How Modernizing your DevOps Solutions Can Help Close the Skills Gap

By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

In today’s hiring climate, the premium on attracting and retaining technical talent is steep. As more organizations look to digitally transform, the need for technical talent has increased. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the demand for computer and information technology jobs will grow 13% from 2020 to 2030, adding 667,000 more tech jobs in that timeframe. But due to compounding factors – like an aging workforce, ongoing pandemic, and the era of the Great Reshuffle – organizations are struggling to find the technical talent they need.

Organizations should invest in and integrate modernized software – like updated DevOps tools and approaches – into their business operations to better attract and retain sought-after technical and developer talent. With modern software, organizations can offer talented developers the chance to work on mission-critical applications with continuous integration continuous delivery (CI/CD)—which is not only attractive to developers, but also good for business.

A recent survey by Rocket Software found that as companies continue to face skills gaps in their talent pool, modernizing systems is the most popular way they are working to maintain talent pipelines, with 45% of respondents citing it as the top method. Here are ways organizations can go about modernizing their DevOps solutions.

Empower flexibility for CI/CD

DevOps in the mainframe can enable faster development of new products and easier maintenance of existing deployments – empowering businesses to stay ahead of market disruptors. But as technology and approaches evolve, organizations’ DevOps solutions need to be able to meet those changing needs. An up-to-date DevOps solution delivers the flexibility engineering and DevOps teams need to test the right things at the right time, quickly experiment, make changes and adapt as needed — driving innovation throughout the business.

A useful DevOps solution includes CI/CD tools that help automate the building, testing, and deployment of projects to move them from development to production more quickly. IT teams will be able to automate as much manual, error-prone work as possible, relieving the workloads of already strapped IT personnel and driving faster time to market. CI/CD in a mainframe environment plays a vital role in reducing time to market and a faster return on investment.

Provide a strong DevOps UX

Not only are organizations struggling to attract and retain technical talent in today’s competitive market, but the number of developers who understand code on mainframe systems is limited. A modern DevOps platform integrates popular third-party and open-source DevOps tools, standardizing DevOps processes across an organization and enabling an easy-to-use interface for developers no matter their technical background.

Another critical aspect of an updated DevOps solution organizations should look for is for it to enable end-to-end DevSecOps, which is different from DevOps in that it integrates security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle. By providing mainframe development and delivery teams with a solution that delivers everything from deployment management to testing, teams can develop and deploy high quality code not just quickly and efficiently, but also and quite importantly, securely.

Keeping an organization’s most important systems running optimally requires an experienced team of developers, but with a limited number of professionals who have a deep technological understanding of mainframe systems and a generation of talent quickly moving toward retirement, organizations are facing a skills shortage. Attracting new developers in the current hiring climate will be dependent on employers’ ability to offer prospective employees modernized DevOps tools and approaches that allow them to focus on innovation and driving the business forward.

To learn more about the power of DevOps on the mainframe and how it can help bridge the skills gap, visit Rocket Software’s page.

IT Leadership, Software Development