Rancher Labs has announced the launch of Rancher Academy, a new certification program that the open source software firm says will address the growing Kubernetes skills gap.

The initiative arrives as a result of accelerating enterprise adoption of containers, as well as 250% year-on-year growth in Rancher’s training programs, with the initiative aiming to enable “the complete democratisation of Kubernetes”.

A no-cost and zero-obligation programme, users can now take on the five-week Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1 course via Rancher Academy, with new classes to be announced later this year, the company said.

“This Rancher certification is designed to help Kubernetes practitioners demonstrate their knowledge and competence with Kubernetes and Rancher,” commented Adrian Goins (pictured), director of Community and Evangelism at Rancher.

According to a recent Dice Tech Job Report for 2020, there has been an 82% increase in job demand for workers with Kubernetes skills over the last year, with Dice predicting a further 67% growth rate for the decade ahead.

A 250% increase in Rancher’s Rodeo and Master Class registrations over the last 12 months also highlights practitioners’ desire to build competencies in Kubernetes concepts and architectures, the software firm said.

The comprehensive and self-paced Rancher Academy training scheme aims to counter this demand by covering all the key details for deploying and managing Rancher, as well as how to use the platform to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters from any provider.

Rancher Labs says the course has been built using educational best practices, featuring a mix of passive and active learning, as well as an increasing difficulty as the weeks progress.

More specifically, Rancher Academy offers video introductions, theory work, demonstrations, hands-on labs, quizzes and a final exam.

“Not only do we want all members of our community to have the most relevant and up-to-date skills on the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform. But we also want to empower them to be at the forefront of the cloud-native way of doing business, which is agile, open source-oriented and maniacally-focused on fast access to innovation,” Goins explained.