Now here’s a headline to make us techies cringe: high tech skills that, well, won’t be skills (won’t be in demand) not far in the future. Part of me laughs at the notion that tech experts are going to face diminishing demand; every IT person I know is crushed under demand for their services. But part of me understands the anxiety that currently-employed techies feel: they’re running in place, or falling behind, or totally losing the battle to stay current with technologies.
That is our stock-in-trade: we’re the people who know how to build, maintain and secure a working infrastructure. And, oh yeah, teach our users how to use it. Oh, and constantly fold in all those must-have new technologies, whether it be Blackberry servers (how Y2K!) or iPhones using Exchange. Often we’re the first person in the office to have an Android phone, though not always. Even if we aren’t, the minute we see one in the workplace we know whose responsibility it will be: ours.
And now there’s cloud computing, and virtualization, and tablets, and mobile apps. We have Sharepoint sprawl, an toolbar in Word that half our users can’t stand, and web technologies moving so fast that any website with a team of fewer than a dozen is obsolete by the time you build it. There are new data protection laws (fortunately none in New Mexico), breach disclosure laws (ditto), federal standards in more flavors that ice cream, and users who flatly refuse to give a thought to security. Should we really be afraid of becoming obsolete?
Only if we can’t keep up.
And half of keeping up is getting ahead, even if just a little bit, of the curve. Do you at least glance through InfoWorld, InfoWeek, ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld or take-your-pick of IT trade publications? Do you have some degree of foresight of what’s coming? Because you need to. Even if you already know this, make sure your management knows it.
In the mean time, check out this article at GlobalKnowledge.com:
http://www.globalknowledge.com/articles/generic.asp?pageid=2885&country=United+States
And consider: will you really be sorry to see manual software installation and updates go the way of the buggy whip? Gee, you won’t be visiting 200 desktops to update Office. That’s a shame, no?