With an average salary of a DevOps engineer exceeding $126,000, the desire to consider this career is overwhelming. However, not all aspiring specialists manage to take full advantage of the opportunity. The main reason is complexity.
To become a DevOps engineer, you need to make a substantial investment in your education and acquire some much-needed experience. Landing a high-paying DevOps job right out of college or after completing a course is nearly impossible. You need to take a comprehensive approach to turning DevOps into your career.
What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?
Before you consider a career in DevOps, you need to have a clear understanding of your future responsibilities. It’s important to know that you aren’t going to control how developers do operational tasks.
It will be up to you to encourage the developers and operation teams to work together toward the same goal. Your job is to ensure that this collaboration proceeds smoothly even if the company hasn’t taken the DevOps approach before.
Your responsibilities will vary from collecting and analyzing requirements for project development, testing, and deployment to seeking users’ feedback and implementing new technologies. Then you need to put all the data you collected to improve the product.
You will also spend a big chunk of your time researching new technologies and approaches to ensure your product’s efficiency and productivity. The key goal of your efforts would be implementing scalable programs and integrating infrastructure work with app deployment processes.
Other things you may need to take care of include:
- Researching new tools and technologies like DevOps Kubernetes platforms.
- Looking through potential uses of the program so users can take advantage of it without complications.
- Gathering and analyzing user feedback about newly released software.
- Making sure all code changes are in the same place for the teams to modify and test them.
- Designing better quality interfaces.
- Design tools and processes for managing infrastructure.
- Designing tools and processes to improve user satisfaction.
- Working with other team members and helping them collaborate with each other.
Depending on the company’s structure and development tools, your responsibilities may vary. To make sure you excel at your work, it’s important to have both development and operation experience.
How to Become a DevOps Engineer
To become a successful DevOps engineer, you need development and communication skills. Since you will be serving as a connection between development and operations teams in the company, you need to understand how they work together and what they do.
It’s important to understand that a DevOps engineer is a senior position that you need to earn with knowledge and experience.
Get a Bachelor Degree
To make your resume look appealing to potential employers, you need to think about getting a bachelor degree. The degree has to be related to computer science, electronic engineering, or math. Any software development focus in your education will be a big help. Even if you already have a degree, you can take certificate courses in software development that can set you on the right path towards this very high-value career.
It’s worth noting that it’s possible to become a DevOps engineer even if you have a bachelor degree in something unrelated, like economics. Extensive experience in development and management can be just as valuable.
Earn a Master’s Degree
No matter what your bachelor degree is, you can improve your resume tremendously by getting a master’s degree in software development. This can help you acquire necessary skills in software development, including coding.
This experience coupled with a diploma can give you extra leverage when competing for a DevOps engineer position.
Acquire Important Skills
Once you finish your education, you need to start acquiring the necessary skills to become a demanded DevOps engineer. You will need to learn various technologies and processes, including:
- Industry-relevant coding languages
- Different OS concepts
- Networking
- Security
- And much more
It’s possible to start acquiring and honing these skills while you are still getting your degrees. Many future DevOps engineers study and work at the same time.
Should You Become a DevOps Engineer?
A DevOps engineer is a senior position with a formidable salary. However, before you are hired, you need to get proper education, acquire valuable skills, and get some experience in software development.
If you are ready to invest your time and money in this career, it’s likely to pay off. Meanwhile, you can gain valuable experience as a software developer.
