New Technology = New Skiils = New £$£
Ian Moyse, Cloud Industry Thought Leader & Cloud Sales Director at Natterbox
Having been in the tech sector for many years and starting in a technical role I have always had an affinity for the technical side of the industry. I was a programmer in a variety of languages from Cobol, Pascal and C through REXX, Basic and Z80a.
I have worked for the past 12 years in the Cloud sector and circled around, presented on and been close to the edge of a wide range of new emerging technologies from Cloud, Big Data, IOT, AI and Drones.
I present often at business events on ‘Changeonomics’, how technology is enhancing and cost reducing at such a speed that it is no longer the entitlement of only large firms, but can empower any organisation from small to large, from startup to established, to be able to revolutionise their customer offering and to disrupt or be disrupted.
With this speed of technology change comes a need for those supporting the business to adapt quickly and adopt new methodologies, knowledge and skills to empower a company to make use of these new possibilities. Switching from Waterfall to Agile, from networking to virtualising to Docker, from hosting to IaaS & PaaS and from C, through Java into Swift, Hack and Dart.
Change is hard to accept at the best of times, particularly if you have previously been the subject expert on a vendor / technology for a long period to now find that is being disrupted at a pace and your worth is diminishing either in your own firm or the market too.
Staying relevant and of demand is both harder and easier than ever before. Easier if you are willing to continually learn and re-learn, placing yourself in the eye of the demand for new world skills and identifying these wisely around the tech that is of high growth and will leave businesses paying high for the skills they need. Harder if you are stuck in the old world, have plenty of in depth knowledge on a platform or technology, but one that is disrupting fast or if you do not keep an eye on the market changes and demands and yourself get marginalised and disrupted. The days where knowing one platform or technical coding language would last you your career are likely gone. Even the Amazons and Googles of this world are re-inventing themselves and enhancing faster than we have ever seen in the tech sector before.
The demand for many newer skills is showing signs of exploding and with this comes opportunity. Get on board with the right technology eco-system, get trained and importantly certified and get some experience under your belt and you can likely surf the wave to strong salary or contracting rates.
The Salesforce sector has been lucrative for many years for a growing number of consulting firms and consultants, with the breadth of technology function allowing specialisations in areas such as marketing, ERP and customer application coding.
The new technology markets (Cloud, IOT, Big Data, AI) are growing at such a pace that the number of job postings is accelerating and yet the talent qualifying for these roles is marginal, pushing the rates up and increasing the chances of highly valued roles or contracts.
Having experience and certifications in areas such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), MS Azure, Cloud, IOT and Big Data Analytics will quickly enhance your value and likely lead to a job whose role title was not even in use 10 years ago (Data Scientist, Digital Officer, Devops, Big Data Architect and so on…).
Knowing how and where to best employ the use of IaaS & PaaS to a business’s advantage, how to move old creaking applications to newer models and how to deliver a better quality of service and user experience across the demands of any device, any place, any time working demands will serve you well in the new era of ‘Business User Is King’.
Businesses now have pressures upon them like never before! Markets that shift quicker, more fickle and demanding customers, users being influenced by or becoming millennials (who expect faster, quicker, easier, cheaper from the world they have grown up within) and disruption all around them from new born firms who can attack with the gusto of using all the new world tech and methods and with no legacy to unchain themselves from.
Firms both new and legacy are all demanding more and where the skills are not in house, willing to go out and get them, the faster the disruption occurs the more opportunities for those ready to take them there will be. The hottest tech trends of 2017 revolve around development, data analysis, cloud and IOT. If you are not there now, start shaping your skills, take online classes, increasing your own personal value is more in your hands and in reach than it has been in the history of technology.
You can follow Ian at www.ianmoyse.cloud