Cloud provider Bluewolf is looking to kill two birds with one stone: boost the amount of cloud talent in the market and stem the tide of unemployment.
With those two items on the agenda, Bluewolf at Salesforce.com's Cloudforce New York this week launched a new learning initiative to offer free Salesforce certification training courses to unemployed IT pros and arm them with the skills they need to attack the emerging cloud and social enterprise markets and enable what Bluewolf calls the "agile enterprise."
"There are not enough skilled resources out there," said Corinne Sklar, Bluewolf vice president of marketing. "There's just not enough in the market."
Sklar said New York-based Bluewolf used the Cloudforce event to offer of free role-based training courses, workshops and one-on-one "office hours" with Salesforce experts. The free training is part of a larger Bluewolf Training initiative that looks to bridge the talent gap. And Bluewolf will continue to offer training initiatives in coming months.
"U.S. leadership is so fixated on creating jobs that they’re overlooking the fact that a huge number of jobs are going unfilled because employers -- as many as 47 percent -- can't find candidates with the right skills," Eric Berridge, Bluewolf co-founder and principal, said in a statement. "Its economics 101: you take the supply where the demand is. We're training and placing IT pros to fill jobs that are already there."
Bluewolf also offers placement services to assist in securing new jobs for people with skills that are in demand.
Sklar said the new cloud, mobile and social technologies and services are creating a skills gap in the marketplace and Bluewolf wants to add more talented candidates to the pool.
"The talent gap this revolution is creating is wide and dangerous," added Berridge. "Bluewolf is putting over 1,000 people to work in the U.S. monthly, but this could be much higher if they had the skills in demand now. For the most part these IT pros don’t exist, and if we don’t train them, America is going to fall seriously behind."
Bluewolf highlighted its recent Tech Outlook Report which found that IT hiring and staffing spending for professionals with development skills in Salesforce, and around mobile platforms like Android and the iPhone, has grown more than 100 percent in the past year. Despite that, Sklar said the national unemployment rate still hovers around 10 percent and said roughly 70 percent of companies in those businesses saying they can't find the right talent.
What sets Bluewolf's training apart is that it's role-based, Sklar said, meaning Bluewolf is offering training for technical architects, business analysts and other specific skills.
"We want to be part of the solution, not the problem," she said. "We can put skills in the market."
