QA has today announced that it is launching a new DevOps Engineer apprenticeship. The programme is offered at level 4 and will be available for new apprenticeship starts in October. Open to everybody, from school leavers to adult learners, it has been designed to meet the demand for skilled DevOps practitioners. This is particularly relevant as we emerge from Covid-19 and business leaders look to accelerate their digital transformation.
DevOps represents a change in the traditional structure of IT. It brings together the development and operations functions of a business, making them work more in sync and speeding up the delivery of IT projects. Adoption has been widespread and DevOps Engineers are in high demand. In fact, more than half (52%) of respondents to the recent DevOps Institute 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report said they are currently recruiting or planning to recruit DevOps practitioners, while 65% described their recruitment process as difficult.
Apprentices completing the Level 4 DevOps Engineer apprenticeship will learn how to implement and facilitate DevOps practices within their business – automating processes around development, testing and release. They will study the following modules:
- Coding Fundamentals
- Networking and Security
- Linux and DevOps Tooling
- DevOps Infrastructure
- Cloud Computing Specialisation
During the programme, apprentices are assessed on their technical knowledge but also skills essential to their employers such as logic and problem solving, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and environment management. The QA Level 4 DevOps Engineer apprenticeship is accredited by the DevOps Institute and takes a minimum of 18 months to complete.
Mark Solomon, DevOps Practice Director at QA, explains:
“The Level 4 DevOps Apprenticeship programme will equip UK IT organisations with a new and powerful means of shaping and refining their DevOps transformations. It’s critical that IT transformation leadership have strong answers for challenging questions like, 'How can we internally farm IT talent sustainably?' and 'How can we transition our existing team talent members from commodity IT roles to differentiating IT roles?'. This programme will help IT directors to answer these questions. It leverages our industry-leading blended learning approach to provide top-quality DevOps engineers.”
QA apprenticeship programmes are designed to keep apprentices on track, specifically helping to achieve and evidence the 20% ‘off-the-job-learning’. They provide an immersive learning experience with online learning resources for apprentices to discover in their own time. Skills are then practised in the classroom – or virtual classroom – through role-based practical projects designed to make learning relevant and applicable before being applied in the workplace.
Real-time progression data is available via dashboards in the client portal and complemented by trigger alerts for trainers and managers if learner progress drops off. Digital learning consultants are on hand via live chat, messaging boards and video calls to provide feedback as it is required and help apprentices learn faster. Digital by design, our programmes have the flexibility to meet the learners’ individual needs but also ensure progress is maintained in spite of the changing Covid-19 restrictions.