A Juniper Networks global survey finds 45 percent of IT decision-makers believe their workforce will not have the skills needed for their roles five years from now.
Trying to address the IT skills gap, Juniper Networks is building on the success of its flagship OpenLab innovation center, Today, Juniper announced the global expansion of OpenLab, enabling local delivery of its programs to seven locations across North America, Asia, and Europe. OpenLab’s new regional centers are offering hands-on training, face-to-face workshops, webcasts, and technology competitions to help IT leaders equip their workforce for the next era of digital transformation.
Juniper customers, partners, educators, students, and startups use OpenLab to refine, develop, test, demonstrate, and validate systems that harness network intelligence.
The OpenLab program will give customers, academics, and other industry leaders a range of resources including educational programs, and software-defined networking (SDN) sandboxes and network functions virtualization (nfv) interoperability testing, to learn more about emerging virtualization and automation technologies.
One of these educational training programs includes a week-long workshop with over a dozen universities, where top students are paired with Juniper technology experts and customers to solve real-world problems with the latest SDN and automation systems. These students compete for prizes and opportunities to earn internships and full-time positions with Juniper and its sponsored partners.
Other programs include customized assessments, life-cycle modeling and design and deployment of SDN services, network automation, and network security, to help customers plan, build, and operate their networks.
OpenLab plans to add new sessions in the future to incorporate more programmable platforms and capabilities, and custom deliveries of these sessions are available for Juniper Network customers and partners.