In November 2014 I did an ‘Ask the Agent’ presentation at the North West VMware User’s group in Manchester.
This presentation included a section of ‘hot skills for the future’ of which I’ll focus on shortly.
Before doing that it’s important to understand the bigger themes of the IT industry and how to play its game. Here’s my thoughts:
– Like a surfer on the sea it’s important to catch the right IT skill waves & ride them efficiently before smacking head first into the sand, i.e. always keep an eye on new technology waves.
– Virtualisation & Cloud technologies are mature, proven & accepted. Yes maybe their adoption, for a whole bunch of reason’s, haven’t been as quick as the IT market would like, but they are certainly not going away.
– IT skills flourish and die very quickly in the IT jungle but note some pockets of older skills always remain in vogue & can be strangely lucrative. Always embrace change though is my major message.
– The real earners in IT land are both technical and can communicate technology to non technical people, e.g. presales/evangelical/technical types will always earn more than pure technical types. Thus technical skills gain is good but technical skills and presenting, being able to do whiteboard sessions, etc is better.
– VCP on its own is now commodity. I used to get very excited when we had 25 VCP’s on our books, then 50, then 100, then 500. Now I don’t know our current number of VCP’s. We are in a VCP plus market.
So hot IT skills for the future.
Well, the hottest ticket / role in IT infrastructure town is the ‘Cloud Solutions Architect’ – this mythical beast can do cloud and evangelise it to board/director/owner level.
Cloud Solutions Architect’s need to know everything – how physical & virtual IT infrastructure touches & affects everything, i.e. virtualisation (VMware & others), old skool & new skool Windows/Microsoft technologies, traditional & flash storage, security, networking, VDI/Application Virtualisation, cloud management tools, automation/monitoring, DevOps, Converged Infrastructure, etc.
Here are some specific technologies/themes that should help you on the way to be a ‘rock n roll’ Cloud Solutions Architect:
- AWS | Azure | vCloud Air | Google Cloud Platform
- SDDC – SDN – NSX – vCAC – vCOPs – SC2012
- Puppet
- Docker
- Openstack
I hope these comments prove interesting. Always remember though, and in the lyrics of AC/DC, ‘it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll!’
Neil Mills – MillsHill – www.millshill.co.uk
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