Just looking around at the IT landscape today, there are so many more opportunities than there were just a decade ago. Whereas workloads used to be confined to a server room, data center or data processing room, today, those same workloads whiz around data centers between hosts while powerful management and monitoring tools keep it all in check. "Back in the day" the IT profession was also much more pigeonholed, with specific people responsible for specific areas of the infrastructure and others responsible for reporting and what used to be called MIS functions. Over the past two decades, entire industries have popped up to support what have been two massive paradigm shifts in the IT landscape. The first was the rise of the Internet and the second has been the adoption of virtualization.
Both have had major positive impacts on the work environment and on the kinds of jobs that we see in IT. The rise of the Internet gave business new opportunities and new sales channels that enabled worldwide growth. The rise of virtualization has enabled companies to lower ongoing costs of running business systems, while, at the same time, providing new opportunities for workload availability and disaster recovery. In addition, virtualization has enabled companies to go to market much more quickly with new products and services.
As I mentioned, both have given rise to new classes of jobs that weren't even envisioned before these changes. And today, we're seeing another paradigm shift start to occur as organizations eye the cloud as a potential target for running workloads. In addition, there a job ads for cloud architects and engineers showing up in various places. During the rise of virtualization, we saw ads for virtualization admins appear and, today, that's a typical role in an organization and carries with it elements of networking, storage and systems administration. Personally, I see a growing need for more business-facing IT staff and this need may be enabled by offloading some parts of the IT infrastructure to the cloud.
As technology continues to forge ahead, what kinds of jobs do you think will be the hot jobs of the future?
Reply to this post to get 50 thwack points and an entry in the April Ambassador Engagement contest. An iPod Nano sits in the balance!
