Cloud skills forecast: HotHow many jobs are out there? The lines between the cloud, big data, SaaS, and more conventional architectures are blurred, but you can get a sense of the breadth of demand by looking at Dice, one of the largest IT-oriented job boards.
As of August, there were 10,771 jobs in six categories that Dice deems cloud-related, compared to 8,217 the year before, an increase of 31%. A look at the categories that comprise Dice's cloud set -- vCloud, cloud, VMware, virtualization, Xen, and Hyper-V -- shows how hard it is to get an accurate handle on demand, as some also pertain to traditional IT data center consolidation and other skills, such as Linux and Python. They're often cloud-related but not classified as such on the job board.
Wanted Analytics, a Quebec-based firm that tracks employment statistics, believes the market for cloud skills is even hotter. The company counted advertisements appearing in April for 12,000 cloud-related IT jobs, an increase of 50% over 2011, and 275% over 2010. Talent in many areas is so tight it's taking weeks to fill positions. In Seattle, the area with the most pressing labor shortage, cloud-related jobs are going begging for an average of seven weeks, Wanted Analytics reported. A third job service, Indeed.com, says that jobs with the keyword "cloud" in its database jumped from 18,862 in August 2011, to 31,998 in August 2012, an increase of 70%.
So pervasive is the cloud or, in some cases, the idea of the cloud, that a recent analysis of national help-wanted ads by Wanted Analytics found cloud computing is now entering the job description of non-IT positions, including marketing managers, sales managers, customer service representatives, and even cargo and freight agents.
Consider the huge demand for IT hires at Amazon Web Services, the largest public cloud provider. AWS currently has "many hundreds" of openings related to cloud computing. At other times, it's had upward of 1,000, says Adam Selipsky, Amazon's VP of Web services.
