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September 7, 2017

Featured Resource: DevOps Careers

By IT Revolution

Leading up to DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco, we’ll be releasing our most valuable DevOps resources to our community on a weekly basis.

Each of these resources come to you straight from the DevOps Enterprise Forum, where more than 50 technology leaders and thinkers gather for three days to create written guidance on the best-known methods for overcoming the top obstacles in the DevOps Enterprise community.


Many organizations list a skills gap as one of their primary obstacles to achieving and sustaining a high-functioning DevOps-based organization. This resource attempts to provide practical guidance to organizations on developing, recruiting, and retaining DevOps talent.

In this week’s resource we discuss:

  • Career Path — An information technology career path involves the progressive development of an individual throughout their career. While there could be many steps along this path, we provide principles and guidance on career steps based on three levels, starting with an entry level role to a mid-level master to an expert level leader.
  • Early Career — First, we evaluate how interns, college graduates, junior engineers, and entry-level IT professionals looking to begin their career in a DevOps model should consider the more generalist nature of their roles.
  • Middle Career — Next, we discuss how IT professionals who have reached a point in their career where they are very well established in their field must make a concerted effort to stay current and resist the propensity to become vertically specialized without horizontal, cross-discipline collaboration.
  • Leaders — Then, we look at IT professionals who have adopted the middle career principles and are looking to further expand their influence and impact will look to move into more of a leadership role. It is generally at this point that the choice between a management path or a technical leader path is considered. There are common principles to both paths, but there are also unique elements that we will consider within this section.
  • The Supply Side: Working Force Creation and Ongoing Development —  While there are a number of ways the digital/IT workforce is educated and trained, but there appears to be a large and growing gap between industry practice and traditional four-year education; in this final section, we evaluate the traditional education sector as a means by which the majority of the workforce is created.

The authors on each of these resources will be prominent figures in the industry, and on this particular one, we have three industry leaders working together. They include:

  • Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering, The Walt Disney Company
  • Chivas Nambiar, Director, Systems Engineering, Verizon
  • Paula Thrasher, Director, Digital Services, CSRA

Here are two amazing presentations from authors on this week’s resource.

Chivas Nambiar

Paula Thrasher


If you’re eager to continue learning about these topics and more, come see how you can be a part of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco. We spend three days talking with the leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps principles and practices, with the goal to give leaders (like you) the tools and practices they need to develop and deploy software faster and to win in the marketplace.

- About The Authors
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IT Revolution

Trusted by technology leaders worldwide. Since publishing The Phoenix Project in 2013, and launching DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we’ve been assembling guidance from industry experts and top practitioners.

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