This newsletter contains useful information about the automation engineering industry. Our staff is mainly comprised of engineers so there is a lot of relevant content for both management level and engineering focused readers. We hope you enjoy the content!

• Core Jobs and Resume Analysis: What is the gap between skills in demand versus skills available.

• Recommended Training: We take and deliver a lot of training. Check out our recommendations below.

• Recommended Tools: With automation engineering, there are a lot of tools. In this section we recommend tools that have had the most impact on recent projects.

• Upcoming Events: We deliver live and virtual events almost every quarter. Stay tuned and check out our upcoming events.

• Recent Blogs: CMG is always giving back to the automation engineering community in the forms of videos, blogs, and webinars. This section highlights some great technical blogs you may find interesting.

• Customer Case Study: While we do not share our customers' names (without their permission), we love to share solutions we deliver that increase our customers' productivity.

Core Job Data: DevOps Entry Level Jobs

Each month in this section, we share trends and insights on IT Automation jobs from both the employer and job seeker perspective. We collect data on job postings and candidate resumes in areas including DevOps, DevSecOps, Data Science, and Full Stack Development. The data is collected from public sources on the Internet, aggregated, and evaluated to provide you pertinent information about the industry. 

We use data engineering, preprocessing, Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to provide the information listed below.  There are many questions we can ask of the data and observations we can make. This month we wanted to look at the entry-level DevOps job postings and the candidates available in the United States.

From the job posting data, we answer the following questions:

• Where are the jobs posted?

• What are the most popular skills in demand?

• Where are the jobs located? Which states have the most job postings?

• How do the skills available align with skills in demand? 

From the candidate data, we answer the following questions:

• What skills are advertised on the resumes?

• How do the skills advertised align with the skills in demand in the job postings?

The goal is to provide some insight into the number of skilled candidates versus the number of jobs and skills requested. This helps us to understand the gaps between the skills requested by the job postings versus the skills possessed by the candidates.  We specifically focus on recent graduates from top 130 computer science programs with less than two years of experience. All the analysis was performed using Python, CI/CD Pipelines, Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). As this data changes over time, we will provide periodic updates with new or updated analysis.

Explaining the Data

At the beginning of each quarter, we gather information from multiple job sites on the currently posted resumes and currently posted jobs in the United States. For this newsletter we examined the data available for entry-level DevOps positions. To determine if a job was a DevOps job, we searched the title of the job posting for “DevOps” (case insensitive and accounting for the possible occurrence of a space between “Dev” and “Ops”). We determined if a job was entry-level based on the job site tagging the job as entry level. 

Where are the jobs posted? 

This led us to narrow our search data down to two job sites: Indeed and LinkedIn. In the chart below, you will see the breakdown of the 1,669 total entry-level DevOps jobs that we found on the two sites. 

What are the most popular skills in demand? 

The chart below shows the top 15 skills for entry-level DevOps candidates. No surprise. DevOps is the top skill; the chart is self-explanatory. 

Where are the jobs located? Which states have the most job postings? 

We can also determine where the jobs are physically located. Over a quarter of the jobs (444, or 26.6%) were marked as remote. The remaining 1,225 jobs (73.4%) had a physical location identified, 99% (1,213) of which we could identify the location in the United States.

What skills are advertised on the resumes? 

The image below represents the top 15 skills advertised on candidate resumes. The counts are based on aggregated frequency distribution of all resumes (deduplicated). 

How do the skills available align with skills in demand? 

When we compare the top 25 skills in demand (those in the job postings) to the skills available (those in the candidate resumes), we see a significant mismatch. As would be expected, DevOps is the top skill listed for a DevOps job, but the number of entry-level candidates who list that skill specifically on their resume is significantly lower than the jobs needing the skill. While basic development skills such as Python, Java, Git, Github, and SQL have ample candidates available, the remaining 20 skills show significant gaps in the supply and demand. What this indicates is that more training is needed for entry-level candidates across a broader spectrum of skills. In lieu of colleges and universities adjusting to account for this, employers need to know when hiring new candidates that there will be significant training required to develop the skills needed. CMG trains our team on current and legacy technologies to ensure we do not suffer these gaps. The typical turnaround time to close the skills gap is approximately twelve to eighteen (12-18) months. At CMG we use this data to develop a targeted training and mentoring curriculum to align with the top skills in demand. Hence, the CMG “Day One Ready Resources” claim. The image below shows a direct comparison between the skills in demand vs the skills advertised on resumes.

Core Job Data: Summary

CMG uses this data to make our resources “Day One Ready” to support customer projects, staff augmentation, or managed services requirements. You can use this data to determine how you, your team, or company aligns with the state of the industry.

Recommended Training

If you're always hearing about automation and continuous integration without some supporting context, you will love this training. At CMG we take a lot of training to keep our team on the cutting edge. We highly recommend this training available from Udemy. It will teach you a lot about Automation, Git, YAML, and using CI/CD pipelines. This training will also give you some perspective on how you can move from legacy CI/CD pipeline tools to something more full-featured and contemporary. This course is relatively short (5 Hours) and is completely hands-on.

Recommended Tools

If you are working in information assurance for the Department of Defense and suffer the grueling process known as RMF (Risk Management Framework), you will want to check out OpenRMF Pro. This tool converts months of work down to minutes by providing a set of tools for Continuous Compliance Automation. Aside from saving you time it will save you a significant amount of money. This tool will free your information assurance team up to focus on fixing and validating vulnerabilities instead of documenting their existence.

There is a free open-source version and the Pro version. The Pro version is what you will need in your production environment. You can read more about OpenRMF here:

https://www.openrmf.io/ The open-source version is on GitHub at this location: https://github.com/cingulara/openrmf-docs/

Upcoming Events

December 9, 2021

Recent Blogs

Quick Customer Case Study

We recently engaged an enterprise customer that was manually uploading, and preprocessing data into their new IT Asset Management (ITAM) platform using spreadsheets. While most ITAM platforms have a method for importing spreadsheets, comma-separated value files (CSV), and the like, many ITAM administrators are not very familiar with REST APIs and how they can be used with CI/CD pipelines to automate the ingestion process. Our resources worked with the customer to identify the data sources, architected connections, authentication, and automation requests via CI/CD pipelines. Various tactics were used for connections based on the location and accessibility of the data. We used REST APIs, SQL queries, and SFTP connections (all run from Docker containers) to request the data, preprocess the data, and map the fields to the appropriate endpoints on the ITAM platforms API. Contact us to discuss how we can help you automate your repeatable tasks.

If you want to discuss how you might be able to leverage DevOps, DevSecOps, Automation, Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing in your environment, reach out to us here at CMG. You can even set up a meeting with us if you’d like. We’d love to discuss how we can help you with your DevOps automation and integration needs!