Hot IT skills and AI’s future (is it haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past?)

Hot IT skills and AI’s future (is it haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past?)

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The hottest IT skills for 2023 – even in a recession

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens in his 1859 novel “A Tale of Two Cities.” If he’d been writing today, that statement could very much apply to today’s IT personnel and hiring landscape.

For many of the hundreds of thousands who’ve been laid off by tech companies recently, this might well be considered the worst of times — especially with a recession looming. Yet there are plenty among them, and others in the workforce, who could consider this the best of times. Why? Because they possess the most in-demand skill sets and certifications.

Despite the layoffs, cutbacks, tightening pursestrings, and general doom and gloom presented in the media, these IT professionals can look forward to higher pay, plenty of offers, perpetual headhunting inquiries and even the occasional bidding war for their talents.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens in his 1859 novel “A Tale of Two Cities.” If he’d been writing today, that statement could very much apply to today’s IT personnel and hiring landscape.?

For many of the hundreds of thousands who’ve been laid off by tech companies recently, this might well be considered the worst of times — especially with a recession looming. Yet there are plenty among them, and others in the workforce, who could consider this the best of times. Why? Because they possess the most in-demand skillsets and certifications. Despite the layoffs, cutbacks, tightening pursestrings, and general doom and gloom presented in the media, these IT professionals can look forward to higher pay, plenty of offers, perpetual headhunting inquiries and even the occasional bidding war for their talents.

Below are some of the hottest skills and certifications in IT, in no particular order.?

Filling the IT skills gap

First, Foote Partners’ IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends Report provides a list of the rising stars among IT skills and certifications. Many of the top skills are in cybersecurity.

Security auditing

With the market value of this skill rising by almost 20% in the last six months, security auditing is very much in demand. Cyber-insurers have gotten stingy about whom they offer policies to and what those policies cover. They are interrogating businesses about their policies, practices and tools. Security audits are one way they can find out what is going on. But organizations are using them too. Bringing in outside eyes helps them find blind spots.

>>Don’t miss new special issue: Zero trust: The new security paradigm.<<

“A security audit will provide a roadmap of an organization’s main information security weaknesses, and identify where it is meeting the criteria the organization has set out to follow and where it isn’t,” said David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners. “Security audits are crucial to developing risk assessment plans and migration strategies for organizations, and that always deals with individuals’ sensitive and confidential information — all of which are hot issues these days.”?

Azure Key Vault

These Azure skills have risen in market by 19% in the third quarter of 2022. Azure Key Vault is a cloud service for securely storing and accessing secrets (anything you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates and cryptographic keys).?

Cryptography

Cryptographic skills, which encompass areas such as encryption, VPN and SSL/TLS, are very much in demand. They jumped 20% in market value over the last six months.?

Identity and access management (IAM)

IAM is up 6% over six months. This field has risen in importance steadily since the COVID-19 pandemic made physical boundaries less relevant. With so many remote workers being given greater access to internal systems, identity and access problems have become a serious concern. Those who can fix such issues and implement comprehensive IAM solutions have plenty of work opportunities.?

Risk analytics

Digital risk analytics is growing in popularity as a niche of business intelligence (BI) development because of increased interest among risk-management professionals. It is up about 6% over the last half year. “This discipline has vastly improved the way risk managers evaluate potential scenarios and predict risk-laden events,” said Foote.?

Penetration testing

Penetration testing (pen testing) has gained 21.4% in market value over six months. The more distributed denial of service (DDOS), phishing and ransomware attacks that occur, the more organizations want to bring in ethical hackers to identify, update and replace the parts of their systems that are susceptible to modern hacking techniques.?

“While cybercriminals and hacktivists are increasing in numbers and deepening their skillsets, the ‘good guys’ are struggling to keep pace,” said Foote.

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According to Skillsoft’s 2022 IT Skills and Salary Report, the top three most challenging areas to find qualified talent are cloud computing, data analytics/big data/data science and cybersecurity.

“This year’s list is notable first by what topics continue to be hot this year — cloud foremost, supplemented by a couple of key certifications in cybersecurity and data,” says Zach Sims, general manager, tech & dev, Skillsoft. “Not surprising, given how nearly every company in every industry of every size in every geography is relying upon cloud computing to power their technology strategy.”

Cybersecurity

Foote Partners named some of the specific areas of cybersecurity with the biggest recent hikes in market value. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other areas of cybersecurity desperate for competent and experienced personnel. These include application security, network security, cloud security, intrusion detection, security controls and frameworks, incident response and threat detection/modeling/ management.

Projections about the need for cybersecurity talent are bullish. Between April 2021 and April 2022, employers posted almost three quarters of a million cybersecurity openings. Government data projects a 35% surge in cybersecurity jobs between 2021 and 2031 — more than double the expected rise in demand for general IT jobs.?

Cloud computing

Anyone skilled in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Wasabi or other cloud services such as Salesforce will have no shortage of job openings in 2023. With Microsoft Azure cloud deployments expanding by 33% year over year, and other cloud platforms experiencing similar growth, organizations are screaming for more cloud developers, engineers, architecture specialists, cloud migration skills, application programming interface (API) management skills, cloud database skills and more.

“Cloud skills are clearly in high demand,” said Foote.?

Data analytics/big data/data science

Both Skillsoft and Foote Partners identified data analytics, big data and date science as rich in possibilities for anyone keen to find a lucrative career path. It’s also replete with avenues and niches. Depending on the platform, the programming language, the application or the industry, data analytics and data science skills are sought after to varying degrees. Data science positions are expected to grow by 28% by 2026, with salaries ranging between roughly $125,000 and $150,000.

Those proficient in statistics, economics, information systems, computer science and programming, and who can take care of data wrangling, data intuition, querying, social media mining and data visualization should be able to pick and choose their employers. Beyond data science skills, those who can extract SQL, Excel and other data and subject it to analysis will compete well in the job market.

Artificial intelligence

Those with AI skills in addition to other specialties are likely to be inundated. Last year, some 33% of IT job postings asked for AI skills. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report predicts 97 million new AI-related jobs will be created between 2021 and 2025. Salaries are rising accordingly. Those well trained and experienced can command average salaries around $150,000.

But AI is a wide and varied subject. It takes in many skills, including machine learning, data science, algorithms, math, statistics, analytics and a variety of programming disciplines such as Python, C++, R and Java. AI applications often make heavy use of machine learning (ML), which is another in-demand skill, centered around the harnessing of algorithms that can learn without being programmed to do so. ML engineers are among the top five fastest growing jobs in the U.S. over the past five years.?

A study by application development firm Reign found that the U.S. witnessed a 21% increase in AI jobs, plus a 27% increase in AI job-related wages, over the past decade.

“The demand for workers who can develop AI technology is increasing, as are the effects of AI on workers around the world,” said Felipe Silberstein, head of platform strategy at Apply Digital. “Jobs requesting AI or machine learning skills are expected to increase by 71% in the next five years.

Devops

Devops has been a buzzword over the last couple of years. Nevertheless, devops specialization is a hot skill. Residing in the interface between software development and operations as a way to shorten development cycles, devops personnel need to be knowledgeable in continuous integration, testing, microservices and infrastructure as code, as well as programming.

Beyond devops as a whole, software development will provide abundant openings in the coming decade for those skilled in JavaScript, Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, PHP, C#, Swift, R, Ruby, C and C++, and in programming tasks related to containers and Kubernetes.

Further hot skills

IT in general provides plenty of channels for employment beyond those listed above. These include product and project management, as well as a variety of networking specialties: cloud, wireless, edge, software-defined networking (SDN), secure access service edge (SASE), zero trust network access (ZTNA) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).

Hot certifications

Those possessing certain IT certifications can demand quite a premium in the job market. Anyone wishing to move up the career ladder is advised to plot a course that includes one or more of the following certifications, listed by Global Knowledge as the top paying certs for 2022:?

? Google Certified Data Engineer?

? Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect

? Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)?

? Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC)?

? Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)

? Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)

Their average salary for those with these certifications is more than $150,000 per year. These certs can open doors to positions such as CIO, CTO, CISO, IT manager, security manager and chief architect, as well as plenty of positions requiring cloud skills.?

These certifications also scored well in the most recent salary survey from Skillsoft. But AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Professional) rose to the top spot.?

To that list, Foote Partners adds the following, based on pay that’s well above average and the most gain in market value in the past six months:?

? GIAC Certified Forensics Analyst (GCFA)

? Information System Security Engineering Professional (designed for those already completing CISSP and requiring two years of practical experience developing highly secure systems)

? AWS Certified Security Specialty

? OKTA Certified Professional (specialist in ID management) — rose 57.1% in market value in six months

? Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK)?

Other worthwhile certs that can bring a bump in paycheck include:?

? Cisco CCNA certification?

? CompTIA’s Network+, Security+ or CySA+ credentials?

? ISACA’s CISM certification?

? AWS Certified Security — Specialty

? PMP: Project Management Professional

? Nutanix Certified Professional — Multicloud Infrastructure (NCP-MCI)

? Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert

? Google Cloud — Cloud Digital Leader

? CISA — Certified Information Systems Auditor

? AWS Certified Big Data — Specialty

? VCP-DCV 2022 — VMware Certified Professional — DataCenter Virtualization 2022

? AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

? CCNP Enterprise

“Learning is the catalyst for mutually beneficial growth for employees and employers, especially as organizations struggle to retain technical talent and keep pace with innovation,” said Sims of Skillsoft. “Companies that create cultures of learning and talent development will be most successful in recruiting and retaining ambitious individuals with the right skills and certifications to make an impact.”??

23 AI predictions for the enterprise in 2023

It’s that time of year again, when artificial intelligence (AI) leaders, consultants and vendors look at enterprise trends and make their predictions. After a whirlwind 2022, it’s no easy task this time around.

You may not agree with every one of these — but in honor of 2023, these are 23 top AI and ML predictions experts think will be spot-on for the coming year.

It’s that time of year again, when artificial intelligence (AI) leaders, consultants and vendors look at enterprise trends and make their predictions. After a whirlwind 2022, it’s no easy task this time around.

You may not agree with every one of these — but in honor of 2023, these are 23 top AI and ML predictions experts think will be spot-on for the coming year:

1. AI will be at the core of connected ecosystems

“In 2023, we’re going to see more organizations start to move away from deploying siloed AI and ML applications that replicate human actions for highly specific purposes and begin building more connected ecosystems with AI at their core. This will enable organizations to take data from throughout the enterprise to strengthen machine learning models across applications, effectively creating learning systems that continually improve outcomes. For enterprises to be successful, they need to think about AI as a business multiplier, rather than simply an optimizer.”?

—?Vinod Bidarkoppa, CTO of Sam’s Club and SVP of Walmart?

2. Generative AI will transform enterprise applications

“The hype about generative AI becomes reality in 2023. That’s because the foundations for true generative AI are finally in place, with software that can transform large language models and recommender systems into production applications that go beyond images to intelligently answer questions, create content and even spark discoveries. This new creative era will fuel massive advances in personalized customer service, drive new business models and pave the way for breakthroughs in healthcare.”

— Manuvir Das, senior vice president, enterprise computing, Nvidia

3. AI will completely transform security, risk and fraud

“We’re seeing AI and powerful data capabilities redefine the security models and capabilities for companies. Security practitioners and the industry as a whole will have much better tools and much faster information at their disposal, and they should be able to isolate security risks with much greater precision. They’ll also be using more marketing-like techniques to understand anomalous behavior and bad actions. In due time, we may very well see parties using AI to infiltrate systems, attempt to take over software assets through ransomware and take advantage of the cryptocurrency markets.”?

– Ashok Srivastava, senior vice president and chief data officer, Intuit

4. Open source ML tools will gain greater market share

“Next year teams that focus on ML operations, management and governance will have to do more with less. Because of this, businesses will adopt more off-the-shelf solutions because they are less expensive to produce, require less research time and can be customized to fit most needs. MLOps teams will also need to consider open-source infrastructure instead of getting locked into long-term contracts with cloud providers. Open source delivers flexible customization, cost savings and efficiency. Especially with teams shrinking across tech, this is becoming a much more viable option.”

— Moses Guttman, CEO, ClearML

5. Deep learning opportunities will boost demand for GPUs

“The biggest source of improvement in AI has been the deployment of deep learning — and especially transformer models — in training systems, which are meant to mimic the action of a brain’s neurons and the tasks of humans. These breakthroughs require tremendous compute power to analyze vast structured and unstructured datasets. Unlike CPUs, graphics processing units (GPUs) can support the parallel processing that deep learning workloads require. That means in 2023, as more applications founded on deep learning technology emerge to do everything from translating menus to curing disease, demand for GPUs will continue to soar.”?

— Nick Elprin, CEO, Domino Data Lab

6. AI will create meaningful coaching experiences

“Modern AI technology is already being used to help managers, coaches and executives with real-time feedback to better interpret inflection, emotion and more, and provide recommendations on how to improve future interactions. The ability to interpret meaningful resonance as it happens is a level of coaching no human being can provide.”?

— Zayd Enam, CEO, Cresta

7. Geopolitical shifts will slow AI adoptionT

“As fear and protectionism create barriers to data movement and processing locations, AI adoption will slow down. Macroeconomic instability, including rising energy costs and a looming recession, will hobble the advancement of AI initiatives as companies struggle just to keep the lights on.”

— Rich Potter, CEO, Peak

8. The role of AI and ML engineers will become mainstream

“Since model deployment, scaling AI across the enterprise, reducing time to insight and reducing time to value will become the key success criteria, AI/ML engineers will become critical in meeting these criteria. Today a lot of AI projects fail because they are not built to scale or [to] integrate with business workflows.”

— Nicolas Sekkaki, GM of applications, Data and AI, Kyndryl

9. Multi, hybrid-cloud MLOps and interoperability will be key

“As the AI/ML market continues to flood with new solutions, as evident by the volume of startups and VC capital deployed in the space, enterprises have found themselves with a collection of niche, disparate tools at their disposal. In 2023, enterprises will be more conscious of selecting solutions that will be more interoperable with the rest of their ecosystem, including their on-premises footprint and across cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). Additionally, enterprises will gravitate towards a handful of leading solutions as the disparate tools mature and come together in bundles as standalone solutions.”

— Anay Nawathe, principal consultant, ISG

10. Advanced ML will enable no-code AI?

“Advanced machine learning technologies will enable no-code developers to innovate and create applications never seen before. This evolution may pave the way for a new breed of development tools. In a likely scenario, application developers will ‘program the application’ by describing their intent, rather than describing the data and the logic as they’d do with low-code tools of today.”

— Esko Hannula, SVP of product management, Copado

11. With spending down, AI will shift to practical applications

“This past year was filled with incredibly impressive technological advancements, popularized by ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, Galactica and Facebook’s Make-A-Video. These massive models were made possible largely due to the availability of endless volumes of training data, and huge compute and infrastructure resources. Heading into 2023, funding for true blue-sky research will slow down as organizations become more conservative in spending to brace for the looming recession and will shift from investing in fundamental research to more practical applications. With more companies becoming increasingly frugal to mitigate this imminent threat, we can anticipate increased use of pre-trained models and more focus on applying the advancements from previous years to more concrete applications.”

—John Kane, head of signal processing and machine learning, Cogito

12. ChatGPT will change the contact center, but not the way you think

“Chatbots are the obvious application for ChatGPT, but they are probably not going to be the first ones. First, ChatGPT today can answer questions, but it cannot take actions. When a user contacts a brand, they sometimes just want answers, but often they want something done — process a return, or cancel an account, or transfer funds. Secondly, when used to answer questions, ChatGPT can answer based on knowledge [found] on the internet. But it doesn’t have access to knowledge which is not online. Finally, ChatGPT excels at generation of text, creating new content derived from existing online information. When a user contacts a brand, they don’t want creative output — they want immediate actions. All of these issues will get addressed, but it does mean that the first use case is probably not chatbots.”?

13. AI will drive the future of customer experience

?“Digital engagement has become the default rather than the fallback, and every interaction counts. While the emergence of automation initially resolved basic FAQs, it’s now providing more advanced capabilities: personalizing interactions based on customer intent, empowering people to take action and self-serve, and making predictions on their next best action.

“The only way for businesses to scale a VIP digital experience for everyone is with an AI-driven automation solution. This will become a C-level priority for brands in 2023, as they determine how to evolve from a primarily live agent-based interaction model to one that can be primarily serviced through automated interactions. AI will be necessary to scale operations and properly understand and respond to what customers are saying, so brands can learn what their customers want and plan accordingly.”?

— Jessica Popp, CTO of Ada

14. AI model marketplaces will emerge

“Coming soon are industry-specific AI model marketplaces that enable businesses to easily consume and integrate AI models in their business without having to create and manage the model lifecycle. Businesses will simply subscribe to an AI model store. Think of the Apple Music store or Spotify for AI models broken down by industry and data they process.”

— Bryan Harris, executive vice president and chief technology officer, SAS?

15. Explainability will create more trustworthy AI

“As individuals continue to worry about how businesses and employers will use AI and machine learning technology, it will become more important than ever for companies to provide transparency into how their AI is applied to worker and finance data. Explainable AI will increasingly help to advance enterprise AI adoption by establishing greater trust. More providers will start to disclose how their machine learning models lead to their outputs (e.g. recommendations) and predictions, and we’ll see this expand even further to the individual user level with explainability built right into the application being used.”

— Jim Stratton, CTO, Workday

16. 2023 will be a major year for federated learning

“Federated learning is a machine learning technique that can be used to train machine learning models at the location of data sources, by only communicating the trained models from individual data sources to reach a consensus for a global model. Therefore instead of using the traditional approach of collecting data from multiple sources to a centralized location for model training, this technique learns a collaborative model. Federated learning addresses some of the major issues that prevail in the current machine learning technique, such as data privacy, data security, data access rights and access to data from heterogeneous sources.”

— David Murray, chief business officer, Devron

17. NLP plus object recognition will take search to the next level

“While most people write scrapers today to get data off of websites, natural language processing (NLP) progress has been made where soon you can describe in natural language what you want to extract from a given web page and the machine pulls it for you. For example, you could say, “Search this travel site for all the flights from San Francisco to Boston and put all of them in a spreadsheet, along with price, airline, time and day of travel.” It’s a hard problem, but we could actually solve it in the next year.”

— Varun Ganapathi, CTO and co-founder, AKASA

18. Advances are coming in real-time speech translation

“With remote work, boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred. Today it’s common for people to work and converse with colleagues across borders, even if they don’t share a common language. Manual translation can become a hindrance that slows down productivity and innovation. We now have the technology to use communication tools such as Zoom that allows someone in Turkey, for example, to speak their native language but allows someone in the U.S. to hear what they’re saying in English. This real-time speech translation ultimately helps with efficiency and productivity while also giving businesses more of an opportunity to operate globally.”

— Manoj Chaudhary, CTO and SVP of engineering, Jitterbit

19. AI-enabled phishing will grow

“By now, everyone has seen AI-created deepfake videos. They are leveraged for a variety of purposes, ranging from reanimating a lost loved one, disseminating political propaganda or enhancing a marketing campaign. However, imagine receiving a phishing email with a deepfake video of your CEO instructing you to go to a malicious URL. Or an attacker constructing more believable, legitimate-seeming phishing emails by using AI to better mimic corporate communications. Modern AI capabilities could completely blur the lines between legitimate and malicious emails, websites, company communications and videos. Cybercrime AI-as-a-Service could be the next monetized tactic.”

— Heather Gantt-Evans, CISO, SailPoint

20. Companies will turn to a hybrid approach to NLP

“In the year ahead, we will see enterprises turn to a hybrid approach to natural language processing combining symbolic AI with ML, which has shown to produce explainable, scalable and more accurate results while leaving a smaller carbon footprint. Companies will expand automation to more complex processes, requiring accurate understanding of documents, and extending their data analytics activities to include data embedded in text and documents. Therefore, investments in AI-based natural language technologies will grow. These solutions will have to be accurate, efficient, environmentally sustainable, explainable and not subject to bias. This requires enterprises to abandon the single-technique approach such as just machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) for their intrinsic limitations.”

— Luca Scagliarini, chief product officer, Expert.ai

21. AI-generated music will see advancements

“Advancements in AI-generated music will be a particularly interesting development. Now [that] tools exist that generate visual art from text prompts, these same tools will be improved to do the same for music. There are already models available that use text prompts to generate music and realistic human voices. Once these models start performing well enough that the public takes notice, progress in the field of generative audio will accelerate even further. It’s not unreasonable to think, within the next few years, that AI-generated music videos could become reality, with AI-generated video, music and vocals.”

— Ulrik Stig Hansen, president, Encord

22. AI investments will move to fully-productized applications

“There will be less investment within Fortune 500 organizations allocated to internal ML and data science teams to build solutions from the ground up. It will be replaced with investments in fully productized applications or platform interfaces to deliver the desired data analytic and customer experience outcomes in focus. [That’s because] in the next five years, nearly every application will be powered by LLM-based neural network-powered data pipelines to help classify, enrich, interpret and serve.

“[But] productization of neural network technology is one of the hardest tasks in the computer science field right now. It is an incredibly fast-moving space that without dedicated focus and exposure to many different types of data and use cases, it will be hard for internal-solution ML teams to excel at leveraging these technologies.”

— Amr Awadallah, CEO, Vectara

23. AI will empower more efficient devops

“When it comes to devops, experts are confident that AI is not going to replace jobs; rather, it will empower developers and testers to work more efficiently. AI integration is augmenting people and empowering exploratory testers to find more bugs and issues upfront, streamlining the process from development to deployment. In 2023, we’ll see already-lean teams working more efficiently and with less risk as AI continues to be implemented throughout the development cycle.

“Specifically, AI-augmentation will help inform decision-making processes for devops teams by finding patterns and pointing out outliers, allowing applications to continuously ‘self-heal’ and freeing up time for teams to focus their brain power on the tasks that developers actually want to do and that are more strategically important to the organization.”

Healthcare AI is advancing rapidly, so why aren’t Americans noticing the progress?

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare had a very successful year. Back in October, the FDA added 178 AI-enabled devices to its list of 500+ AI technologies that are approved for medical use.

However, despite the leaps and bounds made in the field, a recent survey from medical intelligence company Bluesight found that regardless of actual advancements made, around 50% of U.S. adults say they have not seen or experienced improvements in their own care as a result of medical AI advancements.

Why is that? And, when will consumers start to reap the benefits?