24/05/2016

Recruiters looking for open source skill sets

The Linux Foundation has unveiled the results of its annual study of employment in the open source sector, which showed high demand for developers and cloud technology skills in particular.

2016 Open Source Jobs Report is the title of the annual study published jointly by the Linux Foundation and the Dice recruitment website. It clearly confirms the demand amongst open source professionals for specific training courses, one recent example of which is the Open Source School.

The figures are incontrovertible: 65% of the surveyed hiring managers reported that the recruitment of open source specialists would be the highest in their businesses over the next six months. As a result, the remuneration offered to future employees is rising for 79% of the surveyed professionals.

Development first and foremost

After five editions, the study expanded its field of analysis beyond specialists in the Linux operating system. It is based on responses from 405 hiring managers, 3/4 of them North American, and from 4,500 open source professionals around the world. Some of its key lessons include:

— 59% of hiring managers will be seeking additional open source talent in the next six months. This figure is up from last year, when the question was specific to Linux specialists.

— 87% of managers say it’s hard to find open source talent.

— The most sought-after profiles are developers (74%), following by DevOps (58%).

— The reasons for professionals in the sector deciding to join a particular company are based above all on how interesting the projects are to them (31%), then on the cutting edge technologies employed (18%), quickly followed by the ability to work with the global open source community (17%). Salary and job security were relegated to the end of the line at a respective 2% and 5%.

— The most popular skills among recruiters relate to cloud technologies (51%), with OpenStack and CloudStack topping the list.

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