Hiring managers are increasingly looking for open source professionals, and two thirds of them say that the numbers of these specialists they hire will increase more than other areas of their businesses. Main drivers are company growth (60%), increasing use of open source technologies (42%), and open source becoming core to the business (30%).
Meanwhile, 86% of open source professionals believe that knowing open source has advanced their careers, and 52% say it would be easy to find another job. Only 27% report that they have not received a recruiting call in the past six months.
These are the main conclusions of the Open Source Jobs Report 2017, published by The Linux Foundation and technology job site Dice.
Areas of expertise
Cloud/virtualisation, application and web development, Linux, and Big Data are the areas of expertise most searched for, followed by networking and security. The positions most in demand are developers (73%), followed by DevOps Engineers (60%) and system administrators (53%).
Linux
According to the authors of the report, demand for Linux expertise is still high, but the open-source system is increasingly implicitly assumed as the underlying platform, for example for the most popular DevOps tools — Chef, Puppet and Ansible.
The same is true for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google's Cloud Platform. Even on Microsoft's Azure platform, 30% of the instances are running Linux, and this share is increasingly rapidly.
Not surprisingly, open source professionals report that they are increasingly working on container technology.
Certification
64% of hiring managers say their employees are either requesting or proactively taking training courses, up from 55% in 2016. Half of them report that finding certified professionals is a priority. The percentage of companies willing to pay for employees to become certified is increasing strongly.
According to Dice's annual salary survey, salaries for Linux professionals are in line with last year, at over USD 100,000 annually, higher than the average USD 92,000 for tech professionals in the USA.