Monday, October 7, 2019

What Will Your IT Career Look Like in the Next 5 Years

Will the impact of automation be felt? What positions will be created? We hear expert bets on the new generation of IT

With all the technological transformations and changes in the workplace, the IT career is undergoing a real makeover. When thinking about IT of the future, people often imagine functions involving artificial intelligence, data science, and cloud. These topics are undoubtedly part of expectations for years to come, but experts also include new functions that do not yet exist in the market.

To gauge what the IT career will look like five years from now, analysts have been discussing what will change at work and how these changes will improve business results. In the analysis, experts also consider how these changes can help make adjustments and corrections that may benefit IT professionals in the future.



New Security Positions

Growing security threats must create new roles for professionals. For Joy Beland, senior director of cybersecurity development at Continuum, these variables will impact organizational culture, not just technology. “The internal culture of companies needs to take a new perspective around privacy and security,” he explains. “The adoption of cyber tools and solutions is completely dependent on it. I think this will lead to a new position: cybersecurity culture director. Those who focus on the human element for cybersecurity implementation will become more in demand as the integration between HR policy, corporate culture and information security merge into a single leadership role. ”

Beland also believes that the functions of CIO and CISO will be merged into small businesses, as there is a need to integrate technology supervision with privacy and security. "Budgets within smaller companies struggle to accommodate both functions," said the expert.

Offensive Security's Jim O'Gorman also sees the need to create new security roles as work demands with increasingly complex protections are increasing and requiring professionals to deepen their knowledge in specific areas.

Remote Teams

The remote work will grow increasingly creating demand for the deployment of new tools to meet deadlines and goals. "Because nearly half of US employees are already working remotely in some way, technology will allow more to do so over the next five years," said Chris McGugan, senior vice president of solutions and technology, Avaya. "And for companies to truly reap the benefits of such a workforce, project managers will be needed to ensure that the distribution of work is met."

McGugan further sees the need for IT specialists who can implement new collaborative solutions to facilitate remote work, enabling employees to contribute to business more effectively. "These specialists will be needed to choose the right technology vendors and make sure the systems work well," he says.

Park Place Technologies CIO Michael Cantor sees another aspect that will make it necessary to advance remote work. "The growth of retired workers will also make it difficult to acquire talent as the workforce shrinks, making alternative forms of work more acceptable," says the executive. Despite this, Cantor does not expect a complete change in career plan developments, but rather that new work patterns will be available to those interested.

Democratization of data and application development

Steven Hall, ISG's partner and president, expects wide adoption of tools in business divisions that can help employees develop applications and make sense of big data. “In general, we are seeing deindustrialization and decentralization of IT. The technology is accessible to everyone, with thousands of SaaS and microservices available to beginners, ”reports the expert.

For him, there is an emerging trend: the emergence of Low-Code platforms and tools that make data science and analysis more accessible to businesses.

“IT skills are changing dramatically, but in very interesting ways. Cloud and SaaS solutions with low-code or no-code capabilities have simplified software development. Organizations are moving to PaaS solutions such as ServiceNow and Force.Com to rapidly develop applications with limited IT support, ”he notes. “Rapid developments in data visualization through tools such as Microsoft BI, Tableau, Dome, etc. have moved traditional IT reporting functions to the front of the business, where professionals across the organization can easily analyze data with extremely visual aids. to understand the information better. ”

Expert Hiring

Andres Rodriguez, Nasuni CTO and former The New York Times CTO, says there is a growing need for hiring data scientists with specific skills. "We see relatively small companies that specialize in specific industries such as pharmaceuticals, transportation, logistics, etc.," reports Rodriguez. By investing in experts, data analytics can be tailored simply to customer demand.

The impact of automation

The automation is already transforming workflows and confidence in technologies demonstrates an increase in demand for trained professionals to deal with the changing roles that require scanning. Cathy Southwick, CIO of Pure Storage, sees growing automation in the future, even in small and midsize businesses. “They can automate much of what is needed from an IT perspective - from email distribution lists to application permissions,” explains the expert. "This may seem trivial, but the volume of such work really increases when it has to be done manually."

Chatbots should also help reduce the burden on IT professionals. “An employee can be serviced by a bot to do a password reset or to request a software license. This saves time for the end-user employee and the IT employee who is released to handle the most important tasks, ”says Southwick. "It also creates a better employee experience, as employees can have their requests handled in minutes using technology."

Nutenix CIO Wendy Pfeiffer says the company's machine learning tools are already solving nearly a third of its help desk requests. "In this new IT environment, which will be most in-demand is the skills surrounding IoT and high-end computing. By 2021, Cisco predicts that IoT devices will produce approximately 850 zettabytes of data per year or more than 40 times. the information generated by data centres around the world. IT teams will need the right people, tools and strategies to collect and analyze this data.

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