Give yourself a break in 2002 by brushing up on the skills that
will not only put you in pole position to survive the downturn, but
also make you a hot employment commodity to boot.
A review of current demand for IT skills gives a good indication of
how the market will pan out next year:
As an IT consultant and member of UK-based parliamentary group
Eurim, Geoff Petherick is well placed to comment on the various IT
skills and how they fit with the bigger picture. "Java is slowing
down because businesses are not starting new projects," he says.
Even demand for skills in security - normally a hot area - is
drying up. In Petherick's experience programming skills have been
getting cheaper this year. "It's now 60% of last year's rate. I can
get a C programmer with five years' experience for £175 per day."
Looking at this evidence, is it time to move out of
programming?
Maybe not yet. In spite of the dotcom backlash John Willmott,
principal consultant at research firm NelsonHall, supports recent
research which found that one of the top areas for projects in the
next six months would be e-commerce. He expects to see demand for
skills in customer service, Web development and middleware.
CRM is possibly one area that is less favourable than a few years
ago, according to Willmott. He does not think the technology is
going out of fashion but that demand will drop because people have
been spending the last two years developing CRM projects.
Demand for Web services
David Metcalfe, an analyst at Forrester Research, believes there
will be demand next year for skills in Web services using XML to
expose application interfaces to the outside world. "Building Web
services will require expertise," he notes.
His advice for anyone looking to learn a new skill is to spend next
year learning Web services, as it is still early days for the
technology. "We are in the charm of novelty of adoption. But in
2003 this will really take off," he says.
Metcalfe advises avoiding such technologies as the much-hyped
peer-to-peer computing philosophy, as deployed by the likes of
Napster. "Don't spend your weekends trying to understand this
technology as it could be years before it is ready for [commercial
use]," he says. He admits, however, that P2P holds a lot of promise
for the future.
A commercial understanding of Ariba and CommerceOne will be
beneficial, he says, because lots of companies have spent money on
e-procurement and they want to see the benefits. One of the key
skills in this space is tying together e-commerce applications.
Higher up the food chain, Metcalfe believes change management
skills will be important next year, particularly for those people
working or looking to move into IT consulting.
Graduate gold rush
Tim Jennings, research production
director at analyst firm Butler Group, says that while last year
saw a rush for new graduates in Java, next year will definitely see
a move away from Java programmers. His advice for any Java
developer is that "businesses are now looking for Java 2 Enterprise
Edition and Enterprise Java Beans skills". Such technologies are
used to build business applications and are more complex than
vanilla Java, which is used within Web site development.
Jennings believes C#, the Microsoft alternative to Java, is one
skill to look out for next year. The Visual Studio.Net suite, which
includes this tool, is due for release shortly. Even though
Microsoft's new licensing policy has increased the cost of its
development tools, he urges anyone looking to expand their C#
skills to take a look at the development package. The implications
of C# for C++ developers are, he says, quite profound: over the
next two years there will be a transfer of skills from C++ to C#.
The other big Microsoft language, Visual Basic, is also likely to
remain a good bet for the future.
Focus on business analysis
Beyond developer skills
Jennings believes there will be increased focus on business
analysts who are versed in business process management and who have
the right skills for application assembly. "You will need a fair
degree of technical skills like UML [unified modelling language]
tied to an understanding of business process re-engineering," he
says.
Jennings describes the effect of this shift as a reduction in "raw
code churn". Rather than a business employing a bank of programmers
to develop systems, he suggests that they will hire specialists and
re-use the code far more than is common practice today. "A Java
programmer could build a service that could be re-used by other
parts of the business," he adds.
For Simon Moores, chairman of the Microsoft Forums user
association, one of the big skills for next year will be 801.11.
Moores sees big demand for this wireless technology within
corporate portal sites. But the problem for anyone planning to
deploy the technology is, he says, that "it simply is not plug and
play. You need skills for trouble-shooting installations." He does
not expect Bluetooth skills will be in such demand next year.
Microsoft skills
While Microsoft moves onwards and
upwards with Windows 2000/XP, Moores says that skills for older
versions of NT will be less popular even though operating systems
like NT4 will still be widely deployed. He says it is too early to
make any real decision on .Net, the Microsoft Web services
platform, but he is seeing growing demand for Linux skills.
"There is growing interest in Linux, especially where it plays a
part in enterprise and government IT," he says. He advises people
to seek opportunities in Linux, particularly given the anger among
businesses over the price hike associated with licensing Microsoft
software, courtesy of MS Licensing 6.0, the company's new policy on
software pricing.
As the industry struggles through a downturn, it is even more
important than normal for IT professional to keep their skills
up-to-date this coming year. This may mean paying for IT training
yourself if your employer is not able to foot the bill. Whatever
the future holds, honing your IT skills is a sure bet for improving
your job prospects.
How do you see life in 2002?
What do you see as the key
to success for companies and individuals in a tougher economic
climate?
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>Let us know with an email.