they're at.

And where their gaps are. So certifications provide a great way to do that. It also provides a great way for advanced practitioners to get that next job role get that next career opportunity get that next promotion.

So it serves multiple facets of what folks are looking for whether it's entry into the space or in advancement into the space. I feel like sometimes and from a hiring perspective that companies are mathematically challenged. They expect to fill all these positions with people have four year degrees.

But by the time they get a four-year degree, you know, the world will have passed them by so have we an issue now with how do we train folks in without necessarily required and they go to college for four years to get the right skills that we need and we know do we need to think about this and smaller monthly. Maybe one year two year jobs are programs. Yeah, absolutely.

I think one of the philosophies I've certainly adopted here is you you meet your audience where they want to be. So there are several folks that love and instructor based setting where they want to come in do a workshop style lab-based format where they really get Hands-On quickly and harness university offers multiple forums to be able to do that in you know in a monthly Cadence and and it's free of cost. So we're truly encouraging people to learn and learn as quickly as they can but there are others that, you know want to learn in their own time in a self-based fashion.

And so we give them those opportunities as well and our credentialing framework that we've put together where we award them completion certificates. So they don't necessarily have to wait for two years to get a completion certificate to show that they've learned something they can get it within a span of weeks or even months and then you tie that into a certification where at the end of taking these multitude of training opportun. Is you're able to get a badge that certifies that you are able to demonstrate a certain skills that that certification is testing for that further completes their their Learner Journey and they're able to put that out on on LinkedIn and and get the visibility from recruiters and and the job market Specialists out there.

Announcement that is the issue if we have no way to differentiate who knows what skills we come up with certifications just to let people know and it becomes the vehicle. We're essentially give yourself a raise by getting a certification even though you may present the process a little bit. Um, what do you think?

We're seeing an increase in salaries for devops professionals that have certifications? Yes from the from the research that we've seen it certainly helps, you know, your promotions and really good your growth within the area but more importantly we are trying to educate folks on the best practices. So ultimately if we are able to get impact results from a business value that they're contributing to whether it's saving Cloud costs with with the with the deployments ETC that they're that they're responsible for.

Or whether they're reducing developer toil with how long it takes to build their software or identifying security vulnerable vulnerabilities earlier in the process. Those kinds of impacts are also worth measuring as we roll out the certification. So in addition to being a job vehicle or a career vehicle, I think if we're able to also measure the business impacts we're able to then quantify that even better.

We've also all met those old hands in this business who probably have forgotten more about devops than most of us will ever learn or at least that's what they'll tell you. However, I would wonder a positive the theory that has the technology advanced so frequently and so fast as of late that even folks who are quote unquote Old Timers have something new to learn and maybe they should be revisiting some of these programs. What do you think?

Absolutely. We've we've seen a lot of innovation in the devops field at least in the last four or five years and it continues to evolve and part of that is is the cloud providers and the environments around us are evolving the Integrations that folks need to think about are evolving. The security scanners are evolving.

There are so many different aspects to be considered when you release software that there's there's best practices to be had very very frequently. And so Absolutely, I would I would consider the space as a learning journey and the more folks can upscale. The more people can learn about these many different facets.

I think the Richer their own experience as a devops engineer will be what is that one thing that you see that? Students are unprepared for you. Wish they would spend more time thinking about before they signed up the program the thing that you constantly see the mistake that people make over and over again.

So one of the things we've we've seen is just the basic understanding of software delivery Concepts just simple things like what are the differences between continuous deployment versus continuous delivery? How does release management within that software delivery lifecycle? How is that different from just deploying software?

And is it more than just developers and devops Engineers that play a part in this in this life cycle? The answer to that is yes, but we need folks to to pay attention to those those details in addition to the more technical aspects of it. Like if you're deploying to a kubernetes environment understanding kubernetes Basics or if you're working with specific Cloud providers, like if you're in an AWS environment or in a gcp environment knowing the basics of those environments will be hugely helpful to all of these the folks and most of them do come in with that knowledge.

But where we see challenges is when they're switching environments and then upskilling in those those areas does tend to be challenging for them? All right, we hear a lot about Automation and Ai and people start to wonder about whether or not they'll be a job for them when they are done finally with the training. So my question to you is hey, would you tell your nephews nieces children that they should get a devops training and invest in that time and effort now because you know, well, we still be talking about this 10 years.

Absolutely. I mean, I have a 13 year old at home and she's very very interested in in programming and and so many different aspects of software and and you know delivery in general. So what I'd say to everyone aspiring to be in this space is that is so much Innovation there so it you know, even with the Advent of AI and and ml there is a lot of thinking and triaging that needs to happen, especially with all of the Integrations and all of the problems really that are businesses are trying to solve so focusing on the business value and really seeing do you you know, what is your your end goal is your end goal going faster in terms of velocity or is your end goal having more secure software is your end goal governance of that software.

There's so many business impacts that we need to solve for. That despite, you know all of this innovation in Ai and ml if we can help our devops Engineers for honing on those best practices and business problems. There's there's always room for learning.

There's always room for innovation. All right, folks. You heard it here first.

Don't be embarrassed by what you don't know and don't assume what you do know is still relevant. So there you have it even welcome. Thank you for being on the show.

Thank you. All right back to you guys in the studio.