Interest in hiring open source workers is on the rise, with 60 percent of companies surveyed looking for full-time hires, compared with 53 percent last year, according to the 2017 Open Source Jobs Report.
Hiring managers from 280 global businesses, along with 1,800 open source professionals participated in the July study by The Linux Foundation and tech career firm Dice.
That’s good news if you have open source skills; indeed, 86 percent of professionals say open source has advanced their careers. The not-so-good news is 89 percent of hiring managers are finding it difficult to find this type of talent, which is in line with last year’s finding of 87 percent. The specific areas hiring managers say open source talent is in short supply are developers (73 percent), DevOps (60 percent) and SysAdmins (53 percent).
It’s no wonder then that 67 percent of managers are eyeing these hires more than other areas of business in the next six months. Fifty-eight percent say they will hire more open source professionals in that timeframe with expertise in cloud (70 percent), web technologies (67 percent) and Linux (65 percent).
Because of the challenges hiring open source professionals, 47 percent of employers say they are willing to pay for employees’ certifications, which is up from 33 percent in 2016. Meanwhile, 55 percent of hiring managers are making formal training a priority and seeking certification in new open source hires.