COVID-19 has had a tremendous effect on the career paths of some working in the tech industry.
Quite a few tech professionals had salaries cut and bonuses evaporate. Some lost their jobs. Due to these effects and the nature of pandemic lockdowns, many tech professionals looked to transform their career with a view past the pandemic. They invested in abilities expected to keep them relevant and help develop their careers.
Key Skills Moving Forward
Since quite a few businesses are beginning to require more with respect to cloud and infrastructure abilities, there’s a growing reliance on cybersecurity. Businesses have a large amount of data distributed through various networks, and hackers have been persistent at trying to infiltrate these networks. Hence, those with valuable cybersecurity abilities and knowledge will be in high demand. With the worldwide cybersecurity market projected to expand 10 percent from 2020 to 2027, positions in this career track will be abundant.
COVID wasn’t just a boon for Amazon’s delivery-based retail service. It also juiced demand for Amazon Web Service. AWS is a platform meant to give companies. simple, cost-effective cloud solutions when the business chooses not to host their own services. While many businesses make use of AWS, some do not utilize it well. Because of this, qualified individuals who understand how to get around the system will be in demand.
Companies also stepped up their use of automation during the pandemic, and Ansible is one IT automation tool that helps with cloud provisioning, software deployment and configuration management. It shortens complicated jobs, helping programmers manage their workload. In some situations, Ansible is a great tool to assist with IT orchestration: It allows developers to run tasks sequentially and then make a chain of events that can appear on different serves and devices.
Gaining New Tech Skills
As COVID lockdowns held us at home and layoffs threatened career stability of quite a few people, some looked to learning new capabilities to keep their skills sharp or beef up their resume. A very common area for improvement was technology ability.
To gain new tech skills during the pandemic, many people used YouTube, according to a recent survey from Boxboat. The survey found YouTube was the most common resource for tech learning across all surveyed generations, from Millennials to Baby Boomers. It was voted the single most valuable resource for learning new tech skills during COVID-19.
The survey also found free online courses were also significantly more popular than paid online courses. Respondents said they were more likely to turn to online articles or friends than they were to pay for an online course.
On average, the survey found, people spent 7.2 hours per week on tech skills. Respondents who were not working full-time during the pandemic averaged 7.7 hours per week. Those learning coding and programming languages invested the most time per week: 9.5 hours.
We Can Help You Move Forward
At SMCI, we’ve been working with tech professionals to help them emerge successfully from the pandemic. Please contact us today to find out how we can help you.
