What areas of IT are hot right now?

Energize

Energize

Energize

Caporegime
Joined
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England
Atm I'm still doing 2nd line support studying towards MCSA, CCNA (more for my personal learning of technologies than anything else), but it's only really something that I'm doing because it pays the bills rather than wanting to be in support for a career.

Now that I'm actually into the field of IT with a couple years experience in a pure IT role and much better and broader knowledge of the basic technologies and the way businesses operate, I realise that I need to be thinking more in terms of business, ie what can I offer a company in order to get the most in return, and then study that area and range of technologies and gain experience in them in order to make myself more attractive to employers.

The question is, with my interest in things like infrastructure, networking, security, and having development experience. What up and coming areas of IT are going to be most suited to me? And how do I break into them? I honestly feel like I got my first couple of jobs because of luck. :p
 
Devops is hot right now, sysadmin roles and traditional IT support is dying and so are the wages. Learn a language, aws and docker. Networking kinda sucks tbh, unless you end up managing a big estate and getting into things like BGP and ccie stuff where you can earn good money.

From what I've seen of security, it's quite a lot of theory and you need to know a load of stuff and it's quite the responsibility.

If you want hands on stuff like firewall management that would probably fall into infrastructure.
 
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Coding seems to be the way forward. With more and more hardware and software developments going on, and more and more things turning to a digital slant, if you're up to it do some coding, get good at it and start to establish yourself.

Or business analyst, data analytics etc... so sql and database skills too.

There's no right or wrong language to learn, but generally a lot of people seem to be familiar with a few.

I know a few people who do software development as a second income. Seems to be reasonably steady too.
 
swillsy said:
BI and anything to do with databases
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This is what I fell into when I left uni and there's definitely no shortage of jobs around. I'm coming up to the 2 year mark at my current place so I've been scoping out the job market for a jump and it's looking healthy at the minute.
 
DevOps, Security, Blockchain, SMACK stack, or any other high throughput/processing stack due to MIFID II.

BI/Reporting

Cloud
 
Definitely security, supposedly a massive skills shortage and an area which isn't exactly going to get easier for companies :)
 
"Big data" and "data analytics" if the random recruiter spam I get via linked in is anything to go by.

If infrastructure and networks are your thing, then being able to set up stuff like a Hadoop/Spark/other buzzword cluster would get you an interview and be better qualified than most applicants. Understanding how to do the queries is the key, the dev/code side of it is fairly mechanical after that.
 
To echo others:

  • Dev - Try to be platform independent so Python, NodeJS, Perl etc, also look into CD/CI methodologies
  • Cloud architecture and transformation - Think going from monolythic to serverless/containers/microservices
  • Data analytics / BI
  • Security/Compliance - Specifically security in the cloud as Azure/AWS/Google Cloud need a different approach to on premise

You could focus on specific langugages or implementations like Docker, Jenkins etc, but it's worth understanding the "why" not just the "how". I think it's key to understand why a business might want to look at containers, or microservices, or serverless first, then look into the specifics of how you would do it such as language, Docker, Jenkins etc.
 
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I thought I had replied to this yesterday but I guess I forgot to submit...

if you fancy going back to university then machine learning is getting hyped up rather a lot at the moment and rater a lot of companies are looking at using it for quite an interesting variety of problems - Cambridge, Edinburgh and UCL are probably the top places to study the field in the UK

'big data'/analytics etc.. is a growing area in general - doesn't necessarily require too much further positions - for data science positions then the pool of candidates would be from ML related programs as per the above or stats postgrads, data science post grads etc.. though people with a solid quantitative background from other disciplines are looked at too. There are various roles though that won't require a post grad education - some may be labeled 'data science' too or data analytics, business analtyics etc.. etc.. with varying amounts of statistical knowledge required

you could also get a role doing some of the grunt work as suggested above - if you're just going to be a techie who is familiar with spark, hadoop etc.. they you're not necessarily going to need the relevant education background can can likely still find plenty of demand for those skills.
 
Thanks, a bunch of interesting suggestions there and there seems to be a consensus.

Not too sure which direction to go in really from those options, which area is easiest to break into from an IT support role? I did work as an android developer for a little while so have a basic grip on Java and have worked a fair bit with mysql databases.

Don't know about BI though, sounds a little dry based on the descriptions of it I can find.
 
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dowie said:
I thought I had replied to this yesterday but I guess I forgot to submit...

if you fancy going back to university then machine learning is getting hyped up rather a lot at the moment and rater a lot of companies are looking at using it for quite an interesting variety of problems - Cambridge, Edinburgh and UCL are probably the top places to study the field in the UK

'big data'/analytics etc.. is a growing area in general - doesn't necessarily require too much further positions - for data science positions then the pool of candidates would be from ML related programs as per the above or stats postgrads, data science post grads etc.. though people with a solid quantitative background from other disciplines are looked at too. There are various roles though that won't require a post grad education - some may be labeled 'data science' too or data analytics, business analtyics etc.. etc.. with varying amounts of statistical knowledge required

you could also get a role doing some of the grunt work as suggested above - if you're just going to be a techie who is familiar with spark, hadoop etc.. they you're not necessarily going to need the relevant education background can can likely still find plenty of demand for those skills.
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Yup, machine learning and AI seem to be gaining a lot of traction. Spoke to a few people at the firm I was with over the summer and they're using it for quite a few interesting things. Detecting unauthorised trading being one example, though it was still in its early days when I was there
 
oh interesting - which bank?

obvs if a small one then I'll understand if you don't want to divulge further details

I've spoken to a few people at various banks recently re: ML and a whole bunch of the people I've encountered (including people working in technology!!!) don't even know what 'machine learning' is or do vaguely but have no clue if it is being used where they work. At best I got 'I think some quant teams are using it'.
 
dowie said:
oh interesting - which bank?

obvs if a small one then I'll understand if you don't want to divulge further details

I've spoken to a few people at various banks recently re: ML and a whole bunch of the people I've encountered (including people working in technology!!!) don't even know what 'machine learning' is or do vaguely but have no clue if it is being used where they work. At best I got 'I think some quant teams are using it'.
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The company I work for have their own Machine Learning centre at Oxford Uni;

http://www.eng.ox.ac.uk/about/news/...-of-oxford-launch-centre-for-machine-learning

It's not just things like MAST, etc - it's actually being run and used to come up with strategies and react to signals from the market.

Extremely interesting stuff.
 
IT Security and IT Risk (audit etc) are going to be very busy over the next 10 years due to a sudden focus by many top-tier companies on Cyber Security readiness. High salaries and good long-term job security, so get in now while you can.
 
Richdog said:
IT Security and IT Risk (audit etc) are going to be very busy over the next 10 years due to a sudden focus by many top-tier companies on Cyber Security readiness. High salaries and good long-term job security, so get in now while you can.
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This is what I'm doing, just trying to figure out the correct path to take as I'm starting from fresh.
 
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