Mr. Bhavesh Goswami is the Chief Executive Officer and the Founder of CloudThat – a Microsoft 2020 Learning Partner of the Year Award Finalist. Mr. Goswami has been working in the Cloud Computing space for over 10 years. He is deeply passionate about technology and keeps the company up to date on the latest Cloud technologies & market trends. His focus is on building CloudThat as a strong platform providing technology sources for organizations looking to utilize the flexibility and power of Cloud Computing.
With growing digitalization and adoption of developing technologies across industries, India is at the forefront of cloud use, seeing a tremendous increase with the shift to virtual working environment. At the outset of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, many organizations in India and worldwide migrated to a work-from-home model, which meant that important business functions had to be carried out on a virtual platform. Companies reacted to their new operating environments by increasing their investments in well-known cloud infrastructures such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud.
Also, many sectors feared coming to a standstill at the outset of the pandemic if the necessary technology solutions were not in place. The corporate world has seen a pandemic-driven acceleration toward digital transformation, exposing skill shortages that must be addressed as organizations shift into the post-pandemic new normal.
According to McKinsey Global Survey-2021 findings 58% of their respondents say that closing skill gaps in their organization workforces has become a higher priority since the pandemic began. And five key steps identified to close gaps are hiring, contracting, redeploying, releasing, and building skills within the current workforce.
Trend of Businesses Embracing Cloud Shift
Many businesses have seen what is required to quickly scale up the effort – professionals with expertise in this field and a desire to upskill. They migrated to cloud-based applications to manage complex workloads and remote working during the pandemic. Significant investment in cloud infrastructures has resulted from the growing demand for secure, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable technology solutions thus embracing the cloud shift in the post-pandemic world.
Acute Shortage of Cloud Skills & Skyrocketing Demands for Certified Professionals
According to Skill Soft’s Global Knowledge 2021 IT Skills and Salary Report, 76% of IT decision makers are facing acute shortage of required IT skills and scarcity of cloud computing skills is prominent amongst them.
Taking note of the developing skill shortages, many businesses are training personnel in the skills required to meet the demands of new tasks and employment resulting from pandemic-driven technological adoption. As more businesses and working professionals recognize the importance of lifelong learning, the demand for professional credentials is skyrocketing.
Furthermore, with over 608,000 cloud professionals across all verticals in India, the demand for cloud-related roles has grown exponentially since last year (+40%). Cloud-based applications such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) have helped many businesses keep running during the pandemic by underpinning a vast number of business systems. All these factors have triggered a surge for certified cloud professionals in the market.
Post-Pandemic Job Insecurity Pushing Professionals to Upskill
One of the biggest challenges posed by pandemic was job loss across sectors. This triggered many professionals to upskill and reskill in order to survive in the job market. Concurrently pandemic has also accelerated the demand for new job roles in the employment space that was unheard of few years back.
According to Korn Ferry report by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them. A research report also says, the need for cloud specialists is on the rise, with cloud-related opportunities accounting for approximately 10% of total jobs and 3 lakh active job searchers in November 2021.
Competing Cloud Service Providers Create Demand for Certifications
Though job insecurity prevailed during pandemic it also accelerated the digital transformation initiatives in various sectors. According to Gartner, Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services grew by 18.4% in 2021 to total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020.
The surge in demand for public cloud services has motivated major cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, and many more to enhance their certification portfolio in order to ensure better market share. These cloud providers are offering a plethora of certifications enabling both freshers and experienced professionals to upskill on cloud technologies. Moreover, they have strategic authorized training partnerships with different organizations like CloudThat to ensure their cloud certification offerings have a wider reach. Besides, certification aspirants are also offered plenty of learning and support materials to get certified.
On the whole, fierce competition amongst public cloud providers for a better market share is also significantly contributing to the increase in the number of professionals seeking cloud certification. Also, availability of plentiful free courseware on public domain to get trained on cloud technologies is also motivating professionals to get certified.
Get Trained in the Right Certification Path
Post-pandemic upskills and reskill have become the key mantra for professionals to secure a career in the cloud computing sphere. Though many trainings are available selecting the right training institute is critical for success. Always, getting trained from an authorized training partner of Azure, AWS, or GCP who disseminates the right skills and knowledge through industry-certified trainers is a vital factor. Importantly, Authorized Training Partners always adhere to the official course curriculum, provide access to real-world use cases and hands-on lab sessions providing the right path to a lucrative career in the cloud realm.
To conclude, post-pandemic the signs are clear that India’s workforce is attempting to engage in life-long learning and ‘get-certified and move up’ has become the key objective of both fresh and experienced technical professionals.