IT Jobs Thriving

IT jobs thriving despite lackluster economy - USATODAY.com

Better sharpen up your business and soft skills. Learn your economics, accounting, risk management, etc. I have been saying for a while that IT pros lack business skills which is really holding a lot of us back. Less time at a Linux prompt, more time with pie charts.

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Armymanis

That is why I am glad that I am turning 22 and getting a Bachelors in Applied Science in Information Technology and Administrative management. Not only will I have my AA in Technical Support, but I will have some management classes behind me. Basically including the ones in my AA, I will have a solid basic understanding of both the IT world and the management world.

This is the wave of the future and IT people better learn to accept it. If people say I am living in dream world, it is not the case. Technology and business are going to combine together into something magnificent. It will open up more Technical/Business IT jobs. Get ready world the future of IT is coming!

I am getting ready for the change! Are you!?

N2IT

it_consultant wrote: »

IT jobs thriving despite lackluster economy - USATODAY.com

Better sharpen up your business and soft skills. Learn your economics, accounting, risk management, etc. I have been saying for a while that IT pros lack business skills which is really holding a lot of us back. Less time at a Linux prompt, more time with pie charts.

That's where I am at right now.

P&L Statements, Presentations, Risk, Sustainability, Revenue, Cost, Utilization

Those 7 words sum up my space.

andy4tech

Thanks for the informations it_consultant,though i have been thinking in that direction but i can see the confirmation now.I am looking into project management,what do you think about that.

Turgon

we will still need techs, but only the very best will earn well..

powerfool

I think most people that have 5+ years experience have some business savvy, else they are likely finding it difficult to get a job. But, I got my BS in Information Systems, which is a business degree... I know that the discussion happens often, but this will likely drive up to popularity of the MBA for IT folks, especially those that don't have a business related undergrad...

NOC-Ninja

you will still need someone technical to design and deploy. ive been a software validation engineer aka business analyst. if my company wants that then game on. i did that for 3yrs and developers and r&d engineers doesnt have respect for us. its not rocket sci to create user req, test plan, test desin, test spec, test matrix, test report and risk analysis. that getd repetitive and old quick.

it_consultant

The reality is you will have to be able to wear the business man hat and technician hat at any moment. I will submit that its easier to be a tech in most situations. There is a technet article somewhere which will explain how to do 99.9% of the tasks in a Windows environment. Same thing if you are running a Red Hat network. There is NOT a simple reference for dealing with people in different departments and different skill sets. IT pros have not traditionally been thought of as outstanding communicators and team players. That must change if you want to keep your job or, more importantly to all of us here, make much more money.

it_consultant

powerfool wrote: »

I think most people that have 5+ years experience have some business savvy, else they are likely finding it difficult to get a job. But, I got my BS in Information Systems, which is a business degree... I know that the discussion happens often, but this will likely drive up to popularity of the MBA for IT folks, especially those that don't have a business related undergrad...

I find it hard to find any IT professional with professional skills regardless of how many years of experience they have. In fact, my overall impression is that that more entrenched people are in IT the LESS likely they are able to operate in a heterogeneous business environment. As techs get senior on their career and experience, I have often see a special kind of sense of entitlement and narcissism which is one of the reasons why our reputation (among business pros) is not very good.

I am painting with broad brush strokes here, not everyone falls into these categories. If we are being completely honest and introspective though, you will start seeing why our 'kind' has struggled to gain general acceptance in companies. Often, when I walk into a company fresh the first thing I say is something like this:

"There is no IT department or help desk anymore. We have IT professionals. You are not our 'customer'. Our mission is the same as yours, the profitability of the company. We contribute to the profitability of the company by maintaining internal and external systems you rely on to do your jobs."

I get shocked expressions from everyone, but the CEOs and department heads love it.

Turgon

NOC-Ninja wrote: »

you will still need someone technical to design and deploy. ive been a software validation engineer aka business analyst. if my company wants that then game on. i did that for 3yrs and developers and r&d engineers doesnt have respect for us. its not rocket sci to create user req, test plan, test desin, test spec, test matrix, test report and risk analysis. that getd repetitive and old quick.

You cannot learn design from books and certifications. By definition, design is an art. Configuration is just science. Unfortunately pie charts run the world. These are produced by managers. Engineers make the world work, but managers run the engineers.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum. It's happened before in every industry. In the industrial revolution, people grabbed engineers and elevated them to make money. Once the process was in place, the engineers were cast off. In WW II, people grabbed engineers to invent things to win the war, then they were cast off. In the dot com boom, people grabbed geeks. Once the process was in place, the managers swarmed in and the deskilling began. Everyone wants engineers on a coathanger now and the price is falling.

Get some business savvy and wear both hats. Being technical you do have an edge providing that...A. You learn the business side and B... You stick around long enough for the non technical management bloat to burst by about 2020. Then we will *really* need people who are good at both sides. They will be the only lucratively employable people left in this industry.

JoJoCal19

I've seen this trend coming for YEARS. Hence the reason that I am halfway through my BS in Business Administration from one of the top 50 B schools in the nation, University of Florida. I felt adding that to my A.S. in Computer Networking, my IT certifications that I have and am pursuing (Security+, CISSP, CISA, CISM), and the business certifications I will be pursuing next year (ASQ Six Sigma, PMP), along with my 7 years IT experience and other 5 years of business experience, should put me in a relatively good position with regards to staying employed and moving up to higher positions.

Turgon

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

I've seen this trend coming for YEARS. Hence the reason that I am halfway through my BS in Business Administration from one of the top 50 B schools in the nation, University of Florida. I felt adding that to my A.S. in Computer Networking, my IT certifications that I have and am pursuing (Security+, CISSP, CISA, CISM), and the business certifications I will be pursuing next year (ASQ Six Sigma, PMP), along with my 7 years IT experience and other 5 years of business experience, should put me in a relatively good position with regards to staying employed and moving up to higher positions.

The qualifications are fine but everyone is doing that, just as everyone is getting MCSE. The important thing is you start to get commercially facing IT experience. Now.

Turgon

it_consultant wrote: »

IT jobs thriving despite lackluster economy - USATODAY.com

Better sharpen up your business and soft skills. Learn your economics, accounting, risk management, etc. I have been saying for a while that IT pros lack business skills which is really holding a lot of us back. Less time at a Linux prompt, more time with pie charts.

You should still learn the technical. But I agree, the linux prompt is going to India.

N2IT

Turgon wrote: »

You should still learn the technical. But I agree, the linux prompt is going to India.

Now it's going to Japan. The price of a knowledge worker in India is jumping at an alarming rate.

You can get SAP developers in Japan for pennies on the dollars. Not so in India.

My boss managed a 10,000 man operation in India and spread this wealth of knowledge to me.

chrisone

HAHAHA those project managers without technical skills better know their disaster recovering plans and procedures very well, at the rate the hacking world and security threats are growing.

Security engineers are going to be demanded and needed by not only the government but all networks. Fear in the media about hacking is really creating our security jobs in this day and age. Whether it be from a foreign nation hack or from hacking groups, the exploits are there and security gurus will be in high demand.

Project management is always needed IMO , however many security and network engineers have many project management skills and can get by without really needing a specific project manager. That is just my opinion from my experience.

lordy

Ok, everybody may want business savvy IT people but does the market offer them? No.

Saying "we must all get business savvy" will not work out. There are many people who are either not capable or unwilling to think in business terms. For those who are willing to go the extra mile to not only understand the technical but also the business side of technology it will pay off. Is this something new? No.

Turgon

N2IT wrote: »

Now it's going to Japan. The price of a knowledge worker in India is jumping at an alarming rate.

You can get SAP developers in Japan for pennies on the dollars. Not so in India.

My boss managed a 10,000 man operation in India and spread this wealth of knowledge to me.

India, Japan and many other countries besides.

Turgon

lordy wrote: »

Ok, everybody may want business savvy IT people but does the market offer them? No.

Saying "we must all get business savvy" will not work out. There are many people who are either not capable or unwilling to think in business terms. For those who are willing to go the extra mile to not only understand the technical but also the business side of technology it will pay off. Is this something new? No.

It's not something new at all but it's precisely why the market will increasingly reward people who can pull it off, as opposed to the out and out technical crowd who will continue to be squeezed on salary.

UnixGuy

it_consultant wrote: »

..There is a technet article somewhere which will explain how to do 99.9% of the tasks in a Windows environment. Same thing if you are running a Red Hat network. .

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with you. This works in a PC environment where turning it off and on will fix the problem.

There's no "technet" article that will teach you how to build Red Hat cluster, it takes years of exprrience, and good luck with hiring 20+ people from India to *learn* doing it in your business. There's no step-by-step shortcut **** sheet to give you steps to build or design that. Getting it to work IS a challenge, and companies are charged ALOT for high-end technologies.

It's not always about running commands to configure things in a command line prompt, there are SLAs, and things need to be fixed immediately because they cost business money. There's no shortcut or technet article that will make under-skilled professionals troubleshoot high-end networks/systems, it doesn't work this way. Hiring cheap labors won't look very smart when the business is down for hours and people are Googling how to fix the problems. Yes it works when fixing a server in a small office with 20 people, but it doesnt fix the mainframe of a bank. It doesn't recover your Oracle Database running banking applications, and granted a pie chart won't fix it either. When your MySQL cluster or WebSphere is down, then that's a disaster that only skilled/high paid professionals can fix.

Things has been going this road for a long long time, it's nothing new, and I still don't see mainframe professionals or SAP professionals getting replaced by managers. These things need YEARs of serious hands-on experience, expensive trainings, and constant learning. Just my personal opinion.

Turgon

UnixGuy wrote: »

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with you. This works in a PC environment where turning it off and on will fix the problem.

There's no "technet" article that will teach you how to build Red Hat cluster, it takes years of exprrience, and good luck with hiring 20+ people from India to *learn* doing it in your business. There's no step-by-step shortcut **** sheet to give you steps to build or design that. Getting it to work IS a challenge, and companies are charged ALOT for high-end technologies.

It's not always about running commands to configure things in a command line prompt, there are SLAs, and things need to be fixed immediately because they cost business money. There's no shortcut or technet article that will make under-skilled professionals troubleshoot high-end networks/systems, it doesn't work this way. Hiring cheap labors won't look very smart when the business is down for hours and people are Googling how to fix the problems. Yes it works when fixing a server in a small office with 20 people, but it doesnt fix the mainframe of a bank. It doesn't recover your Oracle Database running banking applications, and granted a pie chart won't fix it either. When your MySQL cluster or WebSphere is down, then that's a disaster that only skilled/high paid professionals can fix.

Things has been going this road for a long long time, it's nothing new, and I still don't see mainframe professionals or SAP professionals getting replaced by managers. These things need YEARs of serious hands-on experience, expensive trainings, and constant learning. Just my personal opinion.

I agree with a lot of that, but then as engineers we understand one another. Unfortunately a lot of senior management dont. Time and again I have seen all these problems dismissed as 'operational pain' on the pie chart. It has a cost, but if the numbers are cooked by ambitious executives then the perceived savings and profits win the day. The trend will continue.

UnixGuy

Turgon wrote: »

I agree with a lot of that, but then as engineers we understand one another. Unfortunately a lot of senior management dont. Time and again I have seen all these problems dismissed as 'operational pain' on the pie chart. It has a cost, but if the numbers are cooked by ambitious executives then the perceived savings and profits win the day. The trend will continue.

That's just normal, bad managers without the necessary background will often make bad decisions, and the result will cost the business real money. A bad manager can make so many bad decisions when it comes to financial services, health care..etc. The business must run, and this costs money. If his cheap labors fails once or twice, the business can't run, and VPs will ask questions.

There's no shortcut, good archeticts/designers must go through the pain of getting real high-end IT experience, they must go through the pain of troubleshooting and learning things the hard way - only then they can make good design decisions. Having business skills and people skills is a must too, but nothing compensates for the real experience. Technet/zdnet/facebook articles can't teach under-skilled managers/architects how to design a highly-available solution for a big teclo.

lordy

Very well said, UnixGuy

I am just experiencing this myself. I work in an environment with lots of custom made software. If that doesn't work you cannot simply Google it. You need to have a deep understanding of the system as a whole to identify problems and understand impact, let alone fixing it. I have been working there for 2 years and even that isn't enough time to learn all the details.

Turgon

UnixGuy wrote: »

That's just normal, bad managers without the necessary background will often make bad decisions, and the result will cost the business real money. A bad manager can make so many bad decisions when it comes to financial services, health care..etc. The business must run, and this costs money. If his cheap labors fails once or twice, the business can't run, and VPs will ask questions.

There's no shortcut, good archeticts/designers must go through the pain of getting real high-end IT experience, they must go through the pain of troubleshooting and learning things the hard way - only then they can make good design decisions. Having business skills and people skills is a must too, but nothing compensates for the real experience. Technet/zdnet/facebook articles can't teach under-skilled managers/architects how to design a highly-available solution for a big teclo.

Exactly. Unfortunately a lot of influential people calling the shots in large companies dont seem to get this. Just as many techs starting out dont seem to get that google isn't a magic bullet. The problems you describe exist and will continue. Some companies will fail because of them but that wont necessarily stop the practice from continuing. As I say, a lot of executives hide the pain and cost in the charts and they will continue to do so regardless of if the company succeeds or not. If the company tanks, they will move to another one. The real experience you speak of is vital but the model is increasingly preventing people from actually acquiring it. Should you obtain it then I think your longterm employability in the higher paid stakes are pretty good. The problem is getting it these days. I was lucky to start out when I did.

UnixGuy

That's a perfect example. Serious coding skills is needed in such situation. I remember once there was a sudden strange performance bottleneck in a Java application, and nobody could solve it. As almost rendered the mission-application useless until one experienced programmer was able to debug the JVM. Needless to say, he got paid really well !
These kind of skills can be build with people skills alone.

lordy wrote: »

Very well said, UnixGuy

I am just experiencing this myself. I work in an environment with lots of custom made software. If that doesn't work you cannot simply Google it. You need to have a deep understanding of the system as a whole to identify problems and understand impact, let alone fixing it. I have been working there for 2 years and even that isn't enough time to learn all the details.

UnixGuy

Turgon wrote: »

Exactly. Unfortunately a lot of influential people calling the shots in large companies dont seem to get this. Just as many techs starting out dont seem to get that google isn't a magic bullet. The problems you describe exist and will continue. Some companies will fail because of them but that wont necessarily stop the practice from continuing. As I say, a lot of executives hide the pain and cost in the charts and they will continue to do so regardless of if the company succeeds or not. If the company tanks, they will move to another one. The real experience you speak of is vital but the model is increasingly preventing people from actually acquiring it. Should you obtain it then I think your longterm employability in the higher paid stakes are pretty good. The problem is getting it these days. I was lucky to start out when I did.

you are absolutley right, they ruin the business, and may (or may not) lose their reputation as managers. I think the novel "Atlas Shrugged" shows good examples of what happens when business is run by under skilled people with silver tongues.

Turgon

UnixGuy wrote: »

you are absolutley right, they ruin the business, and may (or may not) lose their reputation as managers. I think the novel "Atlas Shrugged" shows good examples of what happens when business is run by under skilled people with silver tongues.

It always has been and always will be so. It's an occupational hazard that engineers need to be come skilled at dealing with. Otherwise your career propects are at risk. That includes your 4 x CCIE savant who can easily find themselves sent down the road. Again, you need experience to become equipped at this. You dont learn it in books or at college.

it_consultant

UnixGuy wrote: »

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with you. This works in a PC environment where turning it off and on will fix the problem.

There's no "technet" article that will teach you how to build Red Hat cluster, it takes years of exprrience, and good luck with hiring 20+ people from India to *learn* doing it in your business. There's no step-by-step shortcut **** sheet to give you steps to build or design that. Getting it to work IS a challenge, and companies are charged ALOT for high-end technologies.

It's not always about running commands to configure things in a command line prompt, there are SLAs, and things need to be fixed immediately because they cost business money. There's no shortcut or technet article that will make under-skilled professionals troubleshoot high-end networks/systems, it doesn't work this way. Hiring cheap labors won't look very smart when the business is down for hours and people are Googling how to fix the problems. Yes it works when fixing a server in a small office with 20 people, but it doesnt fix the mainframe of a bank. It doesn't recover your Oracle Database running banking applications, and granted a pie chart won't fix it either. When your MySQL cluster or WebSphere is down, then that's a disaster that only skilled/high paid professionals can fix.

Things has been going this road for a long long time, it's nothing new, and I still don't see mainframe professionals or SAP professionals getting replaced by managers. These things need YEARs of serious hands-on experience, expensive trainings, and constant learning. Just my personal opinion.

What you are talking about is applying knowledge to situations, which works in any environment. Setting up a Red Hat cluster is not a new science, I have never done it before but within a few minutes I am sure I can find some thorough documentation on how it is done. Or, if I am wise, I would have paid for professional support through Red Hat and they would support my project. The challenge for us as engineers is to implement these technologies to help our respective companies make money. We are generally implementors and solutions providers of technologies that are not new or untested. That doesn't mean any old idiot can follow instructions to set up a Oracle database or whatever, it does mean that the number of techs who can set up an Oracle database (or Red Hat Cluster, or a Federated domain) is higher than the number of techs who have those skills AND can interface with company management successfully.

No one is saying that we are replacing techs with business people, what I am saying is that techs NEED TO BE business people. This is a positive thing for the IT department and the company as a whole. I have the unique perspective of walking into many different networks. Most of the networks didn't have a lack of IT talent, the problem was the perception of the non-IT personnel was so negative to the IT talent and vica versa. What they had in networking and tech skills they sorely lacked in professional and business skills.

it_consultant

UnixGuy reminded me of a client, they were obsessed with having "redundancy". So they set up two ASA 5510's in a HSRP failover configuration (of course they only have one internet drop so...) in case one of their ASA's went down. This is a kinda sorta complex config, harder in Ciscos then in Watchguards, and as a result the internet went down 4 times over the course of the year. The WAN connection was fine, it was the redundant config that would fail.

From the employee's perspective, the internet was down 4 times, they have no idea what HSRP or any of that jazz is. Management was sold on two firewalls as opposed to one because they were promised "redundancy".

I had to tell them two things, 1) it was never truly redundant 2) the likelihood of a single simple firewall going down 4 times in a year is very low. It is POSSIBLE that the whole firewall may fail and you will have to wait for a replacement which could be 4 to 24 hours away. It would take less time to have another firewall in a box somewhere and break it out and configure it quickly in case of a main firewall failure.

It wasn't that their internal IT did anything particularly wrong technically (besides not having dual internet connections DNS records pointing to the IPs of each different carrier) it was that they didn't match the business need to the technology properly.

It is fairly easy in our world to figure out HOW to do something, it is more challenging and more important to the business you support to figure out WHETHER you should do something.

Turgon

it_consultant wrote: »

It is fairly easy in our world to figure out HOW to do something, it is more challenging and more important to the business you support to figure out WHETHER you should do something.

Correct. Just because you know how to do something that doesn't necessarily mean you should do it.

UnixGuy

it_consultant wrote: »

... Setting up a Red Hat cluster is not a new science, I have never done it before but within a few minutes I am sure I can find some thorough documentation on how it is done. Or, if I am wise, I would have paid for professional support through Red Hat and they would support my project.....

See, this is where we disagree. With all due respect, I don't think within few minutes you (or me or anyone) can find documentation to do it. There are best practices to be followed to make it work properly, otherwise It'll be a disaster. Years of experience with Linux is required, knowledge and experience of Red Hat cluster is REQUIRED, and training is preferred. Yes you're gonna have to call Red Hat or Red Hat Partners to do it, and good luck with squeezing the budget for the amount of money you're going to pay for the installation only (the support is a different story). Be careful, this is where REAL experience IS needed to avoid making bad decisions that will cost money. Thinking that few minutes documentation will do is a receipt for disaster.

Getting it to work: installation, administration, and support IS the difficult part. Making a decision whether a high-availability solution is needed or not IS the easy part. Anyone with high-school level knowledge (and common sense) can decide whether a high-availability solution is needed or not, and whether the cost is justifiable or not. These things are included in entry-level basic certifications material like CompTIA Server+.

Yes, you might spot a not very smart tech who is dumb enough to push for expensive solutions when they're not needed, but that's not the case when dealing with big clients with big setups. Granted, Googling the solution will not help, it costs money, and VERY experienced will be needed. I agree, that's not the case for every solution, specially small to mid-sized business.

it_consultant

UnixGuy wrote: »

See, this is where we disagree. With all due respect, I don't think within few minutes you (or me or anyone) can find documentation to do it. There are best practices to be followed to make it work properly, otherwise It'll be a disaster. Years of experience with Linux is required, knowledge and experience of Red Hat cluster is REQUIRED, and training is preferred. Yes you're gonna have to call Red Hat or Red Hat Partners to do it, and good luck with squeezing the budget for the amount of money you're going to pay for the installation only (the support is a different story). Be careful, this is where REAL experience IS needed to avoid making bad decisions that will cost money. Thinking that few minutes documentation will do is a receipt for disaster.

Getting it to work: installation, administration, and support IS the difficult part. Making a decision whether a high-availability solution is needed or not IS the easy part. Anyone with high-school level knowledge (and common sense) can decide whether a high-availability solution is needed or not, and whether the cost is justifiable or not. These things are included in entry-level basic certifications material like CompTIA Server+.

Yes, you might spot a not very smart tech who is dumb enough to push for expensive solutions when they're not needed, but that's not the case when dealing with big clients with big setups. Granted, Googling the solution will not help, it costs money, and VERY experienced will be needed. I agree, that's not the case for every solution, specially small to mid-sized business.

I think you misunderstand my meaning. In a few minutes I can have documentation on how to do almost anything because we have trusted resources to go to in order to assist us. A non-IT person cannot get past the introduction let alone read and understand what the references are telling us. Even surgeons refer to their books. That doesn't mean they don't already know a lot about what they are doing already, it means they are not interested in screwing it up because they didn't feel like they need to make use of their references. I wouldn't set up a Red Hat cluster production style because I have not done it before. I could lab it and figure it out and after a little while become proficient, thats because I am an IT professional and I am expected to be able to handle that.

I never suggested that we are getting rid of techs or that the job of the tech is going away. I am saying that simply being a tech is not good enough anymore. If this weren't an issue we wouldn't be seeing this trend. High availability is just one example, most of the time the techs are not really wrong, they just didn't match the business needs to the solution correctly. If they teach this in CompTIA and other basic courses...nope, I don't need to go there, I know they don't. They pay it lip service but they don't really go over designing solutions for clients based on current technologies.

Great, you can set up a Red Hat cluster, can you (I don't mean you specifically) determine the accounting needs for a medium sized manufacturing company? Inventory, AP, AR, shipping, maintenance, RMA, machine ageing and value etc? That is just one facet of the manufacturing need. In this case you sit down with the accounting staff with a notebook and ask pertinent questions about how they use their current system and move forward. This is more industrial engineering then IT, but it must be accomplished in order to get a good IT system in place for that company. You can't expect (or at least I have never seen it) business people to pick up enough IT understanding to do this. I do expect IT pros to be able to pick up enough business understanding to fill that role.

At a certain point, you have to admit, that our jobs are not that hard. It is hard to initially learn everything you need to learn but after a while you can pick up new technical skills pretty quickly. It is just matter of filling in the blanks where necessary. Installing new systems really isn't the hardest trick in our world. We aren't inventing anything new and almost everything we will try and do has been done and tested before.