Computerworld has a great article about job skills and the marketplace. While I normally don’t like the “what’s hot/what’s not” angle, this Stacy Collett was right on the money when she wrote that:

The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with “versatilists” — those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

eWeek also chimed in with “Building the Perfect IT Person.”  Deborah Rothberg opines that …

“The old model of IT doesn’t work anymore,” said Steve Novak, CIO at Kirkland & Ellis, a Chicago-based law firm.

While that model is still being sorted out, Novak, along with other CIOs interviewed by eWEEK, is on the lookout for the holy grail—a designer IT person who can adapt and thrive in changing environments and still remain valuable.

These really confirmed my own thoughts on the workplace, based on experience both as a consultant and as an employee. However, it holds a lot more weight when written in a trade magazine and backed up with statistics from Gartner.

If I had one piece of advice to give to a person graduating college and looking to pursue a career in IT, it would be to always seek to increase your value to the organization that you are working for (or with). Hard-core technical skills are important, and useful, and valuable, but only in the short term. Becoming a solution builder means so much more.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 5:33 pm and is filed under People, Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.