I believe that obtaining the right skills for any organization is as much a cultural challenge as a skills-based one. Of course, as we pursue GE’s public cloud strategy, it’s valuable to find people with the right cloud skills on different platforms. It’s just as important, however, that they also have the willingness and openness to help mentor others that are just beginning their careers or are just starting to leverage these new cloud technologies.
To really obtain the benefits of cloud, the traditional infrastructure technology silos need to be broken down and team members need to become "full-stack engineers." This shift to more generalized cloud skill sets requires a strong company culture to navigate the change, but the payoff in speed, efficiency and quality is tremendous.
Thinking in terms of skills rather than roles, my priority list would be:
- Deep cloud provider skills: both big players and smaller niche players.
- Automation skills: which require a cultural mind shift from “I’m building a server” to “I’m figuring out how to leverage technologies and make this process repeatable."
- Development skills: for cloud native application development as well as foundational service development.
The list could go on, but in our culture at least we’re really asking people to become more rounded. Hiring the right set of core individuals and augmenting some of the deep skills they already have is really the challenge and, I’ve found so far, the best way to go.
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