Linux Skills in High Demand, Survey Finds
Coinciding with a robust U.S. jobs report for February, the Linux Foundation says recruiters remain "in hot pursuit of Linux talent."
According to the 2015 Linux Jobs Report released this week, a whopping 97 percent of hiring managers surveyed said they would be recruiting Linux coders and system administrators over the next six months. Half of the hiring managers surveyed said they would hire more Linux talent this year than last.
The bullish outlook stems in part from an improving U.S. economy and a thriving open source community. The Linux Foundation attributed the talent hunt to the emergence of open cloud platforms. The survey found that 42 percent of managers are looking for OpenStack and CloudStack experience. Other sought after Linux skills include security (23 percent) and software-defined networking (19 percent).
With demand for Linux skills growing, personnel departments are worried about a growing skills gap. Fully 88 percent of survey respondents said it is "very difficult" or "somewhat difficult" to identify candidates for a growing number of open source development projects. Similar concerns have been raised in the data analytics field, prompting a growing number of programming "boot camps" to help fill the skills gap.
As wages for most U.S. workers stagnate, a majority of Linux programmers said it would be "very" and "fairly" easy to land a new job in 2015. Seventy-two percent said they have received at least one recruiting call in the past six months. Twenty-eight percent of programmers survey said they had received six or more calls from recruiters over a six-month period.
High-profile security breaches have forced hiring managers to search for more Linux professionals to help secure cloud and other critical infrastructure. Interestingly, on 5 percent of hiring managers said they were looking for Linux programmers to work on much-hyped open-source application container projects.
"Just 19 percent of Linux professionals see it as the biggest area of growth in the industry," the survey report noted.
The economic "laws" of supply and demand are expected to work in favor of Linux programmers. While the survey does not include salary trends, it did find that "job offers, and employment perks continue to roll in." Ninety percent of Linux professionals acknowledged that their open source software skills have advanced their careers. That's an increase of four points over the previous year, the Linux Foundation noted.
Two-thirds of hiring managers surveyed said they looking to fill system administrator positions. In greatest demand this year will be Linux certified professionals with expertise in operational support of Linux systems.
The Linux job survey was conducted by technology recruiting specialist Dice.com during December 2014. More than 1,000 hiring managers and Linux programmers responded to the survey, including just over two-thirds who said they were based in North America.
Among the "trending searches" on the Dice recruitment site are "business analyst," "Java," "Hadoop," and "Dev Ops."
