Employer demand for IT professionals with Kubernetes experience is growing faster than candidate interest, according to new data from job board Indeed.  

Kubernetes and containers have become virtually synonymous with cloud-native development, driving job market demand over the last four years. Indeed found that between October 2015 and October 2019, the share of Kubernetes jobs per million grew by 2,141% while the share of Kubernetes job searches increased 2,125%.

However, during the same four-year timespan, Indeed found that while Kubernetes jobs per million rose 53%, the share of Kubernetes job searches grew a measly .85%. These numbers indicate that not only are companies interested in developers with experience, but they are also finding it difficult to fill those positions.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Linux Foundation, in partnership with edX.org, a nonprofit online learning platform, hope to bridge the skill gap.

This week the CNCF announced that its free "Introduction to Kubernetes" course, hosted by The Linux Foundation with edX.org, already has more than 100,000 people registered.

"A core mission of CNCF has always been education. As our first project, Kubernetes has helped to spearhead our training programs," said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in a prepared statement. "Given the growth of Kubernetes, it's no surprise that this course is wildly popular. In fact, an upcoming CNCF survey found that 78% of organizations are now using Kubernetes in production."

CNCF launched its Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam and Kubernetes for Developers course two years ago. That followed up its previously launched Certified Kubernetes Administrator program. CNCF also offers developer training programs that link into those exam programs.

Shannon Williams, co-founder and VP of sales at Rancher Labs, told SDxCentral that these programs were great starting points.

“The certification hits on all the important elements of deploying and maintaining Kubernetes clusters,” Williams said. “We’re thrilled when we find someone who has a base with the CNCF certification exams. The test is difficult and requires a real understanding of how to use Kubernetes and containers in production.”

There is no better time than the present for IT professionals with Kubernetes experience to flaunt what they've got. According to Indeed’s findings, the top tech roles of Kubernetes jobs included DevOps engineers, senior software engineers/ software engineers, software architects, cloud engineers, and full stack developers. 

“Kubernetes does the things that the very best system administrator would do: automation, failover, centralized logging, monitoring. It takes what we’ve learned in the DevOps community and makes it the default, out of the box,” said Kelsey Hightower, staff developer advocate at Google Cloud.

Indeed also noted that IBM, VMware, Microsoft, Verizon, and Cisco had the highest percentage of Kubernetes job listings on its job board. 

“There’s no question as to if Kubernetes has shaken up the tech industry: it has,” wrote Indeed's Joy Garza in a blog post announcing the findings. “The more momentum it gains, the more opportunity you’ll have to step into a Kubernetes role that suits you and your career goals.”