Career in Cloud Computing: Exploratory Analysis of In-Demand Competency Areas and Skill Sets

Abstract

This study aims to investigate up-to-date career opportunities and in-demand competence areas and skill sets for cloud computing (CC), which plays a crucial role in the rapidly developing teleworking environments with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we conducted a semantic content analysis on 10,161 CC job postings using semi-automated text-mining and probabilistic topic-modeling procedures to discover the competency areas and skill sets as semantic topics. Our findings revealed 22 competency areas and 46 skills, which reflect the interdisciplinary background of CC jobs. The top five competency areas for CC were identified as “Engineering”, “Development”, “Security”, “Architecture”, and “Management”. Besides, the top three skills emerged as “Communication Skills”, “DevOps Tools”, and “Software Development”. Considering the findings, a competency-skill map was created that illustrates the correlations between CC competency areas and their related skills. Although there are many studies on CC, the competency areas and skill sets required to deal with cloud computing have not yet been empirically studied. Our findings can contribute to CC candidates and professionals, IT organizations, and academic institutions in understanding, evaluating, and developing the competencies and skills needed in the CC industry.