Big Data 2.0: Planning your IT career growth

Last week Hays Chief Information Officer Steve Weston published a blog on the trends he’s seeing in the adoption of new big data policies and approaches across the business community. It’s an excellent summary for businesses who are planning ahead, but I think there are also important takeaways for IT professionals who are thinking about the future of their careers.

From Steve’s post:

“I believe that we’re on the threshold of moving from Big Data 1.0 to Big Data 2.0, and significant, real benefits will soon be commonplace across the business world. I see 2017 as a landmark year for data where those companies that take the right steps will be best placed to reap the rewards, both in the next twelve months and beyond.

The extent to which businesses can take advantage of Big Data will depend on the people they recruit. This has sparked a war for talent and the value of data scientists is only set to increase in the jobs market.”

As managing “Big Data” becomes part of business as usual, IT professionals will be on the frontline of this growth. The skills we’re seeing today that will remain important in the next few years are experience with Hadoop, Cloudera, Hive, Spark and MongoDB.

Find out what IT employers want

Employers will be looking for people with proven Data Visualization capabilities and experience. Technologies such as Tableau and Qlikview, which provide the reporting for the Big Data set, are going to continue to grow in need. We will also see an increase in AWS needs as the integration with Big Data continues to evolve. 

There will also be opportunities for IT leadership outside the function itself as data analysis skills become important across multiple departments. “You can’t just drop these technically skilled employees into a silo department and expect them to revolutionize your business,” Steve says. “The ability to analyze data and perform the hard, specialized role is obviously important, but they also need to be able to communicate and translate what they have learnt with the rest of the business. Even more crucial, however, is that the wider company is data literate and understands the potential and limits of the technology.”

I believe that large and even mid-size companies will have teams and departments dedicated to Big Data as the business learns how much value they can provide to an organization. This will lead to many opportunities for career progression into higher level positions with increased visibility to executives. 

Interested in building a career in business intelligence and big data? Contact us to find out what employers are looking for and how you can build your career at the frontier of this technology.