Top Ten IT Skills for 2014
Global Knowledge’s Paul Simoneau projects a list of major IT skills he suspects will be in demand in 2014, taking into account a number of different surveys and reports. Below is the skills list, along with a few words of explanation from Paul.
1. Programming and Application Development – “Major organizations are planning to transition from relying on third-party programming providers to in-house development. “
2. Help Desk and Technical Support – “After outsourcing to third-party support companies, many organizations are also bringing the help desk back in-house. That seems to be in response to the huge increase of mobile devices, along with company-provided web services.”
3. Networking – “The unemployment rate for network and systems administrators is 1.1 percent.
The requirement for expanding wireless connectivity is the most likely reason for the jump in demand for networking professionals. The increased network traffic BYOD solutions and organization-provided wireless devices produce requires a lot of troubleshooting.”
4. Mobile Applications and Device Management – “The use of smartphones, tablets, and similar devices is growing in all areas of both business and consumer arenas. This is driving a strong demand for specialists and experts with mobile skills-the skills that some surveys rated as the third most difficult to find.”
5. Project Management – “Since IT is being judged based on the success or failure of projects, such as HealthCare.gov, organizations are making heavier investments in business analyst/project manager skills. To make highly visible major projects and even small, quiet implementations successful, project managers must gather diverse business and end-user requirements, set priorities, be able to talk with developers about the technologies involved, and follow through to make sure the processes are completed in a timely manner and tested thoroughly before they are rolled out.”
6. Database Administration – “[This] stems from the growing interest in big data. Organizations have been gathering huge amounts of information from websites, social media, and third-party arrangements. Now they want to be able to use that data to make better decisions on products, services, and their customers.”
7. Security – “Responding to highly publicized and very costly (in terms of dollars and consumer confidence) attacks, companies across all categories are looking for security experts who can help them protect their valuable intellectual property.”
8. Business Intelligence/Analytics – “…Big data is predicted to grow more than 40 times by 2020 to over 35 zettabytes. (A zettabyte is a billion terabytes.) With that volume of global data, companies and governments are eager to gain a competitive edge with ever more sophisticated analytics capabilities… According to hiring surveys, demand for these skills and data modeling are double what they were last year and among the most difficult skills to find.”
9. Cloud – “With interest in and demand for cloud computing growing more than 30 percent in the past year, there will be a strong focus on moving IT systems and services to the cloud. That will probably increase over the next year and drive the demand for cloud-experienced networking professionals again next year… Making infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service work with the traditional data center resources requires a strong understanding of all the dependencies.”
10. Interpersonal – “One of the most important communication skills is the ability to speak using the terms familiar to the various business domains, such as sales, marketing, finance, and manufacturing. Technical skills are in high demand, though those with some knowledge or experience in areas such as supply chains and financial derivatives will get the first job offers. “
Global Knowledge is an international IT/business skills training company.
Read the whole article on the Global Knowledge website.