Sean D. Mack

I am so super excited to be back in person. I got to present here last year, but that was virtual, and connection and community are so important to DevOps. There is something about being in person that just makes it easier. I am really excited to be here with all of you. We have also found new ways to connect, so I also think it is important to welcome the folks who are joining online. It is great to be here in person.

I want to start by giving a big thanks to the folks at IT Revolution and all the folks who have come together to put this show together. Let's give them a big round of applause.

The reason we are here to talk today is because building teams is more challenging than ever. DevOps is currently one of the most in-demand skills in the job market today. With ever-increasing rates of resignations and the proliferation of the number of skills you have to have to do the job, it is getting harder and harder to find and build great DevOps engineering teams.

Today we are going to take a look at what the skill gap is, what is driving that skill gap, and what you can do to help resolve that skill gap in your organization. I will start with a quick introduction. Then we will get into the skill gap, what it is and why it exists. Then we will talk about what you can do to bridge that skill gap. I will get into specific details about what we are doing at Wiley to bridge that skill gap, and then some of the next steps you can take in your organization going forward from here.

We have a lot to cover, so let's jump right in. I do not want to spend a ton of time on myself or on Wiley, but I do want to provide a little context to what I am going to be speaking about today.

I am Sean Mack. I am the CIO and CISO at Wiley. I have led a large number of global technology teams, from large financials like Experian to innovative tech companies like Etsy. I have been with Wiley for just over three years now, and I love being at a company that focuses on education and research. I am glad to be here today to share a bit about our DevOps journey and the teams we built.

Wiley is a global leader in research and education. Our mission is to unlock human potential by enabling discovery, powering education, and shaping workforces. Wiley is primarily known as a publishing company, but now more than ever we are a tech-enabled research and education company. We have a pretty diverse technology portfolio, with everything from legacy applications to modern containerized microservice-based applications hosted in the cloud and our data centers around the world. We develop and maintain more than 200 applications, with many big ones powering some of the main online education platforms today.

We are transforming, and this is another reason I love being part of this company, because we are transforming at every level. Our businesses are fundamentally changing, and so too must the technology and the ways of working we have to power them. When I started, pre-pandemic, our CEO Brian Napack said that we are not in a single market that is not going through massive transformation. He is right. If you look at research and the transformation to open access, and education and the transformation to online education, those transformations have only been accelerated because of the pandemic. Wiley has been around for more than 200 years, about 218 now. We have only been around that long because of our ability to continue to transform, and DevOps is a big part of that transformation.

Transformation is something we are doing at every level, and DevOps is helping to drive that transformation. But enough about the background. Let's dive into the DevOps skill gap.

In order to address the skill gap, we need to first understand it. What is a skill gap? Fundamentally, it is a mismatch between the knowledge an employer needs to meet their business objectives and the capabilities of an organization's employees. More basically: I cannot hire enough SREs. I cannot get enough DevOps.

This is a real problem. Eighty-seven percent of executives say they have massive skill gaps. The other thing to note is the growth of skills we need to do our jobs and the changing technologies we have to keep up with every day. Another study found that 19% of employee skills will be irrelevant in just three years.

In a recent study by ZDNet, DevOps was in the top five functional areas identified as gaps in technology experience. Thirty-eight percent of IT leaders said that they now have a skill gap in DevOps. Interestingly, and you will see a theme here, in that same article 86% of senior IT leaders said that business acumen is also an important skill. You will hear throughout this that it is not just about the technical skills. I think a lot of us who are in SRE roles know this. It is not just about knowing the technology. It is about how we work.

Why do we have a skill gap? I am going to dig into two sources of information. One is the World Economic Forum. They publish the Future of Jobs Report, which covers excellent insight into the challenges we are facing based on research across 26 major economies. The other is the DevOps Institute Global Upskilling Report, which gives insight into the most in-demand job characteristics.

The picture we see emerging is that there are three real reasons for this: one, demand growth; two, retention challenges; and three, the skill mismatch.

Demand growth should be relatively obvious to anybody who is here. Over the past 15 years, technology jobs have risen by more than 50%. There is a huge market and a huge demand.

In addition to the growing demand, we have seen significant increases in resignation rates, what many have called the Great Resignation. This is impacting businesses all across the board. Right now resignations are pretty much at their highest level in the past 20-plus years. A couple of things are interesting to me as I look at this chart. One is that what many called the Great Resignation looks to be a bit of a bounce-back as people were entrenched during the pandemic and said, no, I am staying right where I am because I do not know what is changing. Then after that we see a relatively huge spike. It may just be a bounce-back. In fact, if you look overall, it looks like a relatively linear trend. The other thing to note is that we have seen some easing of the resignation rate in the past couple months as the economy softens a bit, and as many economists are predicting the economy will continue to soften. I think we will see that drop off a bit, but I do not think it will be enough to help us with our current challenges.

The third pressure driving the skill gap is this proliferation of skills needed to do the job. The pace of technology adoption is only accelerating, and this proliferation of in-demand skills means it is increasingly hard to find the people we need with the skills we need. In fact, technology is developing so rapidly that employees are now looking for jobs at levels that do not even exist yet.

What are the skills that are most in demand? We are going to look at the DevOps Institute Global Upskilling IT Report. This shows that cognitive skills are of the utmost importance to DevOps leaders. Of course technology skills are right up there, too, but we also see that process skills are a close third. It is interesting to me to note that two of the top three most in-demand skills are non-technical. As we dig into the human skills that are necessary, as an employer it is harder to interview and ascertain those skills.

I am not going to dig into each facet of this report, but I will go through at a high level and emphasize some of the points. When we look at the human skills, it is not surprising that collaboration ranks among the top. What is interesting is that the pandemic seems to have given rise to the importance of entrepreneurship and flexibility. These are key things that many of us have needed during the turbulent times of the past couple of years.

If we look at process skills, DevOps is of course number one. There may be a little audience bias here, but DevOps ranks among the top in those surveys. Agile is number two and ITSM is number three. It is interesting because I feel like all three of these have a pretty decent level of overlap between them.

On technology skills, this report separates automation and technology. It is music to my ears as the CISO that cybersecurity is one of the top technology skills. This also resonates with me as we continue to use our SREs to implement best practices for security. On automation, CI/CD tops the list, not surprisingly, as this is essential to the ways we work within the DevOps community.

The last thing I want to say about the types of skills that are in demand today is the evolution of the type of employee we are looking for. We have been talking about the evolution from the I-shaped person to the T-shaped person: from the person who is highly specialized to the person who has specialization but also breadth of knowledge. That person not only knows how to develop deeply in a given language, but also knows how to operate that system on a platform and understands it more holistically. What we have seen lately is this evolution from T-shaped to E-shaped. E-shaped people have experience as well, and this comes in different forms: expertise, exploration, and execution. We are looking at broader and broader, more well-rounded employees.

This skill gap is having a very real impact on our business. In a survey of business leaders, over 55% noted that they were not able to innovate effectively. Think about that. They also noted that the gap was driving up the cost of resources while driving down the quality of work. I have certainly seen this. Perhaps most importantly, those surveys noted that they were unable to meet market opportunities due to the gap.

The big takeaway is that there is going to be a supply and demand gap. What we need is outpacing what is available, so we need to find new ways of addressing this demand gap.

How do we address this supply and demand gap? There are two main pieces of the puzzle that I am going to talk about today. One is to create new skills through emerging talent: generate pools of talent that have the specific skills you need for your business. The second piece is upskilling and reskilling: fill the gap by reskilling talent that is already within your organization.

Emerging talent strategies focus on leveraging new entrants to the workforce to solve the skill gap. This often looks like graduate programs, internships, and early-career development. But there are some things we need to focus on if we are going to take this approach. We cannot just say, hey, let's have an internship or let's have a graduate program. We need to focus on training and ongoing learning development. These people are coming into your organization very new and very early in their career, and they are going to need that ongoing support.

They offer some real benefits. You get a lower-cost model than hiring a senior SRE. You can find someone in training, and you get to train them in exactly the skills you need for your company. It also gives us an opportunity to diversify our team.

Diversity is really important. The likes of McKinsey and PwC have demonstrated the measurable value that diversity brings to a team. By representing the diverse society we operate in and the customers we serve, we bring a greater number of ideas and innovation. But according to a report by Tech Nation, only 15% of tech workers are from Black, Asian, and minority backgrounds, and only 19% are women.

With these types of programs, we have an opportunity to train and bring in a more diverse group of people. Wiley Edge, which is our Wiley program to do this, just launched a program specifically focused on women in technology to really build that talent pool and bring it directly into organizations.

Building pipelines of emerging talent is just one piece of the puzzle. Solving the supply and demand issue cannot be met by hiring alone. We also have to look at reskilling your workforce as a complementary strategy.

The benefits of reskilling are extensive. Reskilling is lower cost and lower risk. We do not risk having a bad hire if it is someone who is already working for our company. We know that person. They are a great employee. Let's find a way to train them with the skills we need today. It also creates better loyalty. Employees with internal mobility are two and a half times more likely to stay than other employees. We also see tenure rise for those employees from about 2.9 years to 5.4 years.

It is not at all surprising to see that upskilling and reskilling are two top priorities for learning and development professionals globally.

I want to get into a little bit about how we are applying this at Wiley. First, we work to find new opportunities for our employees to grow and learn. A great example: recently there was a really talented SRE, and we moved him onto our mergers and acquisitions integration team. He is now the front line for new companies coming in to Wiley. He gets to work with all sorts of different businesses to bring them into the Wiley SRE practices and the Wiley DevOps ways. He gets exposure to a much broader swath of the organization, so he is also learning and developing.

We are also building out new capabilities. We recently launched our database reliability engineering team. We are also building out a platform reliability engineering function.

The second thing we do is develop a culture of learning and collaboration, and in that collaboration we find opportunities. Our operations center provides a great jumping-off point to get into other places of the organization. We have people who started there who are now all over the organization, whether in our development teams, our SRE teams, or cross-organization in our marketing teams. They get to see everything Wiley does, then learn about it and grow through the organization.

As an education company, we focus on providing training and development opportunities. Sometimes we use external sources like Linux Academy or O'Reilly Safari, but we also have internal resources like zyBooks, which is a really cool learning platform, and Wiley Edge, which has an SRE training program. That is another key piece to growing our existing talent.

We also have to focus on retaining existing talent. A couple things we do here: one is to make sure we have a clear vision of where we want to go. At Wiley, what I try to do is align our vision with our objectives and with the projects we are doing at any given time, so there is a real clear line of sight between what you are doing, what you are working on today, and where the company is going tomorrow.

I also am always driving to be more ambitious. I find that creative, innovative people like a challenge and respond to it well, and want to be engaged. That is the type of people we want at Wiley.

As I mentioned, create a culture of learning. We just had our third Wiley DevOps Days. It was awesome. These things have grown to be a huge success, probably the biggest tech event at Wiley. We had external speakers. Last time we had Patrick Debois join us to kick off the event. We had internal speakers from our development teams, our networking team, and our security team. It is really cool to see these people so passionate about what they do. They want to come and share it with the entire company. We had hundreds of people joining from around the globe.

We strive to make work frictionless. Our goal is to make work as seamless as possible so people can focus on doing what they love and get into that flow state, because that makes satisfied employees who are happy with what they are doing and want to continue to come back.

That is a bit about what we are doing at Wiley. Where do we go from here? The technology market is experiencing a great deal of growth. The pace of change of technology is continuing to advance, and it is going to mean continued displacement of jobs. We need to act now to create reskilling and emerging talent programs to be able to outpace the competition.

As the market continues to grow, I encourage you to make diversity your superpower. Not only does it open up new talent markets, but it also yields better results. If we look back on the impact, the inability to innovate and the inability to meet new market opportunities, it becomes pretty evident that it is a business imperative to address the skill gap.

I hope you found something useful in this talk today. I really appreciate you being here. I love being back in person. If you want more information, check out the DevOps Institute Upskilling Report; you can get that online. I also encourage you to connect with me. You can find me on LinkedIn. I am Sean D. Mack NYC, and you can continue the discussion with me on Twitter. If you are passionate about technology, I encourage you to join the Wiley team. You can find out about opportunities at wiley.com/careers. Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.