Finding a job that utilizes the skills of an IT professional can be exciting, as there are a variety of different positions in a wide range of industries that now require basic or advanced knowledge of information technology. According to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs relevant to computer occupations are expected to grow by 22 percent by the year 2020.
The choices are promising. You could possibly become a software developer, creating useful business programs, fun mobile games, or even useful everyday utility apps that will make people’s lives easier. If you are fond of helping people solve their problems, you could get yourself comfortable in a tech support-related position. Yet another opportunity lies in being an engineer who will be working on projects involving unified communication for IT using applications such as Blue Jeans.
Whether you are a fresh graduate dipping your toes into the real for the first time or a professional dusting off the good old resume to explore new territory, you can easily increase your chances of finding the right job for yourself. Here are a few questions and pieces of advice that you can keep in mind while preparing your documents and other requirements for your next job search:
Choosing Your Career Path
- Are you ready to keep yourself updated on the latest trends and practices?
According to statistics from a study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, nearly half of all current jobs in the US could possibly be completely computerized in the very near future. This is due to the advances in technology that have made certain manual and laborious processes so much easier, faster, and cheaper. While people in the IT sector can benefit from this boom in computers’ everyday usage in the workforce, this type of obsolescence could also affect your career down the line.
*See Essential Tech Skills for Your Job Search and Career (Peggy McKee on Fox News Dallas)
If you want to maintain a career in your chosen path, you cannot let something like this put an end to your professional growth. You will have to pick yourself back up and adapt to the changes in your field of expertise, and this is something you will have to constantly do every few years or so. Remember: employers want to hire employees who will be working for them in the long run, and not only for a short amount of time.
Do not turn your nose up at new developments. Instead, try to treat them as a way to train yourself to be an even better tech pro than before. Invest in some additional classes to learn a new type of computer-relevant technique that recently became popular, and study the outputs of the big names also doing similar output. This will make you much more desirable to a lot of companies as you will have the right skills to execute the job responsibilities properly.
- Have you decided on a particular niche that you want to focus on?
When we talk about niches, we are not just talking about what kind of job you are planning to get into. Yes, you could be a network analyst, an info tech consultant, or even a computer scientist, but you would have to choose a particular field where your expertise in computers and coding could overlap with another field.
For instance, you could be a network administrator working on protecting the data servers of a healthcare organization while also assisting in making it easier to transfer important medical documents from one department to another. You could also be a software developer creating apps that will help certain online retail stores make the buying process easier for their customers. Maybe you were one of those students who did not think that tech was their passion, or perhaps your interest in it died after a while. If so, finding a job where a secondary industry overlaps with your current skills could help rekindle the flame, or perhaps even let you discover that you have an interest in fields such as the arts, the sciences, or even public service.
The Next Step in Your Career
You may have already decided what you want to be doing for your next tech job, but it would be wise not to close off any other alternative paths you may be able to take. You may have heard of some professionals who switched career tracks after earning several years of experience in their previous line of work, and it is a perfectly normal occurrence that you should be prepared for in case you find yourself falling in love with a different line of work. You never know if you might just land a job that you never expected to be in, but could bring you a lot of happiness and a sense of fulfillment in the long run.
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