Introduction: Today's IT industry and IT job market are changing rapidly, and its focus is shifting toward three types of jobs.

In recent years, many IT professionals have generally felt worried. The current situation in the IT industry is very different from ten years ago. In the late 1990s, IT professionals were in the highest demand, and the shortage of IT personnel always attracted much attention. So after receiving training, obtaining certifications, changing jobs, and many other situations, IT professionals became the only people qualified to hold important positions in an increasingly shrinking job market, thereby earning generous salaries. At that time, the IT industry was considered one of the future careers, because more and more of the best jobs would undergo tremendous changes as computer automation replaced manual labor.

Unfortunately, this vision of the future has disappeared, or at least has changed beyond recognition.

After the Y2K crisis and the collapse of dot-com bubble companies, the glorious days of IT professionals were gone forever. Suddenly, companies no longer needed to hire as many programmers. Suddenly, there were far fewer startups that needed to purchase servers and hire system administrators.

At the same time, a general backlash against the IT industry occurred in American companies. Many companies, convinced that technology could solve all problems, invested huge, incalculable amounts of money in IT projects. Because IT was the main driver of productivity improvement in the 1990s, many companies over-invested in IT and wanted to make it improve productivity even more powerfully. As a result, many huge, expensive IT projects failed.

When the economic recession arrived in 2001, these over-relied-upon IT departments became the main targets of budget cuts, and many were hit hard. As the recession continued into 2002 and 2003, IT professionals would often tell each other that they had to weather this storm and that things would return to how good they used to be. But something strange happened. IT department budgets remained unchanged year after year, with no sign of a rebound.

Most IT departments became mere decorations. They greatly reduced the number of technical support staff or outsourced entire call services. There were far fewer administrators running around managing networks and servers, or they simply outsourced this to most data centers. These were the jobs of IT professionals during the boom of 1999. Today, they haven't completely disappeared, but there is absolutely no shortage of labor or offering generous treatment to hire people with such skills.

That is because the IT environment has undergone earth-shaking changes. More and more traditional software has been moved to the web, or at least to domestic servers and served through browsers. Many technophobes of the baby boomer generation have retired, replaced by the millennial generation. These young people don't need to possess many professional skills, but often want to choose their own devices and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. That is to say, current users no longer need as much help as before. Cynical IT professionals argue about this until they are frustrated, but the facts cannot be changed. Many workers have now been using computer technology for ten years or even longer, and compared with ten years ago, they use it more skillfully. In addition, the software itself has been continuously improving. Although it still has countless flaws, it has become better.

So, in what direction can today's IT professionals still develop? What will IT-related jobs be in the future?

1. Consultant

Let's face reality: almost all large enterprises are unwilling to hire IT professionals, and even if they do, they will reduce the number as much as possible. This is not to deliberately target talented people, but simply because IT experts are too expensive to hire, and when IT departments become too large and centralized, they always say "no." They hold things back more times than they contribute. So, we should look toward consultants who take over most traditional IT management and support functions through third-party outsourcing. This covers everything from large multinational consulting firms to solo consultants who serve local small and medium-sized businesses as temporary IT departments. Companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace will lease out data center capacity and IT experts to help with deployment, management, and problem resolution. Many IT administrators and technical support specialists currently work directly for companies, but in the future, they will transition to working for large vendors or consulting firms, because companies will switch to purchasing IT services on demand to reduce expenses, obtain higher-level professional services, and gain year-round uninterrupted coverage.

2. Project Manager

Most IT professionals who can survive in traditional companies and do not leave will become project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will get involved in various different business units and departments. They will become business analysts who can help company leaders and managers make good technology-related decisions. They will collect business requirements, then communicate with stakeholders to seek the scientific solutions they need; they will also proactively look for new technologies that can change the business. These project managers also serve as a bridge between the company and technology vendors and consulting firms. If you look carefully, you will find that many IT managers are now moving in this direction.

3. Developer

By far, the largest number of people moving from the IT industry are those who become developers, programmers, and coders. IT used to be only about managing and configuring hardware and software, but now it is increasingly about web applications, which need to be skillfully operated, easy to understand, and require no training or technical support intervention. There is also another type of program: mobile programs — including native programs and mobile web programs. As I wrote in my article "We Are Entering the Decade of Developers," in today's IT industry, more of the power of the technology industry is shifting from those who configure and support programs to those who create them. This trend has already begun, and in the next ten years it will only accelerate.

Original text:Jason HinerTranslation: Jobole Online - Zhang XiujunZhang Xiujun