|
I've been in the IT industry for 15 years now and have seen the industry evolve. Tools and technology are becoming so intelligent and advanced that in the foreseeable future a lot of the middle level positions (such as sys admin types) will be eliminated through automation. Their jobs will be taken over by high level enterprise architect types that will design and implement that automation. Our admins do not even create user accounts anymore as they are automatically created via an HR process. Our desktops are virtualized using zero clients so hardware is simple and refreshing the OS on all of the desktops is a non issue. Because of this simplicity that was designed and implemented by a high-level enterprise architect type you will see more unskilled and lower cost boots on the ground.
One area that is really hot right now is software repackaging. That is where you prepare software for deployment en mass and remediate OS compatibility issues. This skill is needed regardless of how advanced the infrastructure is and covers both virtualization and traditional installs and i don't see that going away ever unless every application went web based which isn't going to happen in my lifetime.
Modern IT professionals need to be well rounded so they can see the big picture and have that enterprise view. You need the network, virtualization(software and hardware), database, storage, application, desktop engineering, scripting, and in our environment active directory skills to be successful.
|