What can people do to better position themselves for emerging jobs in technology? That was a core question earlier this week when I moderated a panel of experts in cloud computing, business intelligence, and mobile app development during an event held by the University of Washington’s Professional & Continuing Education program.
Continue reading for a few of the highlights and tips from the panel.
How to make the shift from traditional IT jobs to cloud computing
“I’d certainly recommend all of you Google the phrase devops. This is a strong cultural trend that comes along with a lot of the power that cloud computing gives you. What it really means is that the lines between development and testing and deployment have all been very much blurred and are going to continue to be blurred.
“Only by blurring the lines between all those disciplines can you achieve what you need to when it comes to building systems at scale, deploying them rapidly, supporting them in the field. The message is, whichever skill you have, you have to go learn the other skills, too. Because one of the things that’s happening is that these skills are losing the partitions between them and you have to be a more well-rounded engineer.”
— Bob Wise, HP, vice president of engineering for platform cloud services; adviser to the UW PCE Certificate in Cloud Computing program.
How to advance or secure a career in business intelligence
“There’s definitely a lot of jobs out there. There’s an interesting dichotomy, though. For example, there’s a number of proprietary platforms that a number of the mega-vendors have put out there, and so there’s a lot of specific jobs for people who have experience with one of those four or five mega-vendors. It usually takes four or five years to get to that level of experience, and unfortunately in four or five years, there may be four to five different mega vendors. So it is a little bit of a Catch-22 situation.
“That’s why one of the things that I always focus on is, again, the fundamentals. I keep harping on the idea of learning SQL, because even if you’re not deeply technical, you’d be surprised at how much of that code is available in your job, if you’re working with data in any shape or form.” …
“I think that people who work in traditional industries today, or even in pseudo-technical industries or IT industries, will have to develop the ability to consume and interpret and translate and communicate data.”
— Karl Haberl, Brightlight Consulting, senior principal consultant; instructor for the UW PCE Certificate in Business Intelligence.
How a graphic designer can break into the world of mobile apps
“There’s definitely a ton of work out there for people who have design experience and want to work with developers to create an app. Developers in general have not so much of an artistic eye, generally. We’re coders, we’re not designers. Pairing up with a developer who has a great app idea but no graphics skills would be a great place to start.
“There’s also a ton of work to be done in web app development now. All these smartphones have browsers that support web apps. You could get started with html and CSS and get quite a ways before you have to pull in somebody, or you could learn some Javascript yourself and get going that way, so there’s a couple ways to do it.”
— Elisabeth Robson, writer and independent consultant, graduate of the UW PCE Certificate in iPhone and Cocoa Development program.
How to focus on what’s really matters
“The technology is always going to change, and it’s going to change faster than we do. So if you really want to be good at technology of the future, you need to understand humanity, you need to understand people, you need to understand what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and how we want to do it. Zuckerberg isn’t a genius, he just knew what people wanted. Jobs knows what people want. It’s a common pattern. …
“If you can figure out in your own life how to take the target of what we do as humans and apply that to the technology that we have now and in the future, you’re going to be successful in whatever you do. … Know the value of the soft squishy bits between the machines, and that’s us.”
— Mike Maas, Cisco Systems, software engineer; instructor for the UW PCE Certificate in Android Development
