Ok, the good news is that we are still alive! The world did not end in 2012.
That was one prediction that went wrong. But that is not the case of
predictions for IT industry – they still hold. The big four trends were cloud, mobile, social and
data
and these will continue to rule the IT scenario in the New Year as well.
The
public cloud was where the action was
in 2012 -- and it's where much of the action is going to be in 2013. According
to IDC, in 2011, IT cloud services generated 1.5 million new jobs and projected
that number to reach 8.8 million in the next four years. (Those numbers include
both jobs with cloud computing providers and cloud-related jobs within
corporate IT.)
A
recent Gartner study predicts that Mobile
App projects targeting
smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4:1 by
2015. After a year marked by growing pains, Social Media is heading into 2013 with a
strong start. 2013 will be the year of social ecommerce. Even the most
traditional retailers will weave likes, pins and tweets into websites and
social platforms, like Pinterest, will embrace online sales.
Big Data, which refers to data
collected and analyzed from every imaginable source, is becoming an engine of
job creation as businesses discover ways to turn data into revenue, says
Gartner. By 2015, it is expected to create 4.4 million IT jobs globally, of
which 1.9 million will be in the U.S.
No
doubt 2012 was a challenging year for IT professionals and 2013 may continue to
be so. But there is always a silver lining - IT jobs are growing steadily. We
all are aware that IT job market outperformed other fields in the past few
years, with unemployment rates much lower than the national average. In
November, when national unemployment rate was 7.7%, IT industry was below 4%.
Even
so, you cannot get complacent and must take steps to wade successfully through
the tumultuous IT industry. Keeping up with the trends and acquiring new skills
is not an option, it is a survival tactic. Other side of the low employment
rate coin is lack of availability of skilled professionals. As a result employers
have to strive to fill positions that require rare skill sets.
Source: ITJC
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