Career in uncertain time
With the global financial crisis in the U.S and Europe, many graduated students will find it more difficult to get jobs that they wanted. But for those who already had jobs and now working, they need to understand that current economy moves in certain way with many ups and downs, differently from previous cycle and nobody can predict what will happen next. If you don't start to take a more mindful approach to your career, you may be eliminated next.
The fastest change today is in the information technology industry where things are changing every year. With the expansion of information technologies in every business, IT people will play a much bigger role in the companies that they work for. To advance in their careers, IT people must assess how these changes impact their jobs and take actions to improve chance of remaining employed. If they don't, they could be soon out of work. Traditionally, most IT departments provide support to the business by develop applications to manage company's business but today many of these activities are being replaced by Commercial off the shelves (COTS) products. Today the major activity of information technology is on providing services rather than creating applications. New models such as Software As A Service (SaaS), Cloud computing, Outsourcing are dominating the market. In the past, it used to be that company bought some softwares such as operating systems and IT people create applications to run on it and it was all in-house development with some minor systems integration. Today, it is all about purchasing COTS, customizing it, integrating it, and provide it as services to users with very little in-house development and most maintenance software are outsourced oversea to lower the operating costs.
Today the IT environment is more complex because company is working with softwares that are developed somewhere (COTS, Outsourcing). All these things have changed what the average IT person has to do. There will be less development, programming but more architect, design and integration now. IT people must understand what the business needs are and where their roles interacts with another functions of the business. They will be managing a set of services to the users and ensure that these services provide value to the business. There will be more overhauls of the IT department to replace some developers as their roles are no longer needed and replacing them with new people working as IT service managers. Some companies that can not make a complete overhaul may assign the entire IT functions to specialize IT firms (Cloud computing – Software as a services) or outsource applications to foreign companies to handle the whole information applications.
For those who work in the information technology area, you will need to assess your skills and your contributions to the business. Can you clearly articulate how you provide value to the business such as making more money or saving money for your companies? Do you continually innovate or increase efficiency for the company? Or are you prone to accept things as they were and waiting for worst thing to come? How do you know that you are the best at what you do and not just merely an average workers? What's on your list of recent accomplishments? Have you been given increasing responsibility or receive extra training? Are you recognized as an expert in your field?
True career security comes when you can be taken away from your current position, place in a new environment and still be able to succeed. And the only way to make that happen is to understand what will be important to the companies and learn new things to fit that needs. In other words, you must possess a set of skills, be able to get involved in important activities, and develop a strong base of technical knowledge. You must constantly review technology trends, market trends and what are happening in the industry. If you think what would be the new skill that you need to have, take action to learn about them, take additional training, read more technical books, read all information that you can find in the internet. You must do this for every job you have. Even if you're starting out as newly employees, you must seek out new challenge or projects where you can improve your skill set and get to know other experts outside of your company. If you are people with years of experience, be careful that your skill set have not become too specialized, useful only at your current company but may not be needed in the market. Again, you must find new projects that use new technology to improve your transferable skills and keep up with current trends.
You don't have to overhaul your entire career, but just like in playing chess, if you can think a few moves ahead then you will be less likely to get eliminated and more likely to continue be successful. Please remember that in this uncertain time, only knowledge and skills can help you to improve your career successfully.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
