Tuesday, August 16, 2011

An Interesting Twist on IT Skills

Kerry Doyle's 8 Underrated (and Undervalued) IT Skills.

Under soft skills, communication and project management are old standbys. New in this list is collaboration, which I think replaces teamwork, and opens up the potential for collaboration across the enterprise, across geographic and corporate boundaries. I'm not sure that we do a good job of teaching collaboration outside of traditional team-based classroom projects. A wildcard on the list is innovation/vision - this is a great addition, but I'm not sure how you teach innovation or for that matter how you test innovation/vision.

As for the hard skills, it seems that security and help desk will be around forever - probably long after I retire. Maybe help desk will morph into remote help desk and maybe the need for help desk will lessen in a post-PC era, but I don't see either of these going away anytime soon.

Storage and datacenter are nascent fields. Organizations are just beginning to get a handle on how much data they have and the expected exponential growth in required data storage. This will continue to be a strong demand area for a number of years.

A new hard skill on the list is Rapid Programming/Application Development. I think demand in this area stems from the explosion in web-based and mobile apps. As companies - small, medium and large - realize efficiencies and potential revenue streams gained from quickly conceiving and deploying an app there's going to be greater demand for developers who are agile, flexible, and self-motivated.

    Soft Skills
  1. Communication

  2. Collaboration

  3. Innovation/Vision

  4. Project Management
  5. Hard Skills
  6. Help Desk - Tech Support

  7. Security

  8. Rapid Programming/Application Development

  9. Storage - Datacenter

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