A recent survey sponsored by a Cloud service provider, and an announcement by a staff recruitment agency, highlight that the IT jobs market in the UK – and probably further afield - is now in a state of transition. This must be the case because, at face value, they seem to flatly contradict each other.
On one side there is new research from Star, a provider of on-demand computing and communication services in the UK. This shows a growing uncertainty about job security amongst IT professionals.
Some 22% of respondents said they believe their current position to be secure for no more than 12 months – making it likely at least one in five is actively looking for a job at any given time. Only about half of the IT professionals surveyed said that they are currently employed full-time by the company for which they are working.
On the other side is recruitment company Resource on Demand, which has just proclaimed that, in the opinion of Operations Director, Theresa Durrant, Cloud Architects will be the hottest job role of 2012.
According to the company, the role differs from an Enterprise Architect in requiring a fuller understanding of how to configure IT assets around the needs and demands of a business. They should also have an understanding of hybrid, public and private Cloud services.
At the end of Q3 2011, Resource on Demand stated that Cloud recruitment figures were up by 52.9%, with growth fueled by new, more defined roles, such as Cloud Architects, Data Scientists and Social Media Architects. It sees no sign of the Cloud bubble bursting.
This apparent dichotomy highlights two important developments that in the jobs marketplace generally. The first is that the concept of `working’ is no longer about achieving job security – that notion has been fading slowly since the dark industrial days of the 1970s and 80s and is now well past its sell-by date. It is a self-evident truth that there is no law of nature which decrees that job functions have a divine right to exist.
If that was the case, then the army would still require archers and the armaments trade would be awash with fletchers. And though it is only half a century old, the IT business is not inured from this trend – though having said that, there still seems to be a demand for some old skills, such as working with legacy Cobol applications.
The second is that the concept of `job security’ is well past it’s sell by date. The target now has to be skills-based security. There is now a need for people to concentrate on developing and honing skills that are movable across a wide customer base. With that, an individual can not only move employment more readily if the need arises, but can often work for more than one employer at time, based on a situation where the security comes from the transferable skills, not a single employer.
IT staff are perhaps better placed than most to achieve this, for while many on-premise IT jobs would seem to be disappearing, most of the are in fact mutating into roles now being generated by the advent of the Cloud . As the need fades away for the majority of on-premise IT staff to spend their days struggling to keep the lights on, their talents can be liberated to take those new Cloud -oriented roles.
And those with a genuine love of working to keep the lights on, there will be so many datacentres that will require just those skills.
Star would seem to agree with this, as the survey indicates that IT professionals concerned about job security could be doing more to help themselves by acquiring the management skills needed for the Cloud computing era. 23% consider strategy and 19% consider analysis to be the most important management skills for IT professionals.
This, in one way, is excellent news. The Cloud is reducing the need for frontline technical staff and its pervasiveness puts far more emphasis on staff that understand business, and in particular the specific business issues of the customers, rather than the technology.Yet 77% of IT professionals hold technology degrees rather than business or management qualifications.
When I was young my parents wanted me to work in a bank, explicitly because it was a `job for life’. Twenty or so years ago, the apparent truth of that assumption came seriously unglued, so it’s just as well I was lousy at sums and followed a different, more transferable skill.
In the same way individuals wedded to the notion of being an ops manager in a 10-server Unix-running datacentre are liable to be disappointed soon enough. But with some additional training and thought, those skills can be applied in many areas and many datacenters around the world.
