The future of IT jobs: Critical skills and obsolescent roles

As technology grows more diverse and powerful it also grows more difficult to manage and balance. Many IT jobs are gaining a broader responsibility in terms of expertise and the number/type of skills required. No longer is it possible to be a Windows administrator for instance. Because working in IT today requires an IT professional to be more of a generalist rather than a specialist in one discipline, the pressure is on to have a diverse knowledge set. This spells promise for IT pros who can leverage a broad skill set and move among groups or companies to exercise their talents, but it can limit the career options of those who can’t or don’t keep moving. The employee whose sole task is to keep Windows systems up to date with patches might be replaced by an automated process that can perform the same job. Someone whose role is to reset passwords could be shown the door by an employee self-service program that covers the same process.

Tech Pro Research conducted a global online survey in July 2014 to see how IT jobs are changing and what changes may lie ahead. Specifically, we examined the following issues from the 1,156 respondents:

• How are IT professionals responding to the current technology landscape? How are they managing their careers?
• Where and why are they are expanding their technical and non-technical skill sets? How are they learning and who is arranging that?
• How are the new skill sets translating into hands-on work, and what percentage of their time is being allocated to these new areas?
• What level of demand are they seeing for their skills sets at the organizations? What about in the overall job market? What are recruiters and employers looking for in an IT professional?
• What they expect to see down the road both personally and within their industries?
• How are they planning to stay in IT, or are they moving (or being driven) into other fields or companies?