--- title: "VMware Skills Are Getting Funded Again Even as…" canonical: "https://www.metaintro.com/blog/vmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand" language: "en" author: "drashtigarach" published: "2026-09-07T10:29:44.000Z" modified: "2026-10-02T19:47:17.686Z" --- [Back to Blog](/blog) [Skills](/blog/tag/skills)[Technology](/blog/tag/technology)[Upskill](/blog/tag/upskill)[Career](/blog/tag/career) # VMware Skills Are Getting Funded Again Even as the Occupation Shrinks Kyndryl and Broadcom are funding VMware Cloud Foundation training for several thousand consultants as enterprises move workloads back on premises. [![Drashti Garach](https://cdn.metaintro.com/rs:fill:40:40/q:72/plain/images/5719d740-e510-42bc-8017-e040d145f35f_1766029465094.png)Drashti Garach @DrashtiGarach](/blog/author/drashtigarach) [September 7, 2026](/blog/archive/2026/09)Updated October 2, 202613 min read ![A cold aisle between server racks in a data centre](https://cdn.metaintro.com/rs:fill:1200:675/q:78/plain/images/10174-data-centre-aisle.png) [https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=VMware%20Skills%20Are%20Getting%20Funded%20Again%20Even%20as%20the%20Occupation%20Shrinks&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand](https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=VMware%20Skills%20Are%20Getting%20Funded%20Again%20Even%20as%20the%20Occupation%20Shrinks&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand)[http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand)[https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand&title=VMware%20Skills%20Are%20Getting%20Funded%20Again%20Even%20as%20the%20Occupation%20Shrinks](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand&title=VMware%20Skills%20Are%20Getting%20Funded%20Again%20Even%20as%20the%20Occupation%20Shrinks)[mailto:?subject=VMware%20Skills%20Are%20Getting%20Funded%20Again%20Even%20as%20the%20Occupation%20Shrinks&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand](mailto:?subject=VMware%20Skills%20Are%20Getting%20Funded%20Again%20Even%20as%20the%20Occupation%20Shrinks&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.metaintro.com%2Fblog%2Fvmware-skills-private-cloud-certification-demand) [Kyndryl](https://www.kyndryl.com/) and [Broadcom](https://www.broadcom.com/) have expanded their alliance around [VMware Cloud Foundation](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-foundation.html), and [CIO Dive reported](https://www.ciodive.com/news/kyndryl-broadcom-bet-on-vmware-skills-private-cloud/829723/) on September 4 that the two companies are jointly investing in skills development for several thousand Kyndryl consultants, architects and delivery specialists. That is an unusually specific signal in a market full of vague talk about reskilling, because it names a technology, a certification path and an employer paying for it. At [Metaintro](https://www.metaintro.com), we pay attention when a company funds training at that scale, because it is a commitment rather than a forecast. Here is what is driving it and whether it is worth your time. ## What Are the Two Companies Actually Doing? Building a services business around private cloud and staffing it. Kyndryl is bringing consulting, managed services and agentic AI capabilities into VMware Cloud Foundation environments, covering advisory and strategy, architecture and design, upgrades and modernisation, and what the industry calls Day-2 operations, meaning the ongoing running of a system after it goes live. The scope covers both virtualised and containerised workloads, including VMware Tanzu, with integration into public cloud landing zones as requirements change. That combination matters for anyone assessing the skills involved, because it is not a pure legacy maintenance play. It sits across older virtualisation and newer container platforms, which is a broader and more durable skill set than either alone. The training commitment is the part that should interest job seekers. According to Kyndryl's announcement on August 27, the two companies are jointly investing in skills development for several thousand consultants, architects and delivery specialists. Kyndryl did not provide a specific headcount when asked how many employees that represents or how many are certified today, and did not give a timetable for when newly trained staff would enter customer engagements. Treat the number as a direction of travel rather than a precise commitment. ## Why Is Private Cloud Coming Back? Because sovereignty has broadened from a legal question into an operational one. Kyndryl's global strategic alliances leader told [Channel Dive](https://www.channeldive.com/) that around two years ago sovereignty discussions centred primarily on data residency, driven in part by regulations such as GDPR. Customers now also weigh technological sovereignty, meaning how dependent they are on particular technologies, and operational sovereignty, meaning the ability to keep critical systems running under adverse conditions. That is a meaningful shift in what enterprises are buying. Data residency is satisfied by choosing a region. Technological and operational sovereignty are satisfied by architecture, and architecture requires people who understand it. He described customers looking at trade-offs to find the right balance, and characterised it as a sign of maturation after years in which public cloud was often treated as the default destination. AI is accelerating the timeline from an unexpected direction. Kyndryl's announcement framed autonomous systems as increasing security and governance pressure, on the basis that they can identify and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed. Whether or not you accept the framing, it is producing real purchasing decisions, and organisations responding to it are rethinking which workloads belong in public clouds and which should return to private or on-premises environments. ## Does This Mean Systems Administration Is Growing? No, and this is the distinction that decides whether the opportunity is real for you. The [US Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/) projects employment of [network and computer systems administrators](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/network-and-computer-systems-administrators.htm) to decline 4 percent between 2025 and 2035, a net loss of about 13,200 positions from a base of 323,600. Median pay was $99,130 in 2025 with a bachelor's degree the typical entry requirement. So the occupation is shrinking while demand for a specific capability inside it rises. Both things are true, and they are not contradictory. Automation has been steadily removing routine administration work for a decade, which is what the projection reflects. What has not been automated is designing, migrating and governing a private cloud platform under sovereignty constraints, and that is what the training investment is aimed at. The practical reading is that generic administration skills are a declining asset and specific platform architecture skills are an appreciating one, inside the same job family. Anyone currently in a systems administration role should read the BLS projection as a reason to specialise rather than as a reason to leave the field. The people most exposed are the ones doing work a script can do. The people least exposed are the ones deciding how the platform is built. ## Is a VMware Certification Actually Worth Getting? It has better fundamentals than most vendor certifications right now, with one significant caveat. On the positive side, there is a named employer publicly committing to fund training at scale, a clear services demand behind it, and a technology that large enterprises have already deployed extensively. That combination is rarer than the volume of certification marketing suggests. The caveat is concentration risk, and CIO Dive named it directly. A good share of the technological dependence enterprises say they are now managing runs straight through Broadcom, which retired VMware's perpetual licences and bundled thousands of product SKUs into subscriptions. As the report put it, customers counting their single-vendor exposure often describe the vendor as selling the remedy. A certification tied to a single vendor's platform is worth exactly as much as that vendor's position in the market, and that position is currently the subject of active customer frustration. The way to manage that is to treat the certification as evidence of underlying capability rather than as the capability itself. Virtualisation, container orchestration, network segmentation, identity, backup and recovery design are transferable across platforms. If your learning is organised around those concepts, with the vendor certification as proof, a shift in the market costs you a credential. If your learning is organised around one vendor's console, a shift costs you your skill set. Choosing [a certification programme employers actually recognise](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/certification-programs) is partly about the badge and mostly about what sits underneath it. ## Who Is Best Placed to Take Advantage? People already inside infrastructure roles, because the entry point is a conversation with an existing employer rather than an application. If you work in systems administration, infrastructure engineering or IT operations at a company running VMware, the practical move is to ask whether training and certification are funded and whether your organisation is planning private cloud work. Employers funding this at scale are doing so because they cannot hire the skills externally at the rate they need them. The second group is people in adjacent operations roles who want a route upward. Day-2 operations, cyber recovery design and platform governance are the parts of this work that are growing, and they favour people who understand how systems fail in production over people who have only built them in a lab. That experience is common among operations staff and undervalued on their CVs. The third group is career changers, and here the honest answer is that this is a harder entry point than it looks. These are senior, architecture-heavy roles requiring production experience, and a certification alone will not substitute for it. Someone moving into technology would be better served targeting the roles that feed into this work over several years. There are [free and low-cost routes to technical skills employers trust](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/free-and-low-cost-ways-to-learn-ai-skills) that make better starting points, and [the skills gap and what it means for your salary](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-skills-gap-and-your-salary) explains why specificity beats breadth in this market. ## What Does the Agentic AI Part Mean for Jobs? It creates a governance role that did not exist two years ago. Kyndryl is pushing its Agentic AI Framework into these environments, using rules encoded into software to restrict AI agents to approved actions based on customers' business and regulatory requirements, while retaining flexibility across models, data and infrastructure. Read that as a job description rather than a product feature. Someone has to decide which actions an agent may take, translate a regulatory obligation into an enforceable rule, test that the constraint holds, and review it when the business changes. That is policy work with a technical implementation, and it sits between compliance, security and infrastructure rather than inside any one of them. The same logic applies to the cyber recovery capabilities described, which include separate recovery environments, snapshots that cannot be altered and coordinated recovery procedures. Designing and rehearsing those is specialist work with a rising profile, particularly as [security threats move faster](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-cant-fix-cybersecurity-talent-shortage-2026) than the teams responding to them. If you are choosing where to specialise inside infrastructure, recovery and governance are better bets than provisioning. ## How Do You Tell a Real Skills Signal From Marketing? Three tests, and this announcement passes two of them cleanly. The first is whether an employer is spending its own money. Training several thousand of your own consultants is a cost that only makes sense if you expect billable work, which makes it a far stronger signal than a vendor survey predicting demand for skills that vendor happens to sell. The second is whether the demand has a named buyer. Here it does, because the work is enterprise private cloud migration and governance driven by sovereignty requirements, and those requirements come from regulators and boards rather than from technology fashion. Skills demand created by a compliance obligation tends to outlast skills demand created by enthusiasm. The third test is the one this announcement fails, and it is worth being honest about. There is no specific number and no timetable. Kyndryl declined to say how many employees several thousand represents or how many are certified today, and gave no date for when newly trained staff would reach customer engagements. That does not make the investment fake, but it does mean you should treat it as a directional signal rather than a guaranteed hiring wave. The strongest evidence that a skill is in demand remains a job posting asking for it, and those are checkable in a way that a press release is not. Search the certification name against current openings in your own market before you spend money on the course, and note whether the employers listing it are consultancies, enterprises or both. A skill that only consultancies hire for is a narrower bet than one that shows up on both sides of the contract. ## What Should You Do This Month? If you are in an infrastructure role, find out three things: whether your employer runs VMware Cloud Foundation or is evaluating it, whether certification is funded, and who internally owns private cloud strategy. Those three answers tell you whether this trend touches your organisation at all, and the third one tells you whose team to be useful to. If your employer is not going in this direction, treat the underlying shift as the signal rather than the specific platform. The broader movement is enterprises pulling selected workloads back from public cloud for control reasons, and that creates demand for hybrid architecture skills regardless of vendor. Learning how to evaluate which workloads belong where is more durable than learning any one platform, and it is the question your organisation will eventually have to answer. If you are earlier in your career, the useful takeaway is about how to read announcements like this. A company funding training for several thousand people has told you where it expects billable demand for the next several years, which is far more informative than a survey about future skills. Watch what employers pay to teach their own staff. It is the most honest forecast available, and it is published in press releases that almost nobody reads for that purpose. ## Related Articles - [AI Skills Now Essential as Employers Face a Worker Shortage](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-skills-worker-shortage-2025) - [Bridging the Cybersecurity Talent Gap and Its Challenges](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/infosec-talent-gap-hiring) - [Europe's Shift to Skills Over Degrees in Cybersecurity Recruitment](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/europes-cyber-hiring-evolution) - [You Earned a Digital Credential, So Why Will Employers Not Recognise It](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/digital-credentials-employers-not-using-how-to-make-them-count-2026) - [AI Skills for Non-Technical Roles in Marketing, Sales and Operations](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-skills-for-non-technical-roles) - [Engineering Teams Are Shrinking as AI Absorbs the Work](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/engineering-teams-shrinking-as-ai-absorbs-work) - [The AI Boom Needs Data Centers But Not Enough Workers to Build Them](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-boom-data-center-construction-jobs-worker-shortage-2026) - [How Benefits Certifications Strengthen Your Career](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/benefits-certifications-strengthen-career) - [Redefining Talent Acquisition With a Skills-First Approach in Cyber](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/arctic-wolf-cyber-million-program) - [Cybersecurity Still Booming While the Rest of Israeli Tech Contracts](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/israel-cybersecurity-hiring-boom-tech-layoffs-2025) - [AI Job Fears Are Real But Adoption Is Still Too Immature](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-job-fears-vs-immature-adoption-2026) - [How to Roll Out an AI-First Strategy Your Team Actually Trusts](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/how-to-tell-team-going-ai-first-2026) ## People Also Asked ### Q: Is VMware still worth learning given Broadcom's licensing changes? A: The demand is real but the concentration risk is too. Kyndryl and Broadcom are funding training for several thousand consultants, which indicates genuine services demand, and large enterprises have extensive existing deployments. The caveat noted in the reporting is that Broadcom retired VMware's perpetual licences and bundled thousands of SKUs into subscriptions, so customers managing single-vendor exposure sometimes see the vendor as selling the remedy. Learn the underlying architecture concepts and treat the certification as evidence of them. ### Q: Are systems administration jobs growing? A: No. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects network and computer systems administrator employment to decline 4 percent between 2025 and 2035, a loss of about 13,200 positions from a base of 323,600, with median pay of $99,130 in 2025. Demand is concentrated in architecture, migration and governance work rather than in routine administration, which is the part automation has been steadily absorbing. ### Q: Why are companies moving workloads back from public cloud? A: Control rather than cost alone. Enterprises are weighing data residency, technological sovereignty meaning how dependent they are on particular vendors, and operational sovereignty meaning whether critical systems keep running under adverse conditions. Security pressure from increasingly autonomous attack tooling is accelerating those decisions, and the result is selective repatriation of specific workloads rather than a wholesale retreat from public cloud. When an employer funds certification for several thousand people, it is telling you where it expects paid work to be for years, which is better information than any skills forecast. [Metaintro](https://www.metaintro.com) tracks which technical certifications and platforms are actually appearing in job postings across infrastructure and cloud roles. 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