What Top Employers Want in Cloud Talent

When a record that’s stood for 15 years in tech employment statistics is broken, people take notice. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the month of July, 3,600 jobs were created in data processing, hosting and related services. That’s the single best month of job growth in this category since June 1998.

The likely driver is the cloud service providers that report in this category. The cloud is making infrastructure positions at companies more strategic and less task-based, which makes adaptable talent even more valuable in the long run.

So what do hiring managers want in cloud talent? By analyzing recruiters’ searches in Open Web, Dice’s latest sourcing tool, the hiring agenda becomes clear.

Click through for a list of the top cloud skills being searched for on Dice.com.

First is a vendor preference – experience working with Amazon Web Services is sought in nearly half of all searches. That compares with nearly zero searches distinguishing among private, hybrid and public cloud, although the experiences needed may be different.

Open source is a clear theme, from Linux to configuration management systems like Chef and Puppet to programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby. All make the top 10 most popular cloud-adjacent requests.

Demand for DevOps engineers continues to grow – as noted by their ranking on the list. And, there is plenty of evidence on the Dice site, too. The superstar coupling of development and operations talent now has nearly 500 jobs posted on any given day – that compares to slightly less than 200 last fall.

Finally, the generic entry of “solution” on the list only means one thing: more salespeople, more consultants. That should keep the job growth for the service providers on a cloud streak.