High demand for virtualization competencies on IT jobs

VMTN Blog reports IT industry started asking for more virtualization competencies on job recruiment.
Earning a VMware Certified Professional credential can help to be employeed as soon as virtualization specialists increase in availability.

I personally have two thoughts about this:

  • Quite every person on the IT world tried at least once VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC or QEmu. And a lot of them works with these products often. This kind of virtualization experience is considered enough to claim to be a virtualization specialist.
    But the large majority of these claimed specialists never worked or even saw things like ESX, GSX, VirtualCenter, Blades, Fiber Channel SANs, etc. and never done things like capacity planning, P2V, virtual networks designing, etc.
    Modern virtualization is in its infancy and as usually happens in these cases, companies must be really aware of who is expert and who pretend to be so. Otherwise virtualization performances will be poor or unacceptable, and virtualization projects will eventually fail, slowing down progress.
  • In my country, Italy, the request for virtualization competencies is still near to zero. I suspect that apart U.S. few other countries already started to feel the need of virtualization knowledge. For every other world nation the large part of companies requests can still be managed by a small bunch (10-20) of consultant companies.
    Things are going to change but not sooner than another couple of years.