Speaker 1: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of TrendWatch from CompTIA Research where we bring you a little bit of this and a little bit of that from the data that we're collecting. Today we want to talk about some trends for IT professionals that we expect to see in the coming year and specifically I want to talk about skill building. When we performed our IT Industry Outlook for 2023 we asked our IT professionals in the study how they were feeling about their role in technology and most of them are feeling pretty optimistic which is a great sign and one of the biggest reasons for that optimism is that they view that there are a wide range of opportunities for people that have the skills that they have and there's also opportunity to grow their skills so that they can advance their career or maybe step into a new role and do something that's going to help the business. So building skill is something that's been important for quite a while now and it continues to be important in the year to come. There are two big reasons that we think that building skills will be important for IT pros and two big ways that they can kind of build their skills and the first one of those reasons is digital transformation. We use digital transformation to mean a lot of things and it defines exactly what organizations are going through as they're trying to modernize their systems but it also applies to the skills that they're trying to build and I think at the highest level what digital transformation really is is all the pieces of technology coming together. So you've got infrastructure, software development, cybersecurity, data analytics, all of those things have to work in concert in order for a company to become a digital organization and so we're going to see focus on all of those skills over the next year and there's no one area that really jumps out. I think companies are really anxious to improve their skills in all these areas and so with infrastructure we see a lot of focus on networking especially as companies move more towards the cloud. With software development we see a lot of focus on quality assurance and user experience as companies are trying to tighten up their software development cycles and make software more accessible for their end users whether that's internal or external. In cybersecurity companies are going to be securing their data specifically. We've talked a lot about the move away from a secure perimeter and one big part of that is securing the data as it's moving around between cloud providers or mobile devices or wherever it might go and so data security is going to be important and closely tied to that is privacy because as companies are collecting more and more data especially from their customers they have to be very aware of how they're dealing with privacy and how they're being transparent about the data that they're collecting. Finally managing all that data is going to have some focus areas too and companies are always talking about analytics and wanting to get better at that and I think two areas where they can refine their use of data is in integrating all the data together from various silos that might be throughout the organization and then visualizing something that can go to decision makers and help them understand what the data is trying to tell them so that they can make good decisions for the future. So all of those things are coming together again we put it all under the umbrella of digital transformation and so from a technical perspective there's no shortage of skills that IT pros can pursue if they want to build their career. The other side though is the business perspective and we've talked quite a bit about strategic IT on TrendWatch and how companies are shifting away from a tactical mindset and they want technology to be more woven into their strategy and more important to the goals that they're trying to achieve. So if you're a technology professional you can pick up all the technology skills but you also have to pick up some of the business skills. You have to understand the direction that the company is going and you have to understand how technology can maybe help accelerate that direction. So that requires some level of business acumen or business savvy. It also requires maybe some new durable skills like communication or teamwork or project management. Things that kind of help you communicate the technical pieces in business terms to the people that are driving something like sales or marketing or product development. All of these things are coming together again as businesses are weaving in technology with the activities that their business units are undertaking and so technology professionals get a chance to work alongside business counterparts a lot more and once again they have to learn to kind of speak the same language. So business people have a lot of technology understanding from a consumer perspective and technology pros have to help them understand how that relates to an enterprise environment and then how the entire technology architecture can help drive goals forward. And so that business alignment is going to be critical to keep in mind as IT pros are building skills over the next year. There are a lot of ways to build skills and we expect to see that be explored as well as people are exploring online classes and in-person classes and self-taught classes but all of these things are going to fall under the categories of digital transformation and business alignment. So for more on that please check out our IT Industry Outlook report on CompTIA's website and we will see you next time on TrendWatch. you