I fully agree with you: it is mostly an education problem and you can find people willing to learn right out of univ. Indeed, that is exactly my experience: I successfully onboarded several (carefully selected) junior people into the ops skillset over the years and I have seen them do wonders with customer systems, while enjoying their "ops life", without having fires every day.

The connection of this to the replies above it: I am not sure if this kind of junior people would be easy to retain in a large corporate environment. We certainly can do that in niche consulting.

We're a tiny company doing ops as services for large corporations - with one customer now coming close to a decade. That solves the retaining problem as we have limited exposure to all that big corporation nonsense, and have the option for individuals to go on a vacation in other projects without losing their knowledge in the organisation.

I had the exact same business for 18 years :-) and yes, without corporate nonsense it is easy to retain intelligent people. Cheers