Red Hat has announced it will be opening its Training and Certification courses to its partners for no extra cost.
The open source software vendor said it recognises the need for hybrid cloud skills at the partner level so will be offering its self-paced online courses for free to help build knowledge around technologies such as cloud computing, containers, virtualisation, and automation.
The curriculum consists of 17 courses that are available in eight languages and can provide the foundational knowledge needed to develop skills in hybrid cloud computing. These can then be used to pursue further accreditation and certification away from Red Hat.
Courses cover areas including Red Hat system administration, Red Hat OpenShift administration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux automation with Ansible, and cloud-native microservices development with Quarkus.
Red Hat said it previously commissioned an IDC study that found the company’s training courses led to a three-year return on investment of 365%.
The IBM-owned company also plans to release additional courses throughout the year. Partners can also purchase instructor-led training alongside the self-paced courses should they wish.
“Partners play a critical role in Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud vision and customer success,” said Ken Goetz, vice president of enterprise customer success and business management at Red Hat.
“By expanding partner enablement offerings and Red Hat Training opportunities, we are empowering partners to deepen their abilities in delivering impactful customer solutions to unlock the open hybrid cloud with Red Hat technologies.”
Leaders at some of the biggest companies in the world have said the cloud skills shortage still affects them today. CISOs at TikTok and Euromoney, for example, detailed the difficulties they both faced when trying to recruit top talent in cloud technology, which ultimately led them to realise upskilling existing employees was the best method of filling their skills gaps.
Speaking at CPX360 last month, Martyn Booth, CISO at Euromoney, said the key to developing talent from within was having eager staff wanting to expand their skillset.
“We took the decision to train people internally, and those people now will probably consider themselves, and I would consider them as, cloud security experts,” he said. “Before, we had a very limited ability to manage that internally.”
Maya Horowitz, VP of research at Check Point, previously told IT Pro that veritable cloud experts are particularly rare in the market, and the ones that are experts often go to work for the cloud platforms themselves, leaving little talent available for other companies, such as IT service providers.
