On February 14, the York University School of Continuing Studies announced the launch of its new full-time Post-Graduate Certificate in CloudOps. The only full-time, university-level cloud operations program to be offered in Canada, it is designed to prepare recent domestic and international university graduates for entry-level cloud computing roles. Registration for the Post-Graduate Certificate in CloudOps is now open, with classes beginning in September 2023.
The pandemic has reshaped how companies operate and employees work. Organizations are developing cloud adoption roadmaps and quickly implementing those plans. A recent market forecast predicted global spending on cloud services will grow by 16.9 per cent annually to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025[i].
"Many enterprises today are contemplating a strategic move to the cloud. Because of this, cloud professionals are in high demand to manage the complexities of cloud migrations and to choose the right cloud vendor. People looking to enter this profession need the right mix of cloud competencies from organizational change management to data governance and flawless execution and deployment," says Claude K. Sam-Foh, cloud computing expert and curriculum developer, instructor and program advisory member for the Post-Graduate Certificate in CloudOps.
"The Post-graduate Certificate in CloudOps is a comprehensive educational experience that will provide the essential theoretical and practical competencies to excel and contribute to an organization's cloud transformational journey and maintain that infrastructure."
Job postings for cloud service entry-level roles in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) have grown at an annualized rate of 49.5 per cent over the last four years[ii]. The program is co-designed by an advisory committee of senior cloud professionals invested in developing a program that can be a pipeline for top-notch talent in their organizations and the CloudOps industry.
"Organizations are looking to bring talent in-house to build a cloud workforce from the ground up, creating a talent pipeline of entry-level roles with advancement potential to senior positions," says Christine Brooks-Cappadocia, interim vice-president of continuing studies at York University.
"After graduating from this program, students will not only earn the fundamental cloud skills to establish their career in this field, but they will also gain critical cross-functional skills like problem-solving, decision-making, and an aptitude for curiosity that they will need to grow and advance in their career."
In the highly experiential curriculum, students will engage in assignments and group projects and will:
- Gain foundational knowledge required for cloud operations roles such as compliance, security, scaling, containers, microservices, Kubernetes, monitoring, observability, and performance.
- Work first-hand with a vast array of industry-standard tools, including Terraform, Git Merge, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus and Grafana.
- Become adept with prominent cloud platforms like Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, and Google's Google Cloud.
- Develop and present a compelling business case for cloud adoption to achieve business and digital transformation.
- Differentiate between the concepts of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment to build effective automated pipelines.
- Monitor systems and metrics to observe the health of the production environment for early detection of problems.
For more information on this program launching in September, visit the Post-Graduate Certificate in CloudOps program page.
[i] Whole Cloud Forecast 2021-2025: The Path Ahead for Cloud in a Digital-First World (Doc #US47397521), IDC
[ii] Job postings data sourced from LightCast
