Hi! I am Dan Choquette, Director of Chef Education and Professional Services from Progress. First off, thank you for being a customer, enthusiast and/or user of Chef. Your collaboration and enthusiasm for Chef are much appreciated!
Organizations around the world adopt DevOps as part of their product delivery process. However, despite the abundance of DevOps roles, there seems to be a severe skill shortage in the DevOps area. A survey done in 2023 shows that more than a third (37.5%) of respondents to the survey said they expect to continue to have trouble finding skilled developers, the majority of whom are DevOps engineers, data analytics developers and IT security engineers.
Progress Chef is a DevOps pioneer whose automation solution software allows you to configure, deploy and manage your entire application infrastructure more securely for cloud, on-premises or even edge devices. Certification in Chef helps DevOps practitioners consolidate their skills and validate their mettle in the vast field of DevOps/DevSecOps.
This blog will be about our new Chef certification programs, their entailments and the value practitioners can derive from them.
In my years of developing curriculum and content and delivering training to thousands of technology users, I have witnessed many changes to how practitioners learn, their thought patterns and how they acquire knowledge and best apply it to their jobs and careers.
Some of you might be aware that Progress has crafted the Learn Chef platform, which is a free, on-demand library of tutorials on various technical topics. These tutorials end with an exam that tests your knowledge of the basic concepts of Chef.
On the other end of the spectrum is Progress' comprehensive set of public and private training—Chef Foundations, Automate Compliance, Intermediate, Habitat and the Chef/Jenkins and Chef/Azure pipeline. These trainings are instructor-led and provide an in-depth knowledge of the products.
While the Learn Chef platform is suitable for beginners, the instructor-led programs are niche and customized per organization. This lack of an intermediate option led us to develop a third offering. Whether it be applying Chef to a particular use case, implementing Chef or taking Chef to the next level in your environment, we believed that we needed a more detailed and affordable course that could fully prepare a Chef learner to do their job properly.
To address this gap, the Chef Education and Professional Services teams built something great, of which I am very proud— Learn Chef: Premium.
Learn Chef Premium is an on-demand, self-paced Education-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform that provides digitized formats of all the currently offered live Chef training—complete with instructor notes and a friendly voice guiding you through the modules so that you can learn at your own pace. In this self-paced system, you can come and go as you please and pick up right where you left off.
In addition to the classes, with Learn Chef Premium you will also have year-round access to a virtual lab environment provisioned with the required Chef software.
These certifications are based on our learnings from our previous and very successful certification programs. The aim of all our certifications has been to help customers ensure they have validated talent in-house such that Chef usage is maximized within the organization. Additionally, certifications from Chef help elevate job profiles and boost careers.
My team took those early blueprints and upped the ante. We believe that there are two major types of Chef user personas. The first is the operational user and the second is the architect.
The operational user knows how Chef works and can write creative and valuable cookbooks. If you are this individual, we have created the Associate Chef Certification just for you. After taking an exam and using the Learn Chef Lab to publish your cookbook in a fully functional Chef environment successfully, you will attain the “Associate Chef Engineer” certification.
The second type of user is the architect who pushes Chef to its limits. This individual drives any and all aspects of hands-on architecture, cookbook development and Chef operations. If you fit the bill, then you are an appropriate candidate for the “Certified Chef Architect” certification. Upon enrollment, you will architect, implement, operationalize and troubleshoot Chef in the Learn Chef Lab.
What I love about this program is that you will also be provided with the expert knowledge of a Principal Chef Consultant who will mentor you along the way!
We here at Progress want our user community to succeed using Chef and in their careers. We want to share our best practices and knowledge with you and provide it in a convenient, relaxed and effortless way that helps you do your job well.