Announcing the 2019 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year

Each year at Red Hat Summit, we recognize Red Hat Certified Professionals who demonstrate ingenuity, hard work and expertise by making a difference in their organizations. We’re proud to announce that Jason Hiatt, lead infrastructure developer at OneMain Financial, has been named the 2019 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.

Hiatt has earned several Red Hat certifications and is a Red Hat Certified Engineer, Red Hat Certified System Administrator, Red Hat Certified System Administrator in Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation and Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Application Development. In addition, the Red Hat Learning Subscription has been key to helping Hiatt hone his skills in Red Hat technologies.

In 2017, when the company needed a way to deliver applications more quickly for its customers, it turned to Red Hat to help build out a container platform. Hiatt helped oversee the roll-out of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. He led the implementation of Red Hat Ansible Automation while building the clusters, created CI/CD pipelines and developed applications that run on top of the platform. The initiative was successful in enabling code changes, which once  took weeks or days and now takes mere hours or minutes.

Open source is a component of OneMain Financial’s strategy, and the company understands the value of sharing ideas and code. Once the roll-out was successful, Hiatt launched an internal “tech talk” that promoted the initiative and helped spotlight their success in running Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which heightened interest in running containers from other departments. Hiatt worked collaboratively across teams (including with the department responsible for running a majority of the business-critical web applications) built an OpenShift cluster, and helped them develop a CI/CD pipeline process for the applications that would be going into OpenShift. The teams now meet on a weekly basis and share ideas.

In the spirit of sharing ideas and giving back to the community, Hiatt shares code and his enthusiasm of open source technologies by teaching coding classes at his daughter's middle school.

For the last 20 years, the Red Hat Certification program has had a single goal: validating skills through a program with rigorous, hands-on and performance based testing. Red Hat’s certifications can help system administrators, application developers and IT architects advance their careers and help close the skills gap facing the IT industry. Red Hat Certifications establishes benchmarks for what an IT professional should know when using Red Hat technology.

Congratulations to Jason Hiatt, who will be presented with the Red Hat Certified Professional award on the main stage of the 2019 Red Hat Summit in Boston.