At Red Hat Summit 2015, Ken Goetz, Vice President of Global Learning Services, Pete Hnath, Director of Curriculum, and Randy Russell, Director of Certification, took to the stage to address the technology training market and to highlight the new features, courses, and plans for Red Hat Training and Certification. The two main topics these leaders in Global Learning Services wanted to stress were how Red Hat Training is facilitating the implementation of next generation architecture with new content and how Red Hat Training is expanding the ways they offer training.

“We can offer courses, provide the training, and create exams or certifications to validate a student's skills, but that is not enough. We need to make our training more consumable, more accessible, more just-in-time,” Ken said.

Demands of Cloud and Linux skills
Ken began the presentation by outlining the opportunities in the current market, specifically in cloud technologies. He stated that IDC is predicting 5 million cloud jobs will be left unfilled in 2015. He quoted that IT hiring managers are reporting that the biggest reason they fail to fill open positions for cloud-related IT jobs is due to the candidates' lack of sufficient training, experience, and certification. It is the largest barrier that must be overcome to adopt cloud technologies.

Ken then stated that there is a high demand for trained Linux professionals as well, and this has lead to a shortfall. According to Ken, 90% of IT managers intend to hire people with Linux skills in the next 6 months.

DevOps: A Reality
Randy asked the members of the audience if they had been in the IT industry long enough to remember when virtualization was just starting to be mentioned. He joked about how it is a part the industry and very much a reality. He continued on to say that, much like virtulization, DevOps is becoming a reality. “There was a time when customers would complain to the vendors when there were issues, and they would have to wait until the next big release to get the updates. They would hope they would have their requested updates included, but it might have not been. With mobile devices, consumers are opening apps on their phones and finding that something has changed almost every time,” Randy said.

It is continuous integration, continuous delivery, and a common environment. It is a different mind-set. It is a different approach. “Philosophically, we don’t see DevOps as a tool–you won’t go out and buy the DevOps tool,” Ken shared after Randy. “It’s not a person. You can’t hire the DevOps guy or gal. It’s a multi-role thing. Developers, QA, production–everyone must be on board. It’s a philosophy. A way of approaching things.”

From a course development standpoint, the same philosophy is true. Instead of teaching a tool, Red Hat must teach customers how to automate and orchestrate their systems, using a multidisciplinary approach. “DevOps doesn’t traditionally speak to a classroom environment, so our focus is on the delivery pipeline,” Ken said.

DevOps in Training
From a course stand-point, traditional instruction is still necessary, with product-focused coursework as the foundation for the future DevOps learning. A few of the product-focused topics are: Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and Red Hat JBoss Middleware.

The next step forward is DevOps concept courses, which are in the planning stages. They are the middle ground between product-based training and pure conceptual instruction. Topics could include:

  • Agile development with OpenShift by Red Hat
  • OpenShift by Red Hat architecture and administration
  • Application deployment automation with Puppet

Pete Hnath indicated their stretch goal is to one day add pure, process-based courses. This could include topics such as developing code for continuous delivery and continuous integration and quality assurance.

New Offerings
Red Hat OpenStack Administration (CL210) is the most popular Red Hat Training course, outside of the RHCE-track courses, and they were excited to share that there are new OpenStack offerings. “The training path for this popular technology will mimic the popular Red Hat Certified Engineer track with 3 levels, advanced exams, and upper-level content for solutions like Red Hat Ceph Storage. Offerings will be updated to add instruction on new features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6,” said Randy.

Pete highlighted two new courses: Managing containers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host (RH270) and Building Advanced Red Hat Enterprise Applications (JB501).

Managing containers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host (RH270)
This 3-day course teaches students to manage containerized apps using Dockerfile container orchestration with Kubernetes.

Building Advanced Red Hat Enterprise Applications (JB501)
This course is for advanced middleware developers, and focuses primarily on a front- and back-office integration case study, using multiple middleware products, including:

  • Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
  • Red Hat JBoss Data Grid
  • Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite
  • Red Hat JBoss BRMS
  • Red Hat Fuse
  • Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization

Red Hat Learning Subscription: Making training easier
There are many different factors that make it difficult to deliver training courses, such as a new student demographic that prefers on-demand, self-directed learning, new or inexperienced staff, continuous release cycles that require continuous learning, time, cross-training, post-course support for students, global coverage, and cost-effective training.

To solve these challenges, Red Hat Training was proud to introduce Red Hat Learning Subscription, a learning subscription that provides unlimited access to all of Red Hat's online learning courses, content, videos, and labs.

Watch the break-out session for yourself.

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