Couple of decades back, most of the organizations were building information systems and were in need of massive workforce to construct IT infrastructure and surrounding systems. Now, we have moved to next phase wherein almost all organizations have basic information technology system in place to perform daily business and constantly looking forward to digitally transform business in order to achieve competitive edge. Our CEO Dr. Vishal has emphasized on new and renew strategy to tackle this IT transformation journey and I believe that we need to align ourselves to goal of organization.
Change Mindset
Accept that change is constant in IT. There is no other choice. IT profession is isolated from rest of industries wherein you gain knowledge about some process, plant and next few years you follow the process to run the business. IT is all about adopting change and keeping pace with technology and add business value with innovation. The moment you choose IT field you need to adopt with technology upgrade.
Niche skills
Flashback to late mid of 18th century. Yellow Metal was first discovered in California! As the news spread, people from all over country rushed to rip benefit out of it. New colonies were built. Colleges, railroads, streets and infrastructures were built. The first person to take advantage from this event, was not a miner. An person working as retailer who has seen the great opportunity and it wasn't in mining for gold. Instead, he supplied the picks, shovels and related instruments that miners use to find yellow metal. This retailer eventually became as one the biggest beneficiaries of the California gold rush. Another visionary merchant was Levi Strauss. Levi responded to the gold-rush need for suitable miner's clothes. Levi switched to tough denim cloth and had it dyed in uniform indigo. Rivets and bolts were used to keep denim pants in place. The new pants were relatively cheap and durable. By the 1870s, Levi Strauss' blue Jeans were daily wear for miners, farmers and construction workers throughout the North America. Even if you aren't knowing history of the gold rush, we all are familiar with Levi Strauss's blue pant aka "JEANS".
Bottom-line is that you need not be in mainstream area. For example cloud market gathered space recently, spin off opportunity from cloud is requirement of integration systems , area like SOA and real time integrations has huge scope. With increasing number of cloud systems customer is raising concerns about security , robust security is need of hour. Data is growing day by day opens opportunities for analytics and data scientists.
Bring out the best in yourself
Aptitude tests help you get a better look at who you really are and how you can grow. We need to choose domain and technology which suits us best. It will bring in best out of us. Do not attempt to learn new technology just for sake of market demand. I've seen that scaling of functional domain expert person into technical area did not work at all even if we gave ample time and trainings. Experienced people can easily figure out their liking and areas of expertise. Juniors needs to retrospect and talk to experienced people in order to find the way forward.
Shifting paradigm of Management
Even Management work is not constant in IT as it got changed from traditional Waterfall to agile, DevOps.
As per leading industry statistics, 80 % projects would be in Agile mode and agile will be primary mode of executing projects. With adoption of cloud , Agile will be more relevant.
Boiling Frog Syndrome
Small incremental changes often are neglected and go unnoticed. This is extremely powerful phenomenon known as Boiling Frog Syndrome. If you throw frog into pan full of boiling water, he will immediately jump out of it however if you put frog in a pan with room temperature water and slowly increase temperature, he will be cooked to death. Therefore, need of hour is to adopt ourselves to IT transformation.