Training and Readiness

A cloud transformation has far reaching impact and dependencies across an organization. Everyone in your organization must understand how the transformation is integral to the organization's success and how they can personally contribute to or benefit from the changes. Well-planned and executed cloud skills and knowledge growth can accelerate and maximize targeted benefits realization.

Each company maintains a different level of cloud adoption in terms of the cloud and on-premises mix. While some organizations completely migrate to the cloud, others maintain a varying proportion of their workloads as on-premises to satisfy security and regulatory considerations. With migration to the cloud, the job roles for your IT organization shift from predominantly supporting and maintaining the IT infrastructure to designing, building, and integrating the interconnect between your cloud applications and managing relationships with respective cloud vendors. The connection between the IT teams and the business is also important as IT shifts its focus from maintaining infrastructure to solving business problems.

IT departments migrating to the cloud will find that the mix of skills and job roles required will fundamentally change. All IT team members working in the cloud will need a much broader knowledge of the cloud platform, up-skilling across the IT organization. Companies that have adopted the cloud and that are moving to multi-cloud will be able to up-skill members of their organization who are in cloud job roles so that they can support new clouds.

The starting point for moving to the cloud is development of a training and readiness plan. Initially the CCOE identifies new job roles for your organization. Next, you must consider how you intend to resource the roles, mapping skillsets of existing IT team members to the newly defined job roles. If you identify significant gaps, create a remediation plan that addresses talent development, attraction, and retention. Your objective must be to provide an opportunity for employees to grow as part of your cloud transformation. The training and readiness plan must reflect your organization's appetite for cloud adoption, with incentives, rewards, and recognition. This is an opportunity to use training as an enabler of success while working in a “change” environment.

We recommend that you include the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) training and certification courses as a key component of your readiness strategy. The OCI training and certification courses, available through Oracle University, are designed to build cloud fluency and deepen expertise for employees across a range of job responsibilities:

• Business users should gain a fundamental understanding of the cloud and the benefits and risks that are associated with cloud computing. The OCI Foundations course provides a basic introduction to OCI.
• IT users should be upskilled for designing, architecting, and implementing OCI environments. The OCI Architect Associate certification should be considered a standard requirement for all IT users.
• Specialists should consider additional certifications that are relevant for their responsibilities. Some examples of OCI certifications for specialists include OCI Architect Professional, OCI Cloud Operations Associate, and OCI Developer Associate.

You can also consider other activities such as live training, technical workshops, hackathons, and job shadowing.

The Oracle University page helps you understand the learning paths required for standard cloud job roles. Oracle University provides the tools and resources for you to build your OCI readiness plan, delivering relevant learning paths and training through the OCI Learning Program. For more information, contact your Oracle Customer Success Services account manager.

An essential aspect to include in your workforce readiness plan is security training for IT and non-IT users.

Use the assessment criteria and recommended Oracle Cloud Infrastructure certifications in the following table to develop a training and readiness plan for your organization.