RMIT Chooses Servian to Develop First In-Class University DevOps Course in Australia

MELBOURNE – March 4, 2020: RMIT has chosen IT Consultancy, Servian, to develop and deliver the first in-classroom university DevOps course in Australia. 

Servian’s acquisition of DevOps specialist, Vibrato, last year and its culture of learning and development were driving factors for the partnership. 

The course, which launches today, aims to address the growing disparity between the academic curriculum and latest skill requirements in the industry. 

“Graduates often come to us with theoretical knowledge but lack the practical application of the skills required to be efficient in the industry” says Servian Head of Solutions, Thomas Winsnes, who led the development and delivery of the course.

“By bridging the gap between industry and academia, we’ve designed this course to make the graduates industry-ready; not only to help them get a job but also to enable them to do what is expected of them in that job.” 

The course will also aim to address the increasing demand for DevOps professionals in the market. 

According to RMIT, vacancies for DevOps roles are expected to grow 21% in Australia in the next five years while the industry – which was valued at USD $2.77B in 2016 – is forecast to grow at a rate of 18.6 per cent over that same time. 

However, Gartner predicts that through 2022, 75 per cent of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations due to issues around organisational learning and change.

“DevOps is an increasingly relevant role in today’s field, as modern software development is complex. New software has to be deployed against different platforms, on cloud, on different operating systems and environments, and things are constantly changing,” says RMIT academic and DevOps Course Coordinator, Shekhar Kalra

Winsnes says the course will prepare students for the ever-changing IT landscape. “We’ll teach the students the latest technologies as well as transferable skills that will allow them to adapt to new technologies as they emerge,” he says.  

Students enrolled in the course can expect to learn skills in Continuous Integration, Development and Delivery as well as containerisation and application deployment on Kubernetes. They will also gain experience across Cloud environments and deploying infrastructure as code using Hashicorp Terraform due to Servian’s close partnership with the vendors. 

“Working as a consultancy across Australia’s largest organisations, we remain at the forefront of the latest trends in DevOps and delivery. Being able to mentor the engineers of the future and give them that same understanding before they enter the industry is an incredible opportunity,” says Winsnes.