Jumpstart your Career in Cloud Application Development

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The ongoing cloud transition has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis: Cloud spending rose 37% to $29 billion during the first quarter of 2020. This trend is likely to persist, as the move to virtual work underscores the urgency for scalable, secure, reliable, cost-effective off-premises technology services. According to Gartner, despite the inevitable economic downturn in the wake of the pandemic, cloud spending is estimated to rise 18% for the full year, even as IT spending as a whole is forecast to fall 8%. Here’s how Forrester predicts cloud computing will help companies around the world accelerate pandemic recovery in 2021:

• Hyperscale public cloud market return to hypergrowth. Forrester predicts that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021
• Cloud-native tech demand will spike as serverless and containers heat up. Prior to the pandemic, about 20% of developers regularly used container and serverless functions to build new apps and modernize old ones. We predict 25% of developers will use serverless and nearly 30% will use containers regularly by the end of 2021, creating a spike in global demand for both multi-cloud container development platforms and public-cloud container/serverless services.
• On-premises disaster recovery (DR) strategies will fade, with recovery bound for the cloud. COVID-19 shined a bright light on every company unprepared to recover from a data center outage and refocused enterprise IT teams on improving resiliency. Before the pandemic, few companies protected data and workloads in the public cloud. In 2021, we predict that an additional 20% of enterprises will shift DR operations to the public cloud — and won’t look back.

Cloud Computing featured as 1 of 7 professional clusters on Future of Work

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report  shows large and growing demand for a broad variety of skills that match professional opportunities and include both disruptive technical skills but also specialized industry skills and core business skills. There are seven emerging professional clusters and 96 jobs of tomorrow within them that vary in their individual rate of growth and in the scale of job opportunities they offer in the aggregate. Engineering and Cloud Computing is 1 of those 7 clusters.

IBM Full Stack Cloud Developer Professional Certificate on Coursera

This Professional Certificate on Coursera will equip you with all the key skills and technical know-how to kickstart your career as a Full-Stack Cloud Native Application Developer. Guided by experts at IBM, you will learn to build your own cloud-based applications and practice working with the technologies behind them. This program consists of 10 courses with ample instructional content as well as hands-on exercises and projects designed to hone your skills and help you build your portfolio.

The courses in this program will help you develop skill sets in a variety of technologies including: Cloud foundations, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, GitHub, Node.js, React, Cloud Native practices, DevOps, CI/CD, Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Istio, Python programming, Databases, SQL, NoSQL, Django ORM, Bootstrap, Application Security, Microservices, Serverless computing, and more.

Prerequisite skills for the Cloud Developer Certificate

No prior programming experience or Cloud background is required to start this program. You’ll skill up with the tools and technologies that successful software developers use to build, deploy, test, run, and manage Full Stack Cloud Native applications, giving you the practical skills to begin a new career in a highly in-demand area.

Applied Learning Project

Throughout the 10 courses in the Professional Certificate, you will develop a portfolio of hands-on projects involving various popular technologies and programming languages in Full Stack Cloud Application Development.

These include publishing HTML pages on Cloud Object Storage; creating an interest rate calculator using HTML, CSS, & JavaScript, an AI program deployed on Cloud Foundry using DevOps principles & CI/CD toolchains with a NoSQL database, a Node.js and React application, a containerized guestbook app packaged with Docker deployed with Kubernetes & managed with OpenShift, a Python app bundled as a package, a RDBMS powered application using Django ORM and Bootstrap, and an app built using Microservices & Serverless; and completing a Capstone Project that leverages several technologies into a single scalable Cloud Native Full Stack application.

These projects will be published on a GitHub repository publicly available to peers and prospective employers.

Role-based learning paths on IBM Center for Cloud Training

New courses and learning paths are available for the following IT professions:

• Cloud Site Reliability Engineer
• Cloud Architect
• Cloud Developer

Courses include hands-on exercises that build competence and prepare for certification exams. Courses are all-digital, available on demand and enable social distancing.

Role-based certification exams

Certification exams are available for the following professions:

• IBM Certified Professional Cloud Site Reliability Engineer
• IBM Certified Professional Cloud Architect
• IBM Certified Professional Cloud Developer

IBM Cloud certification exams are proctored by a third party, Pearson VUE. Certification exams may be taken from a home office, so there is no need to visit a testing center.

The cost of IBM Cloud certification exams administered by Pearson VUE varies by country and is not included as part of the IBM Cloud role-based learning subscription.

IBM Learning Subscription with Red Hat

The new IBM Learning Subscription with Red Hat Learning Services is a SaaS-based education offering that gives individual subscribers access to IBM and Red Hat digital courses for a 12-month period.

FREE Soft Skills courses to consider

Explore how to apply design thinking in your own company and what it means for you and your team. The Practitioner Course will provide a baseline of Enterprise Design Thinking skills: collaboration, synthesis, design research, prototyping, and storytelling.

Professional soft skills including Collaborate Effectively, Presenting with Purpose,Interpersonal Skills, Delivering Quality Work with Agility, Solving Problems with Critical and Creative Thinking

Learn how to hone your resilience and emotional intelligence in the LinkedIn courses, Building Resilience, Developing Your Emotional Intelligence, free through March 31st.