It’s called the “IKEA Effect.”

In 2012, researchers from the Harvard Business School published the results of a study that showed that the act of building something on one’s own, such as building furniture acquired from an IKEA store, imbued it with value beyond its inherent quality.

This principle applies to more than just sweating over a wobbly table and indecipherable assembly pictures. It’s a way of better understanding the forces that have powered rapid adoption of cloud computing and created the virtualization industry.

Following the entry of virtualization pioneer VMware Inc. 21 years ago, there are now multiple server virtualization providers, including Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. The technology, which allows users to create cloud resources from a physical hardware system, powers the vast majority of enterprise applications today and represents a certified growth area for information technology, with an estimated doubling in market size by 2023.

Behind that growth is a sizable community of users, developers, and system administrators that has coalesced around the build-it-yourself spirit of an open-source ecosystem and created a communications network that drives continued innovation and learning in the cloud space. It’s an important dynamic, not simply for moving technology forward, but for ensuring a robust and fruitful career path in a fast-paced, ever-changing industry.

“The company you work for does not own your career,” said Phoummala Schmitt, senior cloud operations advocate at Microsoft. “It’s up to you to make that effort to learn a little bit more.”

Schmitt spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VTUG Summer Slam event in Westbrook, Maine. In separate interviews, Miniman also spoke with Chris and Dawn Harney, president and vice president of VTUG LLC; Matt Broberg, advocate, writer and editor of Opensource.com at Red Hat Inc.; Chris Colotti, principal technologist at Cohesity Inc.; and Sean Thulin, vArchitect at Dell EMC, among others (see the full playlist here). They discussed resources available to professionals interested in learning new career skills, expansion of technical positions in many enterprises, the end of the line for VTUG’s annual event and fears that continued cloud adoption will cause job displacement.

Here’s the complete video interview with Schmitt:

Skills needed for robust market

The current cloud-computing employment market is robust. There are over 50,000 cloud computing positions available in the U.S. today, and twice that worldwide. The most in-demand skills include software development, DevOps and infrastructure as a service.

However, some skills have become more popular than others. The Computing Technology Industry Association’s most recent “Cyberstates” report showed that database administrators were only a tenth of the software and web developers category in the “Leading Tech Occupation Jobs” sector.

“People feel like the cloud is going to take away their jobs because they don’t have to manage the infrastructure,” Schmitt said. “That’s not entirely true. You’re still going to need people to manage these systems; you’re still going to need people to manage applications.”

Improving virtualization expertise

In his role at VMware, Thulin has worked with IT professionals in a wide range of fields. He described how he collaborated with one customer who confided that he needed to improve his virtualization skills.

Thulin quickly rattled off a set of resources this particular individual could take advantage of in the open-source and virtualization communities, including the Virtualization Technology User Group, or VTUG.

“I talked to him again six months later,” Thulin recalled. “He went through all that, and now he’s playing around in Azure and Amazon and starting to learn. They reorganized him into a new role where he’s got more cloud responsibilities and effectively saved his job because he went out to the community and learned these skills.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Thulin:

Learning additional cloud skills through user groups and leveraging other resources can also pay dividends as companies realize that the cost model in IT is changing as well. Surveys and press reports are beginning to echo concerns that moving operations to the cloud can be more expensive than IT executives imagined. This is beginning to force a more careful examination of which platforms make the most sense for particular workloads as businesses drive a harder bargain.

“There are some workloads that are absolutely great for cloud, and there are some that are just expensive,” Thulin said. “There’s countless clouds out there with all kinds of different operating and pricing models. We’re in a place now with the technology that people can almost nickel and dime what is best for them and not necessarily be told this is how it’s going to be and this is your only option.”

Coding outside IT

Another important trend in the IT employment space is that technical jobs are no longer confined purely to the IT department. Companies are building network and programming expertise in non-technical divisions as enterprise computing drives all facets of business.

“When you look into organizations you might not normally think you can work in, like marketing and sales, you can find some of the most technical people in the company there,” said Broberg, who is trained as a vExpert for VMware and now works as editor for a Red Hat resource site.

LinkedIn has noted that engineers represented the second-most-difficult job category in the world to fill and the sales engineer was in particularly high demand, with job openings predicted to grow 159%. Newly formed tech companies under pressure to begin generating sales are looking for talent in this area, along with more established firms, such as the enterprise storage company Cohesity Inc.

“All the new companies are always hiring sales engineers; they have to get their sales up and running,” Colotti said. “For Cohesity, it’s a bit similar. The growth is unbelievable.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Colotti:

A community conversation

In 2010, Red Hat Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst published a blog post that opened with the headline, “Welcome to the conversation.” It marked the launch of Opensource.com, an online connection point for conversations about the broader impact that open source could have beyond the software world.

Today, Opensource.com averages 1.5 million page views and 90 published articles per month.

“There’s a lot of interesting ways to grow these days, and I like to advocate for that,” explained Broberg, the site’s editor. “We get to focus just on telling open-source stories inside the ecosystem. Everything from lawyers talking about licenses, to people learning Python, to system administrators telling about their Linux expertise.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Broberg:

While Opensource.com has been a key resource for nearly a decade, events such as the VTUG Summer Slam and the VTUG Winter Warmer have been taking place much longer. The summer event marked its 16th anniversary in July, but this will be its swan song.

“It’s bittersweet, but we’ve realized it takes a lot of time to put these together,” said VTUG’s Dawn Harney.

“Think back to 2003; there was no way to share information,” Chris Harney added. “There was no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook groups. You can learn faster as a group than you can by yourself.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Dawn and Chris Harney, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VTUG Summer Slam:

Photo: Stu Miniman/SiliconANGLE