IT Job Skills 2022: What’s Hot, What’s Not?
The pandemic continues to shape new technology and skills demands. Here’s a look at the skills most likely to shine and sizzle this year.
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2021 said goodbye to 2020 but not to its woes as the pandemic marched on and over everything that had gone before. A lot of lessons were learned in 2021, but one summed up the experience: Business resilience is more than just a buzzword. Through it all and beyond, IT is continuously reinventing itself on the fly.
“The pandemic is accelerating digital transformation. How we work and learn is adapting to a more flexible and hybrid model that harnesses technology to connect. IT professionals can’t simply be technical, they must have communication skills to be effective in their roles,” says David Morales, Chief Information Officer for Western Governors University.
So what skills are hot in IT for 2022? Flip through these slides to find out.
To better grasp the why behind the list of hot skills, let’s first look at the skills that have fallen out of favor. Topping the list of unwanted IT skills this year are physical machine maintenance skills, knowing only one programming language, and a lone wolf mentality.
“The default level to enter IT has been lowered quite a bit -- the end-user services have won the battle for their place, so the amount of high-level programming language specialist has risen to enormous heights,” explains Pavel Kuznetsov, deputy managing director, Cybersecurity Technologies at Positive Technologies.
“The wielders of dark arts -- core and low-level developers -- are not sought after in such huge amounts at the moment, because today you don’t necessarily need to know how the CPU in your PC works and processes data in order to create an application,” Kuznetsov adds.
A quick look further ahead will also add context and perspective to rising skill sets for IT. Here are two emerging trends for the near future:
Decision Intelligence -- a makeover of data mining and automated decisioning methods
‘The DevOps human’ -- specially trained humans who possess people, process, and technology skills
“Soon, perhaps in 2023-2025, people will become tired of apps and services that don't require deep knowledge of computing technology from their creators and we'll return to something we call the golden age of computing,” predicts Positive Technologies’ Kuznetsov.
DevOps started a movement that has now transcended software development to take many of its concepts to other domains. IT professionals who can master (or at least understand) concepts like AIOps (AI for IT operations), ITOps (IT operations), and even NoOps (fully automated IT infrastructure) are in demand.
“With the move to a more virtualized world with everything at your fingertips, the need to provide DevOps to support the various workloads is becoming more important. The goal is to automate processes to enhance the customer experience. Mobile development will also be a key trend moving forward. This has been a hot IT job for a while and shows no signs of cooling down,” explains Denis Savage, VP of Operations at NFINIT.
Data scientists have lost their sheen given the record-breaking number of failed data and AI projects. This year, “the analytics engineer displaces the data scientist as the world’s sexiest job,” predicts Cindi Howson, Chief Data Officer, ThoughtSpot.
However, data science skills will remain on the top of the most wanted skills list for IT pros.
“Because the importance of data for the enterprise has never been greater, those IT pros who have an in-depth understanding of data science will excel,” says Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO and Co-founder of Nerdio. “IT pros should become experts in the tools and techniques to extract and analyze business-level data today to better inform executive decisioning.”
Artificial intelligence is gaining momentum and IT has to stay on top of it in 2022. AI skills are thus among the hottest in demand for IT pros next year.
“Knowing how to deploy and manage artificial intelligence is key for IT departments to determine how they can best save time and resources, meet their KPIs and support an optimal customer experience – while maintaining ethical responsibility,” says Nicolas Avila, CTO North America, Globant.
Taming AI will become an even larger task next year as managing AI models and AI democratization, applying AI to IT operations, and optimizing all the AI at work in the organization also become bigger challenges.
“AI is also a key part of quickly emerging technologies like the metaverse and blockchain,” Avila adds.
A lack of cloud computing skills is no longer acceptable for IT professionals looking for employment or promotion. Cloud providers do ease the burdens on IT departments, but IT pros still need to understand such arrangements in detail in order to manage them well and incorporate them into an overall business strategy.
“Enterprise cloud deployments and investments have increased dramatically year-over-year, yet it’s still an area in which many IT departments are underskilled or understaffed, especially as the cloud ecosystem continues to mature,” says Globant’s Avila.
Given emerging technologies like blockchain, the metaverse, and VR and AR -- all of which are predicted to explode in 2022 -- and current technologies for remote work all rely on cloud infrastructures, “strong cloud computing skills are non-negotiable for every IT department to possess in 2022,” Avila says.
As more systems move to “smart” or “intelligent” real-time processes running throughout a growing number of distributed systems, the demand for IT pros that can manage them will also rise.
“Massively scalable and affordable cloud computing and AI technologies are enabling an explosion of 'data-intensive intelligent distributed systems' that quickly and efficiently analyze massive amounts of data and provide impactful actionable insights,” says Chandra Kalle, VP of Engineering at LeanTaaS.
The core skills required are cloud infrastructure knowledge, data engineering, data science, machine learning, distributed systems, web services, REST APIs, web architecture, and programming languages such as Python, GoLang, Java, and Javascript, according to Kalle.
While IT professionals should be well aware and thoroughly schooled in a variety of security risks and technologies, they’ll also need to gain skills for securing things in the physical realm.
“Any infosec professionals that have experience with securing Operational Technology (OT) environments will be in high demand for 2022. The attacks this year on fuel distribution and other OT assets garnered board-level attention in both private sector companies and in the public sector,” says Paul Baird, Chief Technology Security Officer at Qualys.
“As more OT equipment is connected to the Internet so that organizations can benefit from real-time data, they become more vulnerable and hackers know they are a soft target,” Baird adds.
While IT professionals should be well aware and thoroughly schooled in a variety of security risks and technologies, they’ll also need to gain skills for securing things in the physical realm.
“Any infosec professionals that have experience with securing Operational Technology (OT) environments will be in high demand for 2022. The attacks this year on fuel distribution and other OT assets garnered board-level attention in both private sector companies and in the public sector,” says Paul Baird, Chief Technology Security Officer at Qualys.
“As more OT equipment is connected to the Internet so that organizations can benefit from real-time data, they become more vulnerable and hackers know they are a soft target,” Baird adds.
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