Teach and Be Taught
IT specialists will need to be willing to collaborate with coworkers of all ages and embrace different levels of experience. While younger employees may have less work experience, they enter the workforce armed with an education catered to the current technology landscape. An environment that celebrates collaboration will be a key to success for IT teams preparing for this software-defined shift.
New tools and technologies will always be in development to create efficiencies and cost savings. As we saw with the industrial revolution, the rise of machinery forced many workers to learn new skills that would enable them to work alongside these machines, and not against. Now that we're entering the age of the software-defined everything, it's imperative that IT workers adapt to this new environment by gaining new skills that will help them remain relevant.
2016: The Year of the Software-Defined Skill Set
2016: The Year of the Software-Defined Skill Set
In 2015, Gartner named software-defined applications and infrastructures as one of the year's top strategic trends. As we are seeing more organizations introduce software to effectively utilize and manage physical hardware, the IT teams that manage these software-defined environments will also need to evolve their skill set. Otherwise, they may find that their current capabilities may become obsolete, as many of their primary job functions will become automated.
IT workers will need to broaden their breadth of experience to include more relevant DevOps skills like scripting, automation, and network/storage virtualization, to name a few. Without making this transition, the risk to individual careers is significant.
As cloud computing and virtualization pave the way for the age of software-defined everything, IT workers must prepare for 2016: the year of the software-defined skill set. In this slideshow, Citrix has identified five ways that IT pros can continue to contribute to their organizations.
