Computers and the Internet have become an integral part of our personal and professional lives today. There is probably no sector which is not touched by information technology. Therefore, in the last few years, job opportunities in this field have grown manifold, says RUCHIKA GODHA
Modern world is characterised by the impact technology has been having on nations, businesses, society and individuals. Just look at the way we shop, the way we connect with peers and customers, and the way we are transforming our businesses, every day. Businesses (both tech and non-tech) are striving towards becoming more innovative with adoption of newer technologies like mobile, cloud, analytics, and social. Technology professionals thus have tremendous opportunities to develop.
IT, as a business domain, has seen major highs and lows. From dotcom bubble to bust, from the massive recession to resilient recovery, IT has seen it all. There was a study in the year 2011, where many distinguished professors emphasized great prospects in the field of cloud, business intelligence, analytics, HR, creative and content. If we look at the present trends, we will note that the forecasts made more than three years back still hold water. These jobs, we expect will pay well, have a staying power, and truly influence the organisation now and in the future as well.
HR professional: No longer. The world has moved on and so has the role of so-called “HR” professionals. The role has transformed into people management, talent analytics, and people strategist. HR is playing much important and bigger role in paving the direction of a company. Even at Advaiya, we do not have an HR team but an employee effectiveness team whose role is to ensure the effectiveness of people through right balance of work and fun. This need for balancing acts as a challenge agent which makes “HR” a very attractive career prospect for IT professionals, specially the Gen Y.
Analytics and data scientist: The old records have transformed into big data and has opened doors for mathematicians and economists to contribute in the world of IT by analysing unstructured data, be it customer behaviour or talent analytics to explore the business opportunities.
Technology marketer: The true value of technology has to be communicated simply, effectively, and with clear regard to the changes in how the audience makes decisions. Thus, it becomes important to understand how to connect with customers across different channels, and still be relevant and impress technology buyers. This requires a technology marketer to have more diverse set of technology and marketing skills. Being in a technology marketer’s role means to have enormous influence on other areas of business from technology inception to production to adoption and consumption.
Social media architect/social media strategist/social media manager: Social networking is becoming a part of business in almost every organisation which includes intra-office communications, enterprise collaboration and even customer-involving social communication. The social media is becoming more complex which requires specialised knowledge and resource to manage people having strong IT skills in technologies related to networking, virtualisation, storage, etc. can foresee themselves making career as a cloud expert. The more advanced your understanding of virtualisation, networking, and infrastructure management is, the more your chances are of succeeding as a cloud architect. A cloud architect should have strong capabilities to evaluate/analyse different types of cloud (public, private, and hybrid) from multiple perspectives — costs, business structure and needs, risks, etc; so that she can suggest an optimum and sustainable cloud-based solution to its customers.
Mobile application architect: Mobile is the big thing that is becoming a part of IT career, and this includes developing mobile application, mobile strategies, and mobile security. Companies are demanding mobile technology experts to cater to the new business demand. Having said that, just being experts in a particular technology is not enough. Skills like public speaking, presentation capability, ability to un-learn and re-learn are the asks of business. The focus should also be on the capability of an employee to thrive on chaos and be adaptable to change- two major soft aspects of human attitude to help an individual sustain in any economy.
(The write is executive director,Employee Effectiveness at Advaiya)