Do Tech Careers Need to Evolve and Become More Wide-Scoped?
Written by Vyomini Kapse September 23th 2021
How will tomorrow’s technology workforce be different than today’s? How will jobs and roles change? What skills and capabilities will be needed? Does the current workplace support the evolving work of technology and the workforce required to complete it? How will it need to be redesigned to sustain the evolution of technology work? Technology is evolving and so must the scope of a career in this booming field. Careers in technology must adapt and become wide scoped and incorporate the following aspects:
Business co-creation. Business co-creation is a shift in the role of the technology function from supporting character to costar. Hand-in-hand with business functions, careers in technology can drive innovation and co-create products, services, and experiences that drive growth, revenue, and competitive advantage.
Value realization and measurement. The future of a career in technology likely requires traditional IT governance and performance metrics to evolve to focus on realizing and measuring values such as revenue, market growth, and customer satisfaction.
Product management. When a product mindset is applied to the traditional IT disciplines of application and program management, a career in technology can be viewed as a product that solves business problems, rather than a project that implements an application and delivers functionality.
Experience and design. This new technology discipline focuses on tasks such as embedding technology into the end-to-end customer life cycle to provide products and solutions throughout the customer journey and help ensure that critical bottlenecks are quickly identified and resolved.
Technology architecture. Architectural discipline is often a casualty of rapid growth. Mergers and acquisitions, aging legacy systems and processes, and the proliferation of data and applications also can complicate and strain architecture, platform, and infrastructure management.
Data and insights. Business data can improve decision-making, while product data can be monetized or used to help improve reliability and experience. Yet data on its own does not drive value—it first should be normalized, aggregated from across the organization and external sources, and analyzed to deliver insights that can be monetized.
Talent continuum. The talent of the future likely will be valued not only for technical skills but also for soft skills. To access needed skills, students may need to leverage talent from across the open talent continuum.