DevOps professionals are in demand. With digital transformation accelerating, software updates becoming more frequent and tradeoffs between security, quality and user experience becoming more common, we look at the skills DevOps professionals will need in 2025 to be part of more resilient teams, and push their careers forward.

Why is there rising demand for DevOps talent?

In a 2022 report entitled ‘A Software Skills Strategy for Europe’ the European Software Skills Alliance and Erasmus+ defined DevOps as, ‘Development methodology aimed at bridging the gap between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops), emphasising communication and collaboration, continuous integration, quality assurance, and delivery with automated deployment utilising a set of development practices (Jabbari et al., 2016)’. 

In other words, DevOps is changing software development and deployment for organisations all over the world, integrating development and operations teams and speeding up software solutions so that businesses can resolve problems more quickly and software delivery is faster, integrated, and continuous. This is enabling more efficient software development, clearer communication, and continuous delivery, and benefitting companies with accelerated digital transformation. 

This, combined with a shift to microservices architecture, a rise in cloud technologies, more agile methodologies and an increased focus on cybersecurity, means that more organisations are realising the benefits of DevOps and seeking to gain a competitive advantage over their rivals to boost productivity by using automation. In fact the DevOps market size is set to grow at 20% CAGR to 2030 and DevOps jobs amount to 10% of all contract jobs advertised in the UK. 

Essential skills

Many organisations face difficulties in recruiting experienced and suitably-qualified DevOps talent and there is fierce competition for those people who possess the necessary skills. If you want to boost your chances of landing a role in this new technological frontier, here are some of the essential skills you’ll need.

Cloud-native development 

According to market leader AWS, Cloud Native is ‘the software approach of building, deploying, and managing modern applications in cloud computing environments’. Cloud-native technologies are expected to play an increasingly important role in DevOps by enabling greater resilience, agility and scalability, supporting fast application updates without service delivery being impacted. Gartner expects over 85% of organisations to be using cloud-first principles by 2025 and predicts that many of them will not be able to execute their digital strategies without its use. Candidates looking for DevOps jobs, therefore, should ensure that they’re familiar with platforms such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud to give themselves a competitive advantage.

Container orchestration

Used for resource allocation, provisioning and deployment, configuration and scheduling and container availability among other things, container orchestration ‘automatically provisions, deploys, scales and manages the lifecycle of containerized applications’ according to IBM. It’s used to streamline DevOps or agile workflows and provides the speed and flexibility that modern hybrid multicloud infrastructure needs to deploy the same application across varying environments without the need for a redesign. Talent wishing to build a DevOps career should gain experience of such container orchestrators as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

Advanced security principles

In September of this year Transport for London’s (TfL) website was hacked resulting in some 5,000 people’s bank details being compromised. This is the latest in a series of high-profile cyber attacks that have affected the UK’s public services and private institutions and highlights the need for the highest levels of security principles within DevOps, without compromising on speed or efficiency. To avoid financial losses, reputational damage or potential legal action, security integration should be automated at each stage of the life cycle of software development with each team member playing their part.

Soft skills

As well as the highest levels of technical proficiency, DevOps talent also needs other, vital skills, including the ability to cooperate and collaborate. They’ll be adaptable, innovative and have strong interpersonal and customer-facing skills together with the ability to troubleshoot. They’ll also have strong communication and project management skills together with a proactive approach and the flexibility to juggle multiple projects at the same time. Also required is the desire for continuous learning, to enable them to adapt to new technologies and tools so the organisation they work for remains competitive and agile.  

If you’re looking to take your DevOps career forward in 2025, or you’re looking for DevOps talent to drive success within your organisation get in touch with 83zero.