In a highly competitive information technology job market, it is vital to be aware of the areas that are trending — in soft skills, networking, education, and cutting-edge technologies. Whether you are a new entrant in the tech area or a veteran IT pro, these trends and the list of the hottest IT jobs can serve as your guidepost as you plan your next career moves.
Hottest IT job trends
IT experts taking management roles
Companies are increasingly operating on tighter budgets, and they now expect experienced IT pros within the organization to multitask and assume management responsibilities as well. Many employers are putting their best IT experts in front of clients to discuss product insights and share other tech-savvy information.
As IT teams gear up to deploy IoT solutions, machine learning, and Big Data, individuals with good leadership and people skills apart from tech skills are going to be in great demand.
Growing focus on soft skills
According to career consultants, employers are now placing more emphasis on these three important soft skills: adaptability, problem-solving, and time management. IT professionals who can work in the direction of developing a combination of technical, business, and soft skills, are likely to get preference over others who are solely limited to tech expertise.
Certifications in data analytics
Organizations that have to deal with large amounts of data from cloud storage and IoT devices increasingly face the challenge of analyzing information in a meaningful way that improves decision making. As a result, there is an increasing push for data analytics. IT pros who can acquire certifications in data analytics or make a career switch to data science stand to gain significantly.
Developing business skills
In today’s IT workplaces, those who aim to advance their careers should develop business smarts. More roles for tech personnel are emerging in business competency areas such as operations and marketing.
Considering how software is permeating every sphere of business, ops and marketing people should at least gain a baseline understanding of what technology is doing for their business.
Hybrid IT roles
There appears to be a gradual transition towards hybrid IT roles within tech companies. Tech resources no longer exist in silos. IT people should seek retraining and start thinking in the direction of vertical expertise, ROI, and customer satisfaction. These roles seem difficult to adopt for many because they wish to stay within their comfort zone of a pure tech role.
However, employers now expect IT people to know how, when, and where to monetize and leverage new technologies for the business. Data scientist is a new career path that has emerged from this emphasis on hybrid IT roles.
Emphasis on cybersecurity skills
Cybersecurity skills can help IT pros widen their toolkit and push forward their careers. A massive business growth in the areas of data security and compliance is happening as companies scramble to adopt new technologies at an exponentially faster pace.
Many of the computer science training programs and boot camps lack in providing security training, which has create a shortage of cybersecurity skills. The skills gap for governance, security, and compliance focused on the cloud and systems has widened, resulting in substantial demand for people with these skills.
Hottest IT jobs
AI engineers
Companies are rapidly investing in artificial intelligence to get ahead of the game. However, the area is starved for talent as engineers with knowledge and experience in deep learning are hard to find. The supply and demand gap has resulted in extremely attractive pay levels for people who can work in AI, deep learning, predictive analytics, and machine learning, making this not only one of the hottest IT jobs now but for the foreseeable future.
According to experts, transfer learning algorithms (which involves learning from existing data in one domain in order to perform effectively in a new domain) is emerging as a new promising field for engineers.
VR and AR developers
Researchers say that although virtual reality (VR) is currently one of the most in-demand areas, there are not more than 5,000 potential candidates for VR jobs at present. The demand for VR and AR (Augmented Reality) in development as well as security is only going to increase as more companies adopt these technologies.
Gartner has predicted that by 2020, AR, VR, and mixed reality based immersive solutions will constitute at least 20 percent of the digital transformation strategy of enterprises.
Information security analysts
The job of a security analyst offers a high starting salary, solid growth potential, and a growing influence at the workplace today. In 2017, this was one of the top two hottest IT jobs due to the explosive expansion of cloud-based storage drives.
A security analyst is expected to be well-versed with the current intelligence, including the new hacker methodologies so that they can anticipate and prevent security breaches. Recruiters say that nearly 300,000 positions in cyber security remained vacant in 2016. By 2020, the number of unfilled positions is likely to go up to 2 million.
Cloud integrators
The IT era of the cloud has arrived, where new technologies such as blockchain and machine learning are being built with the cloud in mind. As a result, implementation specialists and developers specializing in cloud solutions are in big demand to fill what has become one of the hottest IT jobs out there.
Cloud computing experts should be familiar with solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday, Amazon Web Services, SAP, Service Now, and Oracle Cloud.
For many recruiters, cloud-related roles are the hardest to fill this year. These roles include cloud infrastructure developers, cloud architects, and hybrid cloud developers and architects. Opportunities are huge for systems integrators, who have the skills to install the cloud services as well as train IT personnel in how to use them.
Full stack engineers, data scientists, and IoT engineers are other positions where demand is exceeding supply.
These jobs are waiting
The IT skills gap is only going to widen in 2018-19 and beyond. While this presents a challenge for organizations, for IT pros committed to building on their skills, it is an opportunity to ride these trends and get ahead of their peers by snagging the hottest IT jobs.
Businesses are ready to offer attractive pay scales for people with the right tech qualifications in order to bolster their IT competencies.
Featured image: Pixabay
