Emerging Skills Needed for a Successful IT Career
The IT industry is constantly changing with emerging technologies, and the skills you need to have a successful IT career are changing as well. In order to move up in your company and stay in demand as an IT professional, you need to be on the leading edge of current skill sets. While it’s always a good idea to keep current on your technology skills, IT professionals who want to get promoted need to broaden their tech skill sets and develop good business skills as well.
According to industry analysts, the technical skills that are in demand in IT are cloud computing, database management, IT security, application and web development, virtualization and tech support. You can stay current with these skills by seeking technical certifications and attending conferences regularly. You can become more valuable to your employer if you show that you’re willing to do a little extra work to keep your technical skills honed.
Many IT professionals will try to stay current and advance their technical skills in order to stay valuable to their employer, but IT professionals should beware of specialization. While it helps to have an in-depth knowledge of technical disciplines, you should be able to shift gears and work in a variety of disciplines to move up. IT Managers and CIOs need to be able to look at the big picture, and if you’re heading for those positions, you should branch out as much as possible in your tech skills. But to be a successful IT professional, you don’t just need a broad range of technical skills.
Industry experts say that the most neglected but also the most important skills for an IT professional are business skills. You can’t stay isolated in the IT department. You need to be able to build business relationships with people of many different disciplines and understand how your company works so you can tailor technology solutions. Business skills like communication, strategic planning, collaboration, leadership and identifying business opportunities are just some of the business skills in demand for high-level IT professionals.
Effective communication skills are some of the most sought after in all professionals, and this is doubly true for IT professionals because we tend to have the reputation for being technology oriented rather than people oriented. It’s important to be able to communicate with your team, of course, but communication with other business professionals is doubly important. As a CIO or IT Manager, you need to communicate effectively with board members, marketing departments and other business professionals in the company.