Companies and organizations continue to increase their recruitment of open source technology talent while offering increased educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps. The Linux Foundation and edX have released the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report which reveals spike in demand for DevOps talent and continued dearth of open source skills.

According to the report, 93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding open source talent and 63% say their organizations have begun to support open source projects with code or other resources for the explicit reason of recruiting individuals with those software skills, a significant jump from the 48% who stated this in 2018.

DevOps has also become the top role hiring managers are looking to fill (65% are looking to hire DevOps talent), moving demand for developers to second (59%) for the first time in this report’s history.

Also, 74% of employers are now offering to pay for employee certifications, up from 55% in 2018, 47% in 2017, and only 34% in 2016.

A full 80% of employers now report that they provide online training courses for employees to learn open-source software, up from 66% two years ago.

In terms of knowledge domains, hiring managers report knowledge of open cloud technologies has the most significant impact, with 70% being more likely to hire a pro with these skills, up from 66% in 2018.