Plumbing is always a good skill to have... I was working as a welder in Norwegian gas fields during my years in university. That said if you know OpenStack you probably know at least a bit Python.
Start from there. Cloud or on-prem what I really find is companies are looking to automate(they often move to cloud as it's seems easier to automate). If your job is to manage Linux boxes using SSH your job perspectives are going down the drain sooner or later. So based on Python learn Ansible/Salt to automate infrastructure then learn python APIs for 1 or more of the cloud vendors. All have a Python SDK (AWS is called Boto for some reason...)
Companies are cutting admin staff but same time ready to pay top money for people who can automate admin tasks using code. Other things that seem hot right now are Docker containers (you can run these with Ansible as well) and Kubernetes for managing a huge number of containers. Kubernetes yml file does pretty much the same thing as OpenStack heat chart except it uses containers and seems to gain popularity much faster.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
