AI skills for IT pros: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast

Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a big impact on IT education, training, professional certification and the types of jobs IT people will be doing as the technology becomes embedded in IT operations. While AI has been positioned as a co-worker, there is likely to be less work for IT people to do as AI takes on more and more of their job role. Although AI will also create new job opportunities, those individuals without the relevant AI skillset, may find it far harder finding matching their existing skills to the new roles. 

Matt Stava, CEO and chairman of Spinnaker Support urges IT professionals to “retool” their skillset. In this podcast interview with Computer Weekly, Stava speaks about why it is important for IT pros to  adapt their expertise to align with new and emerging areas of IT as AI starts to take over the roles that were previously the domain of people who had honed their work skills understanding the ins and outs of industry-standard technology. 

He says: “I think the number one thing people should be thinking about and really focused on is retooling.” Stava urges IT professionals to make sure that they are using AI to the fullest extent that they possibly can. “Making yourself indispensable with AI tools is critical,” he says. 

Along with the need for IT professionals to infuse AI skills, Stava says large language models (LLMs) are quickly becoming embedded in education. 

He says: “My advice to college graduates is to use as many tools as you can and become proficient at using them.” He believes that there will be demand in the jobs market for people with the knowledge and expertise to use such tools. 

Stava says industry certifications around AI are starting to appear, offering personal development for IT professionals. But he feels that older industry certifications that used to be ubiquitous are less relevant today. As an example, he says: “The need for a Cisco certified expert is getting less and less right now.” For Stava, the hot skills are in areas like agentic AI, vibe coding, and understanding the role of AI in business processes. 

While Stava’s advice to IT professionals is to make sure they are adept at using AI tools, one of the big risks in personal development is becoming an expert in a skill that is not yet in demand.  The alternative is to look at IT systems that are no longer in fashion. Rather like the Cobol programmer, who is almost guaranteed a job for life, Stava says legacy or technical debt in enterprise IT is likely to be relevant for 30 or 40 years. 

Given that Spinnaker Support’s business is based on helping enterprises continue running older enterprise resource planning systems from the likes of Oracle and SAP, Stava is keen to emphasise the long-term job opportunities for people with skills in these products. 

In his experience, enterprises do not move rapidly away from these products. “The need for an SAP or an Oracle completely homogenised ERP system is not going away very soon at all,” he says. Instead, he believes that businesses will build new functionality on top of these old IT systems.  “Our large enterprise clients are not thinking about ripping out SAP and replacing it with AI,” he says.