Written by Nicole Fornacon, Marketing Director, EMEA/APAC, Oracle University
It's the 2020s. You've commuted to the office in your titanium flying car, to be greeted by a robotic receptionist. You’ve traveled to your virtual, interactive desk which serves you a tall coffee and scans the morning's to-do list onto your retina.
Or maybe not.
Just as we're still waiting for the paperless office to arrive, the workplace of the foreseeable future will probably still be an open-space, with a wood or metal desk, as well as human colleagues.
But according to futurists, and human resource specialists, there's a strong chance that in 5 years' time, your job will be very, very different.
So, what better time than now to figure out how the IT industry is changing and what kind of growth each role is destined to experience? Let's examine how the Cloud is changing the way IT departments work.
A few years from now, staff and managers will need to adapt to a cloud-driven environment.
Next Stop: the Cloud
The IT train is traveling at high speed towards the next big station: the Cloud.
If you haven’t already jumped in, you still have some time left. But hurry, things are going to change quickly within the next 5 years.
The pace of change can be dizzying!
Keeping up with everything emerging in IT today can drive even the most devoted tech worker to distraction.
But IT professionals who don't take the time to lift their heads from the PC and evaluate the IT landscape may be asking for career trouble 5 years out.
Because one fact is clear: organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the Cloud.
Cutting the Wires
When you step off the elevator at the office or data center five years from now, what will you see?
Fewer servers and fewer co-workers, most likely. Maintaining on-premises data centers is a costly effort, much more so than connecting to the Cloud.
If the current trend toward moving infrastructure to the Cloud is any indication, organizations that haven't already done so will carefully consider those expenses - and many will ultimately decide to trim them over the next five years.
The Evolution of IT Skills
Ten years ago, if IT staff were plugging special cables into special switches, today we are facing a completely different scenario. Cables and switches are replaced by virtual storage volumes across the network, while applications that do their own storage allocation via APIs.
The future is about:
- Enabling the deployment and consumption of Cloud services, not installing, configuring, and managing stacks.
- IT departments now have more viable options to outsource and automate these tasks than ever before, and spend less time on-site performing mundane tasks.
- The IT department will no longer need onsite monitoring and recovering devices and systems to ensure they're ready for use.
IT Professionals as Strategic Planners & Business Analysts
Instead, IT professionals can spend more time as strategic planners and business analysts who ensure their organizations are structured appropriately to support cloud-based office communications.
- Companies' infrastructure will move increasingly to the Cloud.
- So will the jobs dedicated to maintaining racks.
- This will create a need for good network engineers, help desk staff, security managers and business analysts.
The need for server/storage engineers, systems
administrators, or data center managers will decrease.
The result will be a fundamental shift in IT's overarching mission at most organizations, with the support-and-maintain mind-set giving way to a more strategic, software-centric vision for IT.
The IT
staff of the future is likely to need the skills of a business-person to stay
current, as their company's software requirements and the options for
satisfying them will be deep, varied, and changing quickly.
IT Roles
in Flux
At this point, you must be asking yourself: as the Cloud continues to gain terrain, will companies need a fully staffed IT department?
As you may have guessed, only few believe the IT department will disappear. Companies will still require talented staff who can, at the very least, manage systems integration.
But an IT department five years from now
will need to keep pace with nearly constant change and the main switch will be
towards a strategic mindset.
IT will no longer be the people who try to manage the database; they'll be the people who are thinking of new ways to monetize, share, and use data for organization-wide success.
As more workloads shift to
the Cloud, the construction of the IT department, by necessity, must change
away from traditional roles to those more focused on vendor, business,
security, and service management.
The more complex and interconnected the cloud environments become, the higher amount of a general understanding and knowledge of how it all works together will be required from IT teams. The days of simple technology verticals are over.
If you want to build it, maintain it, or fix it, you have to be able to see and understand how it all connects together.
Projecting the Future
Some experts see the Cloud
benefiting the IT department by paving the way for staffers to expand their
roles, doing more development work, coding, tying systems together, and
creating flexible applications that resemble platforms.
Also, in the years to come, everyone in the IT industry will experience a rising need for security skills,
due to IT’s expanding role in development and automation projects.
Changes will occur not only
within the roles, but also surrounding the structure of the IT departments. In
five years, they'll look more like miniature software companies, with staff dedicated
to solving their customers' problems. IT departments will be more fluid, solving
co-workers' problems with an architecture that's adaptable to changing
requirements.
Position Yourself for Long-Term Growth
Smart companies have corporate road maps that spell out where they'd like to be 3, 5 and 10 years out, how they're going to get there, and how technology fits into that vision.
As a smart IT professional, can you say how your skills and position figure into your company's plans, or the industry's plan as a whole?
Everything is moving to the Cloud.
There has never been a better time to invest in yourself and to train for the Cloud.
Oracle University offers Cloud Training Solutions that will show how to migrate to, implement, administer, optimize and use Oracle Cloud applications and platform.
Professional experience, coupled with Oracle Cloud training, demonstrates your skill and proficiency in the industry and sets you on the path to a better and more rewarding career.
Investing in hands-on Cloud training empowers you to stay
relevant and up to date with your skills.
Explore Oracle Cloud offerings today!