Preparing for the Evolution of the IT Administrator Role

Acquiring More Skills

Will IT admins need to acquire more skills?

IT communities are abuzz with discussions on what new IT roles will entail. The good news though is that IT admins are already aware of some aspects of these roles. Learning, deploying and implementing solutions; managing IT infrastructure on the LAN and WAN; and troubleshooting performance issues and bottlenecks are great examples. And, in some enterprises, IT admins are already involved in evaluating the flexibility, accessibility and cost of business applications. Most skills are acquired on the job, and there's nothing to worry about. On a broader level, during the transition, it's best to follow a multi-pronged approach of learning basic development, operations and analysis. Here are some suggestions to get started:

• Take a do-it-yourself approach to learning, including basic tasks such as getting an AWS account, creating cloud instances and using a few cloud-ready tools to manage them.
• Get an Opscode account and use Chef to deploy and manage applications or servers.
• Get the hang of configuration and build tools like GitHub, Jenkins and Docker.
• Learn about business intelligence, data science and cloud analytics tools for analysis and reporting.
• Actively participate in communities that discuss technology, tools and trends.
• Acquire soft skills as interacting with teams and users becomes a necessity.

The search for the future of IT jobs leads to voluminous information and can be overwhelming. Getting acquainted with the concepts, trying a couple of tools and actively engaging with peer groups on relevant communities can make it easy to gear up for the roles in store.