Data scientists, security experts and mobile app developers will remain the hot IT career paths for at least the next few years, says a top executive for Robert Half Technology, a leading IT recruitment firm.
“The job market will be strong for people who can take data and package it” so that executives can make better business decisions, says John Reed, Senior Executive Director at Robert Half.
While this makes perfect sense to anyone who understands the IT industry, what I really wondered was where and how these skills will be developed. In addition to Reed, I asked several academic CIOs about this, and got some interesting insights.
For instance, even though elite universities such as Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, MIT, Stanford -- as well as many liberal arts, business and tech colleges -- offer courses in data analytics, companies are having a difficult time finding skilled data scientists. In fact, 53 percent of the U.S. CIOs surveyed by Robert Half Technology say that “they lack sufficient staff to access customer data and generate reports and other business insights from it.”
“A lot of companies are growing their own data analysts, hiring people with math and statistics degrees, and teaching them analytics on the job,” Reed told me.
And that’s not the only skill in demand for both aspiring and mid-career IT professionals. Along with big data, IT security and mobility, cloud technologies and virtualization skills will be important. Reed’s advice to midcareer professionals is clear: If you are not working in any of those areas now, “Tell management that you’d love to gain some new skills and work with the team,” he says, even if it’s after hours. “You always have to be looking at building your craft.”
The Right Mix
Students particularly need to take Reed’s advice to heart. While college computer science departments are doing a much better job partnering with business to provide students with practical experience mixed with academics, U.S. undergraduate education is only a short four years.
Beyond technology expertise, companies also want applicants with a commitment to lifelong learning and increasingly, problem solving and communications skills. IT executives are finding it difficult to find well-rounded applicants at all levels, says Mark Schwartz, CIO at BlumShapiro, a midsize accounting firm based in West Hartford, Conn.
“Job candidates either have the technical skills but don’t have the communications skills, or they have the verbal skills but lack the technical skills,” Schwartz says. During his own studies for a degree in management information systems at Northeastern University, Schwartz took on numerous collaborative projects and had to make presentations to round out his education.
“While we need people with technical expertise, what’s often more important is having an out-of-the-box thinker who can solve problems and communicate to the accountants at the firm,” he says.
Hands-on Experience
Curt Pederson is doing his part to prepare students better for IT careers. Before signing on this year as CIO at the University of Portland, Pederson was CIO at Oregon State University (OSU), which has a unique Open Source Lab where students can work.
The 16 students in the program receive intensive hands-on experience with Apache, Drupal and other Linux flavors, resulting in three to four years of development and operations experience when they graduate. They also learn to handle internal customers.
“The students solved problems, responded to trouble tickets and in many ways were one to two years ahead of most other students,” he says, adding that they all gained confidence and many were recruited by top Silicon Valley companies.
Pederson says the program was so successful that it’s now being moved from its home in OSU’s IT department to the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The hope is to expand access to the Open Systems Lab to 100 students, a prospect Pederson says may be challenging because the small size was part of the program’s formula for success. Pederson also plans to provide the students at the University of Portland with a similar experience. Already, roughly half of the college’s 80 computer science students are doing hands-on project work in the IT department.
Above all, it seems to me that IT workers today -- and tomorrow -- need to stay as flexible as the mobile workplaces many of them will encounter. And any way they can gain new skills in these hot technology areas will give them an edge.
Where are you finding technical talent? Share your experiences with Smart Enterprise Exchange and your peers.
Steve Zurier is a business and technology writer based in Maryland.