I just read an interesting article written by Patrick Thibodeau from Computerworld which described the difficulties IT managers are having finding staffers with virtualization experience and expertise:
As more organizations adopt server virtualization software, they’re also looking to hire people who have worked with the technology in live applications.
But such workers can be hard to find, as Joel Sweatte, IT manager at East Carolina University’s College of Technology and Computer Science, recently discovered when he placed a help-wanted ad for an IT systems engineer with virtualization skills.
Sweatte received about 40 applications for the job at the Greenville, N.C.-based university, but few of the applicants had any virtualization experience, and he ended up hiring someone who had none. “I’m fishing in an empty ocean,” Sweatte said.
To give his new hire a crash course in virtualization, Sweatte brought him to market leader VMware Inc.’s annual user conference in San Francisco last month. “That’s a major expenditure for a university,” Sweatte said of the conference and travel costs. “[But] I wanted him to take a drink from the fire hose.”
If the industry is having trouble finding IT generalists with training in virtualization security, I can only imagine the dearth of qualified security experts in the hopper. I wonder when the first SANS course in virtualization security will surface?
I'm interested in understanding how folks are approaching security training for their server ops, audit, compliance and security teams. If you wouldn't mind, please participate in the poll below. This is the first time I've used Visu Polls, and you'll need to enable scripting/Flash to make this work: