Future IT Careers. Are You Ready?

According to US News and World Report's Money Careers column, virtually every organization will need IT managers. Their need will be particularly acute in financial, insurance and manufacturing firms. Federal, state, and local governments will need IT Managers as well. And so will the healthcare industry. All of which which translates into many new IT management jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that between 2010 and 2020, job growth will be driven by organizations upgrading their IT systems to newer and faster networks and safeguarding against cyber threats. They estimate as many as 55,800 new IT manager positions will be created in this decade.

"The most important thing about IT management is knowing enough about a lot of things, so you can manage a lot of people who know about different things," says Kapil Patnaik, senior director of IT at TechAmerica."If you decide to go into management, you’ll have to learn how a system works rather than how a particular project works."

A research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of Race Against the Machine, Andrew McAfee studies how IT affects businesses and how IT changes the way companies perform, organize and compete. He looks at how computerization affects the economy and its workforce. In the video What will future jobs look like?, he reveals some interesting insights into how technology will shape tomorrow’s jobs. He predicts that robotics will take over many tasks in an economy that will not need many human workers. So the go-between jobs will be in IT, uniting the human element with the job task element.

In a recent WIRED article, Tony Balistrieri, VP of Partner Strategy at FusionStorm notes that to survive and prosper in the IT jobs to come, you’ll have to adapt to a market that no longer needs “Networking,” “Server” or “Storage” specialists—you’ll have to know them all. The limited availability of talent will prompt employers to offer large base salaries, bonuses, stock options and other perks. There will be an abundance of opportunities for talented tech-savvy individuals who know how to combine server, storage, networking, virtualization, and automation into a single platform. He advises IT pros to immerse themselves in evolving Smartphone and tablet technologies, and to stay up to speed on Software Defined Networking (SDN) that goes beyond networking topologies and into virtualization and control panel methods. Finally, he urges IT job seekers to become proficient in Software Defined Storage (SDS), noting that the fastest growing area of technology is storage and the growth of unstructured data.

Are your skills and knowledge in sync with where IT careers are headed? If not, time to get busy and bring yourself up to speed.

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